Changing Woman: One Navajo’s Fight for a Just Energy Transition
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This week, we have a special episode about the long and winding energy transition in an often overlooked place: the Navajo Nation—the largest Indian reservation in the United States.
Journalist and climate policy expert Julian Brave NoiseCat is our guide.
Ten percent of Navajos lack access to electricity. Some spend up to $700 per month on fuels to travel to places with electricity, or charge electronics in their cars and trucks.
But the Navajo Nation isn’t exactly an energy-poor place. In fact, until recently, the reservation was home to two of the largest coal strip mines in the world. In recent decades as many as five coal-burning power plants surrounded Navajo lands. For many Navajo, power lines connecting coal to major cities like Phoenix and Los Angeles, have come to symbolize this vastly unequal system.
We’ll look at the deep history of energy extraction and colonialism that led to the current clean-energy transition for the Navajo people.
Featured in this episode: Wahleah Johns and Andrew Curley.
Follow our co-hosts and production team:
A Matter of Degrees is a production of Post Script Audio.
TRANSCRIPT
Julian NoiseCat: There's a story among the Navajo people. It's about a girl, the daughter of first man and first woman who grows up to be revered goddess in a time when monsters stock the earth with a young man named Jonah A, the son, she gave birth to twin boys.
Wahleah Johns: Her name is Changing Woman. And she helped to guide them and raise them in a way that they were became warriors. But before they went to the sun, they had to go through so many challenges, but also to prove to the sun that they were the children of the sun.
Julian NoiseCat: The woman speaking that's Wahleah Johns. She's a citizen of the Navajo Nation. She's also an advocate for climate justice and solar energy. The story she's telling, it's part of the Navajos Genesis.
Wahleah Johns: Yes. And then the sun gave them tools and weapons to come back to our home to defeat the monsters and slay the monsters. And there's teachings where as the hero twins were slaying these monsters, some of them went back into the earth.
Julian NoiseCat: At risk of giving too much away. It's also a metaphor, and allegory.
Wahleah Johns: And a lot of teachings come from that, there's teachings there that say, "We're not supposed to dig in the earth. We're not supposed to extract anything from the earth, If we do that it's going to harm us." They say the oil, the coal, all of these deposits of ore and minerals were not supposed to bother them, and that they're supposed to be left alone, If we do, that's going to create the harm. It's going to create all the monsters again.
Leah Stokes: This is a matter of degrees. I'm Dr. Leah Stokes, and I'm Dr. Katherine Wilkinson. My name is Julian Brave NoiseCat. And together, we're telling stories for the climate curious. So today we have a special episode of this podcast. It is about the long and winding path towards an energy transition in an often overlooked place, the Navajo Nation, the largest Indian Reservation in the United States.
Katharine Wilkinson: And we also have a special guest, a co-host on this episode, a journalist and a policy expert named Julian Brave NoiseCat and he's going to help guide us through this story. So Julian, why don't you introduce yourself to our listeners?
Julian NoiseCat: Well, hello everyone. My name is Julian NoiseCat. I'm a citizen of the Secwepemc Nation and a descendant of the St'at'imc Nation. I guess I'm also a policy expert, which feels like someone just put a little pep in my step. I'm excited to-
Katharine Wilkinson: You got promoted there Julian.
Julian NoiseCat: They mostly just call me a hack usually.
Leah Stokes: My dad was a sports journalist. So I feel like hack is like actually a real term of praise and endearment. Well, whatever the term, we are excited to dive into this story with you, Julian would you just tell us what is the story that you're going to bring to our listeners today?
Julian NoiseCat: So the woman speaking was a Wahleah Johns. She's a citizen of the Navajo Nation, the Executive Director of Native Renewables, an organization that's bringing solar power to Navajo homes, and she's also a friend. And the story that she was telling was the story of Changing Woman, a goddess who brings life and transition to the Navajo people at the dawn of this world. And that felt like an appropriate place to start for a story about a woman, a nation and an energy system in a period of immense change. The story begins in Black Mesa, Arizona.
