BY BROOKE LARSEN, Guest Contributor
On July 5, 2017 it was 106 degrees in northern Arizona. As I biked the shadeless highway between Flagstaff and Tuba City, sweat seeped through my pores and immediately dried when it hit the hot air, covering my sunburnt skin in a thin layer of salt. The water bottle that I’d filled with ice at the gas station in Cameron tasted like hot tea by the time I got to the turnoff for Tuba City. I poured the water on my hand to see if my taste buds were tricking me. It felt like I had scooped it out of a hot tub. When I sat down to rest, I immediately jumped up, the red earth radiating heat. This was day 42 of my 54-day bike tour of the Colorado Plateau.
I biked the Colorado Plateau not so much for the ride, but for the stories along the way. Since the fall of 2014, I have been part of the team dreaming, scheming, and organizing Uplift — a climate conference and community for young visionaries, activists, and concerned desert dwellers. During each organizing retreat, we gather around oil lamps at the historic Kane Ranch near the North Rim, the Milky Way filling the sky outside on clear, crisp November nights, and we share stories of the red earth that grounds us, the coal mines and frack pads and social injustices that motivate us to act. At the 2017 conference outside of Moab, Utah, the keynote speaker, Janene Yazzie, said, “It’s not important what you’re doing, but why you’re doing it.” She then instructed us to kneel down and touch the earth.
I went on a journey through the frontlines of climate change and environmental injustice on the Colorado Plateau because I didn’t just want to know what people were doing about climate change, but why. This was partially for my own learning, but also because, as an organizer, I know if we are to win the fight for climate justice, our narratives better be the most compelling.
I chose a bike as my means of transportation because I’ve always preferred pedaling over pushing on the gas. I should be clear that most of my journey was not fossil-fuel-free. Parker, the photographer who joined me for 30 of the 54 days, drove my Subaru full of the ice water I poured over my head every 10 miles. I biked to experience the region I consider my home in a more intimate way. I wanted to smell its scents — from sage blowing in the wind to the exhaust of semi after semi travelling the long, rural highways. I wanted to feel its aridity, as stupid as I would eventually realize that impulse to be. I wanted to experience each contour in the land, feel each incline in my burning thighs and each descent in the tickle of hair that didn’t quite make it in my helmet.
Uplift guided the vision of the trip and the Uplift community kept me well fed, rested, and supported. Friends like Montana Johnson biked with me through grueling climbs and 100-degree days that made me feel the red rock had to actually be on fire. Almost every night I was offered a couch or bed on which to rest my tired body and a home-cooked meal to refuel me. I slowly began to realize that our power lies in this connected, compassionate community.
As much as the Colorado Plateau is home to our nation’s most loved places — from Arches National Park to the Grand Canyon — it is also a national sacrifice zone. I learned from Emily Bowie of the San Juan Citizens Alliance that 91 percent of public lands in northwest New Mexico have been leased for oil and gas. This includes within 100 feet of the home of Kendra Pinto, a Diné woman defending her community from extraction. When I met with her at the Counselor Chapter House, she posed the question, “Why do they say we are unimportant?”
Kendra PintoKendra Pinto is a Diné woman from Twin Pines in the Greater Chaco area of northwest New Mexico. She organizes against fracking in her community and has shared her story in congressional hearings on the EPA Methane Rule in Washington, D.C. Over 90 percent of the public lands in Greater Chaco have been leased to oil and gas. In June, indigenous youth ran 80 miles across the region to raise awareness.
“The people who will assure you that everything is fine, peachy keen out there are industry people. These are people who want that resource, who want that money. This area made about 20 million dollars last year, but driving through here, could you tell that? Could you tell that millions of dollars are made here? No, because that money isn’t put back into the community like they claim. We have to start looking out for the good of the people instead of just thinking about our wallets. I don’t like when they start throwing that ‘well drilling has always been out there.’ Drilling hasn’t always been 300 feet from houses. I literally live on one of the parcels that they sold. I live on tribal trust lands and maybe seventy-five feet from my house the BLM public lands start. Why do they say we are unimportant? I think the hope is to have people remember that this is where their roots started. How do you not take care of a place that has taken care of you, that’s taken care of your parents, that’s taken care of your grandparents? It’s about making sure home remains home.”
For decades, the conservation movement has prioritized protecting the most pristine areas at the expense not only of those communities deemed less “important,” but also of land deemed less scenic. The protection of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument kept millions of tons of coal in the ground (at least until Trump and Zinke came around), but land exchanges afterward also led to fracked fields and the PR Spring tar sands mine in the Uinta Basin.
The environmental impact statement for the PR Spring tar sands mine classifies the surrounding Book Cliffs of eastern Utah as of “low scenic value.” I spent a weekend camping near PR Spring with friends organizing resistance to the mine. As I reached giant black piles of scraped earth, the La Sal Mountains rose in the south and the Uintas in the north, a reminder of the scale of this precious Colorado River Basin. Piñon-juniper woodlands and aspen groves provided shade and supported the 40 elk my friends saw in one day. I thought of the lines from a Wendell Berry poem:
and desecrated places.
