This Changes Everything (64 page)

It was precisely this need to adapt ourselves to nature that James Watt’s steam engine purportedly liberated us from in the late 1770s, when it freed factory owners from having to find the best waterfalls, and ship captains from worrying about the prevailing winds. As Andreas Malm writes, the first commercial steam engine “was appreciated for having
no ways or places of its own, no external laws, no residual existence outside that brought forth by its proprietors; it was absolutely, indeed
ontologically
subservient to those who owned it.”
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It is this powerfully seductive illusion of total control that a great many boosters of extractive energy are so reluctant to relinquish. Indeed at the climate change denial conference hosted by the Heartland
Institute, renewables were derided as “sunbeams and friendly breezes”—the subtext was clear: real men burn coal.
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And there is no doubt that moving to renewables represents more than just a shift in power sources but also a fundamental shift in power
relations
between humanity and the natural world on which we depend. The power of the sun, wind, and waves can be harnessed, to be sure, but unlike
fossil fuels, those forces can never be fully possessed by us. Nor do the same rules work everywhere.

So now we find ourselves back where we started, in dialogue with nature. Proponents of fossil and nuclear energy constantly tell us that renewables are not “reliable,” by which they mean that they require us to think
closely about where we live, to pay attention to things like when the sun shines
and when the wind blows, where and when rivers are fierce and where they are weak.
^I
And it’s true: renewables, at least the way Henry Red Cloud sees them, require us to unlearn the myth that we are the masters of nature—the “God Species”—and embrace the fact that we are in relationship with the rest of the natural world. But ours is a new level of relationship, one based on an understanding of
nature that far surpasses anything our pre–fossil fuel ancestors could have imagined. We know enough to know how much we will never know, yet enough to find ingenious ways to amplify the systems provided by nature in what feminist historian Carolyn Merchant has described as a “partnership ethic.”
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It is this collaborative quality that resonated most powerfully with Red Cloud’s students. Landon
Means, a recent college grad who had just moved back to the reservation, told me that he saw in solar energy a shift in worldview that was about “working synergistically” with the earth, “instead of just using it.” This insight seemed to hit hardest with the young Cheyenne men who had spent time working in the coal industry and were tired of suppressing core parts of their identity to earn a paycheck.
During the lunch break on the first day of the training, Jeff King, one of the Cheyenne students, confessed that he was still working in Gillette, Wyoming—ground zero of the Powder River Basin coal boom. He described it balefully as the “carbon capital of the world” and clearly wanted out. He hadn’t intended to drive trucks to coal mines for a living; a decade ago he had been one of the most
promising Cheyenne students of his generation and had gone to Dartmouth on scholarship to study art, which he describes as “a calling.” But the coal boom sucked him in. Now, he said, he wasn’t sure how he could go back to Gillette. He huddled with a couple of friends to discuss starting their own solar company to serve the reservation.
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One of the last houses to get a solar air heater was on
a busy street in downtown Lame Deer. As Red Cloud’s students measured, drilled, and hammered, they started to draw a crowd. Kids gathered to watch the action.
Old women asked what was going on. “Half the cost of electricity? Really? How do I get one?”

Red Cloud smiled. This is his marketing strategy for building a solar revolution in Indian Country. The first step, he says, it to get “a few solar
panels over on Grandma’s house. Everyone sees Grandma and says, ‘What is that? I want that too.’ ” Alexis Bonogofsky, meanwhile, beamed from the sidelines. “This has been probably the best week I have ever had at this job—it felt different,” she told me as the training wrapped up. “It feels like something has changed.”
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In the coming months, several members of the initial group continued to
train with Red Cloud and others joined them, making pilgrimages to his school, the Red Cloud Renewable Energy Center on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Jeff King quit his coal job in Gillette and set about getting a solar business off the ground. The money wasn’t as good but, he said, “I have a direction now.”

One of Red Cloud’s star students turned out to be a twenty-nine-year-old woman named Vanessa
Braided Hair, who more than held her own with the power tools in the mostly male class. She worked seasonally as a firefighter for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and in the summer of 2012 battled an unprecedented wildfire that burned over 230 square kilometers (90 square miles) and destroyed nineteen homes on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation alone. (As the Associated Press reported at the time,
the fire “ripped through as if the land had been doused with gasoline.”) Braided Hair did not need anyone to tell her that climate change was an existential crisis and welcomed the chance to contribute to the solution. But it went deeper than that. Solar power, she said, embodied the worldview in which she had been raised, one in which “You don’t take and take and take. And you don’t consume and
consume and consume. You take what you need and then you put back into the land.”
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Red Cloud tells his students that deriving energy in a way that heals and protects the natural world is not just about employment. It’s a continuation of “what the ancestors shed blood for, always fought for—the earth.”
And he says he is training them not just to be technicians but to be “solar warriors.”
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I confess that when I first heard that I thought it was another example of Red Cloud’s marketing flair. But in the months and years that followed, I watched his prediction come true in the lives of the young people he had taught. In 2012, with his training still under way, the fight against the mines and the coal train on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation—the fight that had seemed all but lost in 2010—sprang
back to life. Suddenly there was no shortage of Cheyennes willing to hold protests, demand meetings with regulators, or make impassioned speeches at hearings. And Red Cloud’s solar warriors were front and center, dressed in red “Beyond Coal” T-shirts and declaring themselves “Idle No More,” a reference to the movement that had started in Canada and had swept through Indigenous communities
across the continent.