Wahleah Johns: Black Mesa to us is regarded as a female mountain. You know, there's teachings about from elders that said, as long as we take care of her she's going to take care of us and be the provider for good rain, for good moisture for a life a good life to live.
Julian NoiseCat: Can you explain to us a little bit about what life is like in Black Mesa?
Wahleah Johns: Sure. It's beautiful. I love it. It's a high desert region where we live is about maybe 7,400 feet in elevation. All of our roads are mostly dirt, and we just to get home, it's like traveling about an hour of dirt road just to get home. My grandmother also, is a rancher. She's raised lots of sheep, lots of cattle and horses. And so that's I think the beauty of our people, especially in Black Mesa region where many residents live in rural areas that manage livestock and they manage, you know they're farmers and they take care of home. Homesteads are our land.
Julian NoiseCat: Wahleah's mother is from Black Mesa too, her father is from nearby south of the Hopi reservation, which is surrounded by the Navajo like Lesotho in South Africa where some Navajo like to joke like a hole in a piece of Indian frybread. But we'll get back to that in a bit. To this day, the Navajo Nation is a hardscrabble place. About a third of homes lack running water, and a 10th don't have electricity. Wahleah's work has brought her to homesteads across the reservation.
Wahleah Johns: There's an elder, he's probably like 70. And actually I met him through a ceremony and he said, "Hey, you should come over to my house," and he doesn't have power. And so we get into his home and he has a generator that he uses to generate power for light at night. And he has a VCR, and a little television, but he's able to watch even just like bull riding, just reruns of bull riding shows. What else does he have? He has lots of flashlights, batteries are everywhere. You could tell that he buy a lot of batteries to power his flashlights.
Julian NoiseCat: Elsewhere, Wahleah has seen families run extension cords between houses, charge electronics and cars and even drive to see relatives just so they can use their outlets.
Wahleah Johns: So that's what we've seen and families can pay anywhere from, I don't know, we've calculated about $150 to sometimes $700 a month just on fuels depending on what season it is. And usually in the winter, it's more.
Julian NoiseCat: What's odd about all this is that the Navajo Nation isn't exactly an energy poor place. In fact until recently, the reservation was home to two of the largest coal strip mines in the world. In recent decades, as many as five coal burning power plants surrounded Navajo lands. For many Navajo, power lines connecting coal to major cities like Phoenix and Los Angeles have come to symbolize this vastly unequal landscape.
Julian NoiseCat: To better understand the history that brought us here, I called Andrew Curley, a Navajo geographer at the University of Arizona and well, a homie.
Andrew Curley: Oh, this is a history channel program. Okay, now I know what this podcast is about.
Julian NoiseCat: Andrew says that if you want to understand the energy politics of the Navajo Nation, you have to understand the post World War II boom in cities like Phoenix in states like Arizona when aliens came to the southwest like the foreign kind, not ET.
Andrew Curley: So the coal industry and especially like this large scale coal industry enters the Navajo Nation at a time of profound transition. So you have the first 14 school generation coming to adulthood. You have many Navajo men returning back from military services either at World War II or Korea, you have transition of Arizona around the Navajo Nation from just a very sparsely populated Western cattle state. And then it suddenly became part of this boom, this postwar boom, in the set what's called the Sunbelt.
Julian NoiseCat: Almost overnight, Arizona's economy transformed from small and quiet cowboys, ranchers, miners, that sort of a thing to a boom town of defense contractors, semiconductor manufacturers, and suburbanites.
Andrew Curley: So you start to see the need for water increase, and you start to see the need for energy electricity increase. And that's why they were looking in the Navajo Nation for sources of energy.
Julian NoiseCat: At the same time, the United States government was pushing a formal policy of Indian assimilation, relocation and termination. That was the official slogan, termination.
Andrew Curley: I think it was from 1955 to 1962, the federal government sponsored a relocation program. And this was one of the worst legacies of... It's probably one of the least known but like most obvious forms of cultural genocide that you have with what the federal government was attempting to do, and this was to relocate indigenous families from the reservation communities into cities to try to assimilate them into wage labor work. And so the relocation program was happening just before all these coal leases were signed.