Land exchanges don’t factor in the cost of climate change, and now we must ask, how do we price our future?
Climate change is already happening on the Colorado Plateau. In late June, I reached southwest Colorado and spent a day in the cooler temperatures of the San Juan National Forest with Bill Anderegg, a young climate scientist at the University of Utah who studies sudden aspen decline. Bill grew up in Cortez, and during his first summer of graduate school, he returned to the aspen forest where he camped as a kid and found a sea of dead stumps. Cause of death? The 2002 drought that was two to three degrees centigrade hotter than any drought on record. When talking about climate change, Bill said, “It’s visible and it’s visceral and it’s during my lifetime.”
Despite the grief and rage I encountered, I also witnessed courageous hope rooted in an unrelenting commitment to community and place. I met with lots of different characters — from a retired coal miner in Price, Utah to water protectors on Black Mesa. Their experiences of climate change and environmental injustices varied, but all shared a deep love of home.
This commitment makes a just transition away from fossil fuels both hopeful and challenging. It means we can’t just calculate how many jobs a wind farm will create, but how many it will employ locally. For example, Isaac Vigil is the only person from San Juan County employed locally at the windfarm in Monticello, Utah — a former uranium town an hour south of Moab. Anyone else who keeps the turbines turning either works in the Salt Lake office, or was brought in from another town because, as Isaac explained, no one locally had the needed electrical training. The job has allowed Isaac to continue living in his hometown with his family. He said, “I made the right call at the right time to the right person. I got lucky.” We need solutions that allow more people to stay in the place they love with the people they love.
If we conceive of ourselves as community members, what kind of shared solutions may we create? I think of Community Rebuilds in Moab, a nonprofit that builds affordable earthen homes, and their focus on inclusive community in their build teams. During five-month semesters, interns live together, cook together, and build non-toxic homes to address the affordable housing crisis in Moab.
I remember the solidarity walk with the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe’s White Mesa community defending their land and people against the last uranium mill in the country. When I asked Thelma Whiskers, an elder leading the resistance to the mill, how she felt that day, a smile came over her face: “We were strong, and we were brave.”
Ephraim Dutchie and his grandmother, Thelma Whiskers, organize the resistance to the White Mesa uranium mill just a few miles north of their home on the Ute Mountain Ute reservation. Ephraim said, “At least three people I grew up with have cancer. It’s really hard for us here in the community. If a crisis happened at the mill, they would contact Blanding, not us. We’re five miles south of the mill and the wind usually blows south. They don’t care about us; all they care about is money. If there was a crisis, where would we go? My only place is White Mesa.”
The White Mesa Mill is the last operating conventional uranium mill in the country. Thelma has been resisting the mill since the ‘90s. The herbs that Thelma’s mom used to collect no longer grow on the surrounding land, and the mill has been in violation of the Clean Air Act for radon emissions, a radioactive, cancer-causing gas. She said, “This place is dangerous for us. The young people say the water doesn’t taste good. The water tastes like metal. And we’re not going to drink it. The young ones have allergies, diabetes, and asthma.”
I think of Adrian Herder, fellow Uplift organizer, and his family protecting traditional livelihoods on Black Mesa. He reminded me that community is more than just our human neighbors when he said, “We are not only speaking for our families, but future generations, all walks of life that we share this land with, and most importantly the water."
On my journey I learned that injustice births from silenced stories. By listening deeply to those on the frontlines, we find pathways toward reconciliation, justice, and shared solutions. The actions with the power to generate new ways of living will rise from the communities who most clearly understand the failures of our current systems. By projecting stories from sacrifice zones louder than narratives claiming unsacred places exist, we may begin uncovering the roots of our climate crisis. In this region of fierce land protectors, we touch the deep red earth to remind ourselves not what we do, but why.
Mary O’BrienA colleague calls Mary O’Brien the Jane Goodall of southern Utah. She’s in her 70s but has the spirit of a feisty 25-year-old. She knows more about the plants in the region than most, and is currently the director of the Grand Canyon Trust’s Utah Forests Program. She works on collaborative conservation projects, engaging in difficult conversations and relationship-building with ranchers, farmers, and government agencies who sometimes vehemently disagree with her. She lives in Castle Valley, Utah.
“I grew up at a time when I thought that things could get better, environmentally and socially. I think young people like you are going to face things getting worse for the rest of your lives. I don’t know how I would’ve dealt with that. I certainly wouldn’t have given up. During the years when it seemed possible that there might be nuclear war between Russia and the U.S., this one man who was an anti-nuclear activist was asked ‘what would you do if you knew tomorrow nuclear war was going to start?’ and he said, ‘I’d plant a tree.’ I think that’s the only thing you can do. I think you know nuclear war is going to happen and not literally, but climate losses are going to happen. It makes it harder for people to think about restoring something if they think climate change is going to get it anyways. I think of my grandson who is 11, what’s he got to look forward to if he lives 70 years from now? How hot? How many species will be lost? How many coastal areas drowned? But as far as pessimism goes I just always feel like you’re either working for making things better or you’re not. And that’s not much of a choice.”
