Members of the Navajo Nation and their supporters have been blockading the site of a proposed coal-fired power plant in northwestern New Mexico for more than a week now, hoping to halt construction of what they believe will be a social and ecological disaster.
If completed, the Desert Rock Power Plant will cover 600 acres in the largest American Indian reservation in the nation, and it will be the third coal-fired plant on Navajo land.
The protesters have been camped at the site since Dec. 12, and are demanding that officials show them the permits required to begin survey work for an environmental impact statement. Work on the site has been halted since the blockade began.
This week, Dine Power Authority officials requested a restraining order from the district court to remove the 10 protesters gathered there, claiming that they are slowing progress on the facility. But as of last night at least, no one had been arrested. But reports from the scene indicate that police are attempting to stop the blockade by intimidating protesters, according to an email dispatch yesterday from Mike Ewell of the Energy Justice Network:
Based on my conversations with some of those on the ground, it appears that police dismantled the camp site and dispersed the protesters' personal belonging along the road. They wouldn't let elders use the bathroom or eat or allow any wood hauling. They even threatened arrest if they left the site to use the bathroom and are refusing to let them use port-a-potties that they paid for (there are no convenient places to go to the bathroom). A local family was even told that they cannot return to their own land where they live and that their land belongs to BHP (a big coal company).
Najavo Nation elected officials are largely in support of the plant, claiming that it will bring jobs and tax revenue to the poverty-stricken nation. Many Navajo live without running water or electricity, and tribal leaders see the plant as a financial gain toward new development. But the protesters say the plant will destroy sacred land and pollute the air.
"We have to have respect for the Earth; we have to have respect for every living thing.... Our people know that and understand that," Ann Frazier of the Navajo group Citizens Against Ruining our Environment (CARE) told the press. "So for these big companies to come in and do this, and our tribal leaders allowing them to do that, is against the belief of the people."
Others say the plant will not bring the infrastructure development needed on the nation. The plants owners will get the bulk of the profits, and residents will see little of the power generated there, protesters say.
"Why do we have to give all of that [land] to a power plant?" said Dailan Long, who resides near the proposed plant site. "It doesn't make sense that we get the pollution, and they get the power."
Another coal plant bites the dust
Blowing up our clean energy future
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caniscandida Posted 3:16 pm
23 Dec 2006
The Dine' CARE organization is apparently effective in protesting environmentally destructive exploitation. Their next step, it seems, is to begin to propose projects focused on providing employment opportunities and developing renewable sources of energy. The Navajo Reservation probably includes good locations for both solar facilities and wind turbines.
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
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smokesignalz Posted 10:10 am
25 Dec 2006
Tribal Government, you are there to represent and protect the interests of the people. The people don't want this on their land, and it is your job to help them see to it that it does not come to pass. It is the people - at least in part - who put you where you are. In this way, you have a sacred covenent with the people. Presently, you are not upholding your end of the deal. Harassing little, old grandmothers is a mark of cowardice and only the truly evil will engage in this sort of behavior, for only the truly evil are without conscience. It takes a lot of energy to be evil, and this is not a well supported way of conducting oneself in the natural order of things. Those who behave this way end up paying the ultimate price for it in the end, even if that end is a long time away.
You seem intent on following in the footsteps of the white government, selling out your own well being and that of your children for temporary, worldly gains. Can't you take a good look around you and see how miserably the white way continues to fail? Look how sickly and bad off whites are as a whole. For all their outward appearance of affluence and power, they are totally bankrupt on the inside, totally miserable atop their mountains of modernity, money and possessions, with no sense of community and no cohesive cultural identity. They are like the walking dead: dead to each other, dead to their senses, dead to their spirits. Do you really want this for yourself and your people? Haven't indigenous people suffered enough at the hands of the white way, and now at the hands of their own electorate? Is a total annihilation of ancestral lands and cultural heritage necessary for the Dineh people?
A 25% ownership stake in the plant and a handful of temporary construction jobs does not justify further raping the Earth and her people in this way. Four hundred permanent jobs SOUNDS nice, but who will be there to work those jobs when the pool of Dineh applicants is largely ill and dying of cancer and lung disease or disabled from the damage already done in the name of coal and uranium mining? In this instance, only whites will be there to fill those positions when the Dineh are too sick to do so, giving the white government even stronger inroads to ursurping native lands. Why play into the hands of the white government's insistence on cultural genocide against native people?
Money is such a fleeting thing and has no importance in the next world(s). The Earth does not care about money and should not be exploited in its pursuit. Humans can have every richness in life they need and desire without destroying the mother on which they are inseperably dependent. This requires a sense of respect for all living things and a willingness not to succumb to the outside pressures to become greedy and take more than what is needed to live a good, reasonably comfortable life.
Earth gives unconditionally to all her children, yet receives little respect or reverence in return. On the part of human beings, this is shameful and represents a breakdown in the agreement we have with our Creator to honor and care for what we were given in the priviledge of being here. The truth is, we need the Earth more than she needs us.
Because humans as a whole do not honor the basic precept of 'don't shit where you eat', we are paying for it in the form of rampant, widespread illness and dis-spiritedness that increasingly threatens the well being of everyone everywhere. Haven't your elders been warning you against this all along? When will you who hold the power take the teachings of your own elders to heart and start governing with care and respect towards the Earth and all her children instead of doing so purely in the interest of increasing the thickness that lines your wallets? The way you behave now makes you no better than the whites, who have long since destroyed their own sacred Earth ways and who continue to sell out their own in the name of worldly things. Psychologists have long recognized a pattern that often the abused grow up to become abusers themselves. It doesn't have to be this way, though.
The irreversible damage that will be done in the construction and administration of this dis-empowerment plant is like spitting in the face of the Creator. The Creator is the one who is truly in charge of things and does not take kindly to being treated by lesser beings in this way. You who are in positions of government have no idea as to the extent of the danger you are courting in proceeding with this project.
You still have a chance to turn back before you make things any worse for yourselves and your people. Do you have the courage to do this?
The whole world is watching.
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caniscandida Posted 3:15 pm
26 Dec 2006
On that venerable saying, "Don't shit where you eat": One of the most unfortunately overlooked aspects of European and Euro-American civilization, since the Industrial Revolution took off in Britain in the 18th century, is the horrible acquiescence with which we have accepted, generation after generation, the degradation and destruction of our environment.
I do not know that any serious intellectual attitude can be faulted, e.g. the Christian Church and its demi-doctrine of Mankind's supremacy over Nature, or the Enlightenment and its concept of the universe being a clock-work machine governable by reason. Those attitudes are undoubtedly there, and both are deplorable; but that does not mean that either Christianity or the Enlightenment is "to blame."
Rather, I think it has more to do with a combination of Liking To Eat As Much As Possible, and the Law of Least Resistance (gaining the most decent munchies, and the most couch time, for the least amount of effort expended). Certainly the Old White Fathers who settled and colonized and ploughed and pioneered across this land, killing as many of the fur-bearing animals and the predators that they could, and lots of the ones that they liked to eat, and lots of others just for fun, were not questioning themselves very deeply about the morality of their actions.
Whether Indians in tribal governments, including that of the Navajo, can be similarly accused, I do not know. It would have been nice to think that Native American traditions regarding reverence toward the Creator and toward the Earth might actually mean something to the people in tribal governments.
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
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