Julian NoiseCat: Do you remember that hole I mentioned in the piece of frybread, otherwise known as the Hopi Reservation? This is where that hole becomes really important. You see in 1974, Congress passed a law called the Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act designed to clarify the boundaries between the two tribes. Not that that was really a problem, Navajo and Hopi had lived side by side and traded for generations. But as Andrew, Wahleah and just about every other researcher at Navajo I've asked will tell you, that massive Indians was starting to get the way. Funny how us Indians tend to do that.
Julian NoiseCat: Peabody Coal, a corporation interested in the fossil fuels underneath Navajo and Hopi lands, needed Congress to clarify the boundary lines between the reservations so that they could more easily identify which tribe they needed to do business with. The partition ultimately displayed some 10 to 15,000 Navajo families, their land, their livelihoods, their homes, gone.
Wahleah Johns: A completely different lifestyle than what they knew. And many families and people I heard, passed away from heartbreak, elders, because they missed their homeland so much. And they couldn't return back to that many families or people they resorted to alcoholism, substance abuse.
Julian NoiseCat: Even just to access their homelands, relocated Navajo were told they needed to get permits. Some like Wahleah's grandmother resisted.
Wahleah Johns: I actually witness grandmothers being arrested for defending themselves to have a ceremony on their own land. And the police coming in and telling them, "You don't have a permit to do your ceremony here. You need to go and file a paperwork at the government office to say that you're going to have a ceremony here." And the grandmothers were like, "No, this is where we grew up. This is where we're going to be, my umbilical cord is here, and I am not going."
Wahleah Johns: I think I was like 11, and I didn't understand any of the things that were the laws, until I started to read more about the dispute and understand that all of this was because of coal. It was because of money.
Julian NoiseCat: What Congress in Peabody didn't anticipate was the fighting spirit of the Navajo at Black Mesa.
Andrew Curley: The story of Black Mesa resistance is resisting colonialism in its different iterations over time. And so many people who moved into that region into Black Mesa, actually never were taken by Kit Carson or the US Army to Bosque Redondo to Fort Sumner.
Julian NoiseCat: Curley is referring to the four year Exodus known as the Long Walk when the United States military led the Navajo on a forced march out of their homeland in 1864.
Andrew Curley: So they claimed they'd never been conquered, right? They never actually were a party to the Treaty of 1868. And so they're saying Black Mesa creates its own regional identity as already as a defiance against the way that the Navajo Nation was constructed going back to the 1860s within the US colonial system. And a lot of those lands, that's where the two coal mines that eventually opened were located was right in the heart of the Black Mesa region.
Julian NoiseCat: In the 1970s, at the height of the American Indian Movement, the grandmothers at Black Mesa invited some of the movements, spiritual leaders down to Arizona to support their resistance.
Wahleah Johns: In the early '70s, that's when some of the grandmothers when the Wounded Knee happened up in South Dakota grandmothers went up there and asked their spiritual leaders. "We need support down here. We have a fight going on here in Black Mesa area. Can you help us bring your ceremony? We need prayers."
Julian NoiseCat: Wahleah was just a kid when a lot of this was going down, but she remembers a gathering that took place at Big Mountain on partition Navajo lands, Hopi and Navajo elders were there together breaking bread.
Wahleah Johns: Wow, that's significant. You hear about Navajo and Hopi land dispute and conflict. But you're here, you have the most traditional people from Navajo and Hopi coming together and eating together and laughing and supporting each other. And I remember [Thomas Benyonkar 00:14:42] saying, "You young people, all of you, help the elders here. Resist. Stay here. Learn as much as you can about defending this land. You guys are protectors." I will never forget that.
Julian NoiseCat: The story of Peabody Coal is as damning a tale as any told about the crooked dealings of the colonists who swindled this continent away from its first peoples.
Wahleah Johns: You see this type of story internationally everywhere, other indigenous territories have the same story where big corporations come in, and are able to get access and rights to water, coal, and remove people. And I think that's a horrible business plan. I think it's a horrible way to go about development and energy extraction. And that's our story in Black Mesa.
