Although defeated in the last election, Donald Trump’s toxic legacy lives on, one example being his random, destructive pull-backs of protections on three of America’s most revered national monuments: Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and Bears Ears National Monument. Beyond their ecological value, these areas are sacred threads in the fabric of Indigenous cultures. Protection of these public lands is an element of America’s greatness.
Before leaving office, the Trump administration held a bargain basement sale on oil and gas leases in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the Republican Congress having lifted ANWR protections in their 2017 Tax Act. Thanks to the efforts of public action groups, “Big Oil” was dissuaded from bidding on these leases. The six largest financial institutions in the U.S. and Canada declined to finance drilling there due to risks to their reputations and the meager chance of profitability. In an attempt to p
In the spring of 2020, the Southern Nevada Water Authority dropped its plan to pump hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of groundwater from Eastern Nevada and pipe it 300 miles south to Las Vegas. Opponents of the plan, including several Native tribes, believed the project would have depleted precious water sources. There were many efforts to stop that project in the decades it was on the table. In this episode, we look at one that was by Indigenous people for Indigenous people: a 330-mile prayer run inspired by similar events objecting to the Dakota Access Pipeline and the reduction of Bears Ears National Monument.
A view of the night sky from the Antelope Canyon, Page, Arizona. Photo: Ameer Basheer/Unsplash
Americans invented the idea of national parks. They sing of amber waves of grain and sublime purple mountain majesties. They’ve made the Grand Canyon, Yosemite and Yellowstone shrines of national identity and idealise nature in speeches, literature, painting, photography and architecture.
And yet American lands today are torn by conflicts over science, religion, identity and politics, with contradictory conceptions of nature at the heart of a broken national consensus.
To Native Americans, nature and culture are inseparable, and the identity and the history of a tribe is thoroughly interwoven with specific places, such as Rainbow Bridge or the San Francisco Peaks. In contrast, many White Americans embrace wilderness, defined as nature that is free of human presence, with no roads, telephone lines or electricity. The wilderness is, to them, eternal and pre-human, an idea at odds with b
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