Alicia Tsosie Alicia Tsosie works for food security and food sovereignty on the Navajo Nation. She grows her own food in Tuba City and coordinates farmers markets in the community. On a 106-degree day in Tuba City, I asked Alicia how climate change impacts her work.
“The biggest thing is water and the rising temperatures. My corn this morning around 9 a.m. was starting to almost curl like when it needs water, but at six in the morning they were just wide open enjoying the cool air. We don’t use pesticides or herbicides. We’re out there every day. The biggest thing I struggle with personally is the invasive plants. I’m very concerned, you can see the changes in the climate. I remember when we actually got snow in December when I was a little kid. Now we’re lucky if we have sleet. As a Navajo, especially as a grower, you don’t get too worried about providing water to your plants, because if you’re out there every day and you pray for your plants, the Holy People will come and bring moisture. I’ve seen it happen, the little dew that’s on my corn. But on days like this when you have a heat warning, I’m pretty sure I won’t see dew drops tomorrow. It’s kind of a bit of faith. It’s important to have a good local food system, especially here on the reservation where we’re food insecure. Our elders did this with not nearly as much technology that we have today.”
Marcel GaztambideMarcel grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah and spent his childhood exploring the canyons of the Colorado Plateau. He is now the Animas River keeper with the San Juan Citizens Alliance in Durango, Colorado and has been an organizer of Uplift since 2015.
“The Colorado Plateau, since it’s where I was born and raised, means home. It’s the geography of home for me. It’s a place to get my head straight. It’s the first place I went after the most recent presidential election. It’s where I feel safe. There’s something about the canyons that speaks to me in a spiritual way. I think anybody who has studied water in the West knows that the Colorado River is the hardest-working river in the U.S. Most of the West could not exist as it does right now without the Colorado River system. With snowpacks diminishing, with us in an almost 17-year drought, we need to start thinking about how we’re using water and what it’s going to look like in 50 years. The fact that the Colorado River doesn’t make it to the ocean anymore should scare people. Seeing that water creep back up in the desert is a scary, scary thing. I’m also very concerned about the region’s dependence on fossil fuels. I think on the Colorado Plateau there needs to be a focus on a just transition. It will be easy for these companies to pull out and leave the mess behind and leave communities without jobs. As badly as we need those coal power plants to close down, I feel guilty that I’m excited about that happening because there is not a plan in place for those people and there needs to be. People say when the coal power plant closes they can just move to where there’s jobs in solar or wind, but that’s not fair at all. These people were born and raised here and they should get to stay here."
Sarah StockSarah Stock grew up in Castle Valley, Utah. She supports social justice movements across the Colorado Plateau with Seeds of Peace and is part of the regional resistance to extreme energy projects.
“We’re all united by this limited water supply and the Colorado River, and there’s this strong perhaps not always united but at least communicative and loving community that’s across the Colorado Plateau. It goes across issues and it involves folks all upstream and downstream of us in this fight to protect public lands against extractive industries. Here on the Colorado Plateau we have it all—we have uranium, coal, oil and gas, tar sands, oil shale, solar, wind. I’ve found a lot of gratification in getting to know folks in different struggles around the Colorado Plateau, like Black Mesa where they’ve been fighting coal mining for 40 years, and there are elders up there who are still resisting and still teaching people about their struggle. To me resistance on the Colorado Plateau is continuing that legacy and continuing to rebel against this energy extraction. We’re out in the middle of nowhere. There aren’t that many people out here, and there aren’t that many people keeping tabs on the land, so I’ve been trying to connect with folks who are rooted in the Colorado Plateau and are also fighting these extractive industries.”
Carol DavisCarol Davis lives in Dilkon on the Navajo Nation. She is the director of Diné CARE (Citizens Against Ruining our Environment), a Navajo organization that preserves and protects the Diné way of life and has been fighting environmental injustices for three decades. Established in 1988, Diné CARE successfully prevented a toxic waste incinerator from locating in Dilkon.
“For me this work gives me an opportunity to seek justice and equity for my relatives. Even as a kid I always found myself trying to protect the people who couldn’t protect themselves. This work allows me to continue that, for my own people, my relatives. I get this strong sense of accomplishment that I’m also in some way preserving language and culture because it allows me to go out in my community in my native language, and I also in return gain a lot of cultural knowledge. I have grandkids. I also feel like I’m doing this for them and future generations. Making sure there’s a foundation for them to have pride in who they are and where they come from. There’s times when we probably work 80-hour weeks. I’ve been known to send out emails at 1:30, 2:00 a.m. We make time to restore our balance through ceremony. We make sure we do self-care. We take care of each other and look out for one another. There’s some times when we’ll just all be upset about something that didn’t go the way we had hoped, but somebody will say something in Navajo that’s just hilarious and it’s just infectious. The actual sense of humor is somehow constructed in our language. It’s always good to have a sense of humor.”
Winner of the 2017 Bell Prize, Brooke Larsen is a writer and climate organizer in Salt Lake City currently working on a book about her journey exploring issues of climate justice across the Colorado Plateau.
Advocate Magazine
Spring/Summer 2018
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