At a technical hearing for the proposed massive coal mine at Otter Creek, Vanessa Braided Hair pulled no punches: “I want you to know that many people do not see any difference between your agency and Arch Coal,” she told a panel of squirming officials, including the head of Montana’s Department of Environmental Quality. Lucas King, twenty-eight, and another Red Cloud student,
told a different hearing on the Otter Creek mine, “This is Cheyenne country. It has been for a long time, longer than any dollar has ever lasted. I don’t expect you guys to understand us. You don’t. And I’m not saying I understand you. But I know you guys understand ‘no.’ ” He concluded his remarks by saying: “Please go back and tell whoever you have to that we don’t want it. It’s not for us.
Thank you.” The room broke out in applause. A new generation of warriors had been born.
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Today, the mood among dirty-energy opponents in southeastern Montana is positively jubilant. They speak about “when” they will stop the railroad, not if. Which, if true, means the Otter Creek mine cannot proceed. And there is far less talk of mining on the Cheyenne Reservation itself. The plan for a coal-to-liquid
plant on the Crow Reservation is also dead. Mike Scott from the Sierra Club has been working with Crow members on building a wind farm.

What this part of the world has clearly shown is that there is no more potent weapon in the battle against fossil fuels than the creation of real
alternatives. Just the glimpse of another kind of economy can be enough to energize the fight against the old one.
There are also powerful precedents for this: in two of the countries with the largest commitment to decentralized, community-controlled renewable power—Denmark and Germany—these energy victories trace their roots back to the antinuclear movement. In both countries, communities were forcefully opposed to the risks associated with nuclear power plants, but they knew that to win, they needed an alternative.
So instead of just saying no, they demanded government policies that would allow the communities in question to generate their own clean power and earn revenue in the process. Large-scale victories like these, however, are hard to achieve when the communities lack political power. It’s clear from the European examples that renewable energy can be a viable alternative to extraction for Indigenous
people around the world; it can provide skills training, jobs, and steady revenue streams for impoverished communities. But opportunities are consistently lost.

For instance, the Black Mesa Water Coalition, founded in 2001 by a group of Navajo and Hopi youth in Arizona, won a pivotal battle in 2005 when it helped shut down the notoriously polluting Mohave Generating Station as well as the Black
Mesa Mine. But coal mining and coal-power generation continue on Navajo territory, helping to light up and pump water to large stretches of Arizona, including Phoenix, along with parts of Nevada and California. The mining puts the water supply at risk but the Black Mesa activists know that there is no hope of shutting it all down until they are able to provide tangible alternatives to their people.
So in 2010, they came up with a highly detailed proposal to convert land that the mining industry had abandoned, land still likely contaminated and depleted, and use it to host vast solar arrays that could power not just their reservation but also large urban centers. Since the infrastructure and transmission lines are already in place, thanks to the coal industry, it would be just a matter of
converting the power source. As Jihan Gearon, executive director of the coalition, puts it, “Why not turn those lands into something positive that could bring in monetary income to the people who live in that region and begin that transition away from coal?” But under this plan, the Navajos—not an outside multinational energy company—would be the owners of the power they produced and sold to the
grid. And the money generated would
be able to support traditional economies, such as Navajo weaving. That is what made the plan different: this time, the arrangement would be nonextractive in every sense—the poisons would stay in the ground, and the money and skills would stay in the community.
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Yet half a decade later, this elegant plan is still struggling to get off the ground. As always,
a major barrier has been funding. And that is a problem not only for Black Mesa but for everyone concerned about climate change—because if the Navajo cannot show that clean energy can provide a route out of poverty and toward real self-determination, then the coal mining will continue, to everyone’s detriment. Part of the job of the climate movement, then, is to make the moral case that the communities
who have suffered most from unjust resource relationships should be
first
to be supported in their efforts to build the next, life-based economy now.

And that means a fundamentally new relationship, in which those communities have full control over resource projects, so that they become opportunities for skills training, jobs, and steady revenues (rather than one-off payments). This point needs
to be stressed because far too many large-scale renewable energy projects are being imposed on Native lands without proper consultation and consent, replicating old colonial patterns in which profits (and skills and jobs) go to outsiders. The shift from one power system to another must be more than a mere flipping of a switch from underground to aboveground. It must be accompanied by a power correction
in which the old injustices that plague our societies are righted once and for all. That’s how you build an army of solar warriors.

The need to provide tangible economic alternatives to extraction is not only pressing in Native communities, of course. The impossible choices faced by the Navajo Nation and the Northern Cheyenne are intensified versions of the same nonchoices offered to a great
many low-income communities where the present is so difficult and the pressures to provide the basics of life are so great that focusing on the future can seem like an impossible luxury. Holding on to family farms in the face of fierce competition from Big Ag, for instance, is so tough that there is never any shortage of
farmers and ranchers willing to make some extra money by leasing land to
fracking or pipeline companies—even if that means going to war with their neighbors who oppose these practices, and even if it means imperiling their own water supply and livestock. Desperate people do desperate things.

The same goes for many of the workers who want to build those pipelines, frack that gas, or work in polluting refineries. Manufacturing in North America is as battered as family
farming, which means that well-paying union jobs are so scarce that people will fight for whatever jobs are on offer, no matter how dangerous, precarious, or polluting to themselves, their families, or their own communities. The solution, as the more visionary sectors of the labor movement understand, is to fight for policies that do not force workers to make those kinds of choices.

For instance,
a 2012 study from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives compared the public value from a $5 billion pipeline—the rough cost of Enbridge’s Northern Gateway—and the value that could be derived from investing the same amount in green economic alternatives. It found that if $5 billion is spent on a pipeline, it produces mostly short-term construction jobs, big private sector profits, and heavy
public costs for future environmental damage. But if $5 billion is spent on public transit, building retrofits, and renewable energy, economies can gain, at the very least, three times as many jobs in the short term, while simultaneously helping to reduce the chances of catastrophic warming in the long term. In fact, the number of jobs could be many times more than that, according to the institute’s
modeling. At the highest end, green investment could create
thirty-four times
more jobs than just building another pipeline.
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