Wahleah Johns: And that it fed these huge cities to grow, to thrive from this resource at the expense of human rights, at the expense of our health, and our well being. And I think that is what has shaped my understanding of energy development in the United States and how corrupt it is, and how it favors other communities than ours and our people.
Julian NoiseCat: Oh, and a few decades later, it was revealed that the Hopi tribes lawyer, Mormon guy named John Boyden, he was also working for Peabody.
Wahleah Johns: The fact that he worked for Peabody and the tribe didn't know that, and was able to leverage this corporation to have access to subsurface mineral rights is crazy.
Julian NoiseCat: Quote, "Nothing on record indicates that John Boyden ever provided the Hopi Tribal Council with any substantial analysis of the Peabody lease." That's from Colorado University, Boulder law Professor Charles Wilkinson in a 1996 paper. It continues. "There's no indication that Boyden explained the magnitude of the operation and its probable impacts that for example, the two mines on Black Mesa, would constitute the largest coal strip mining complex in the country."
Wahleah Johns: This is the deceit that we don't hear about too much. And in order to get access to lands and mineral rights, it's stepping over and on indigenous rights, and people who have been there living on this caretaking of this land for so long, and it's criminal.
Leah Stokes: Julian it sounds like the height of injustice and these kind of back alley dealings that are greasing the skids to make it all possible.
Julian NoiseCat: There's a tendency I think to imagine these kinds of self dealing, underhanded dealing things as exceptional, as those are the unusual cases. But I think when you look at things spanning from the leasing of Manhattan from the Lenape people all the way to this history. I think when you're talking about how powerful people have related to native people, it actually becomes much more of a common thread.
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah, and I think the other thing that it really brings up is this idea of sacrifice zones that, we can build the largest coal strip mine complex on indigenous territory and poison communities elsewhere, because somehow those areas don't matter that they can be sacrificed for the fossil fuel economy.
Julian NoiseCat: I think even this story stretches that concept to it's absurd limits, right? For Boyden, this community wasn't just sacrificial. It was also for the taking, they could be had.
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah, and what did you learn about the consequences of this taking by Peabody?
Julian NoiseCat: So despite or perhaps because of Boyden and Peabody, the Navajo Nation transformed into a coal economy, like West Virginia, or Wyoming.
Andrew Curley: And so you got kids coming out of high school, looking for work. They could either go to find a job with the coal mine or maybe join the army and go off to Vietnam. And so you have these Stark choices in front of them, and so they end up finding work around where they grew up and where they live.
Andrew Curley: And then over time, they start to identify with that work, and they see that the money that they're doing, working in the coal mine is helping them to not only take care of their families, but also their relatives. It's fulfilling kinship obligations, bringing in resources that are needed for the community, and it's so as seen as this benefit.
Julian NoiseCat: And as coal took off, water and pollution became one of the most prominent focal points in the Black Mesa resistance.
Andrew Curley: Black Mesa mine in particular was the construction of a slurry that took this aquifer water from the end aquifer underneath Black Mesa, and it took that water to move coal from the mine site to the Mojave generating station, 273 miles to the west in Laughlin, Nevada. And so that was used to transport the coal and then it was just wasted. That's all that water was used for. It was just as a cheaper way to transport coal. And so that became one of the first environmental contestations about coal in the Navajo Nation. It's like how does it treat and use water.
Julian NoiseCat: This is where where Wahleah started picking up the work started by her grandmothers.
Wahleah Johns: So that's where I got involved as far as seeing the impact of how much water Peabody Coal company was using every day, and how it had a big impact on the stability of our aquifer. We started to see all of the springs dry up in the peripheral areas of the aquifer, subsidence. And these are all indicators that something's going on with your groundwater and started organizing. And that's how I was introduced into understanding Peabody Coal company, understanding their history, understanding my history.
Julian NoiseCat: Andrew first started looking into this history 12 years ago when he was a researcher at Dine College. Just so you know, Dine that's what the Navajo call themselves in their own language. And like much else on the reservation, Dine College was built by coal money.
Andrew Curley: So what happens is, over time, you have these institutions to rely upon these industries for a large part of their revenue. So what they end up doing is gaining... Okay, so the last year when I was doing my research in 2013, coal was about 25% of non-federal revenues. So there was 25% of discretionary spending for the Navajo Nation. And then oil and natural gas were another significant part and land leases were another like 24%.
Andrew Curley: So all of these resources and the money is derived from resources in various forms support the Navajo Nation government. And then what does that government do? That government creates jobs for people.
Julian NoiseCat: You know Max Weber's whole Protestant work ethic thing? Well currently, if I can paraphrase a bit, it talks about what I might describe as a Navajo work ethic.
Andrew Curley: And then I also talk about the moral economy of coworkers, basically how people who have worked in the industry since the 1970s, who had developed a livelihood and a sense of identity around that work, came to support that kind of industry and said, "This is something that keeps us on the land." They identified it as having a positive benefit for not only the Navajo Nation, but also for communities and culture.
Andrew Curley: There's high unemployment in the reservation, there's little else to do that pays as much. And so they understand it's a Faustian bargain at that point and they're very critical of the whole structure of the coal economy. So there was a degree of critical analysis among co workers themselves, who knew the industry better than anybody, and knew how it was exploiting them, their bodies and the health and also the environment. So there's a range of experiences.
Julian NoiseCat: And much like in Appalachia, Northumberland and the Soviet Union, organized coal workers on the Navajo Nation wielded significant power. Take the 2010 Navajo Nation presidential election between Ben Shelley and Lynda Lovejoy for example. A race Lovejoy was expected to win.
Andrew Curley: And she had overwhelmingly won the primary vote beating all her opponents by a lot. And so people saw that she had support and that she was really likely to become the next Navajo Nation president.
Julian NoiseCat: There was even a piece in The New York Times about Lovejoy and her platform to transition the Navajo Nation to clean energy. The headline, Navajos Hope to Shift From Coal to Wind and Sun. The coal workers and their union the United Mine Workers of America, they didn't take it so well.
Andrew Curley: All of them mobilized to defeat Lynda Lovejoy, and they did it through a lot of chicanery saying that there is this tradition in Navajo stories that say when a woman becomes a leader, then the whole world collapses or something along those lines.
Julian NoiseCat: Lovejoy lost. But the push for a life after coal continued. In 2006, a few years before Lovejoy ran for president, the Black Mesa mine shut down. Ironically, it was the market and not policy or activism that turned the tide.
Andrew Curley: In fact, it didn't die because the Navajo Nation said "No, we're not going to do any more," it died because the utility companies said "We're not going to buy your coal anymore."
Julian NoiseCat: For Wahleah and her allies it was a Pyrrhic victory.
Wahleah Johns: And so when they closed it, we were excited. It was like a bittersweet thing because we couldn't really celebrate, because also it meant 200 Navajo jobs were lost and that means our own relatives that work there.
Julian NoiseCat: And it was right around then, that a new idea came into Navajo politics, transition.
Andrew Curley: If I could go as back to 2006, that's when I think transition enters the vocabulary of Navajo politics. It was a coalition, right? Different organizations coming together to try to push the Navajo Nation to move away from coal into in their minds clean energy technology. Solar, I think was the first thing proposed and then eventually wind. Since 2006, we've been thinking through dealing with this question of transition within the Navajo Nation.
Julian NoiseCat: Andrew recalls a community meeting in 2012, when the Navajo were in the throes of figuring out what that transition would look like. Wahleah was there, Peabody Coal was their community based groups like the Black Mesa Water Coalition, and Black Mesa United were there.
Andrew Curley: So all of those people were there trying to push on to the Navajo Nation Council their agenda, and each of them had a different story about what they wanted to do with this land. Black Mesa Water Coalition wanted to put solar panels on that land, as a symbolic reclaiming of that land that was once for dirty energy, will now be dedicated to the production of clean energy.
Andrew Curley: And Black Mesa United, they wanted that land to return back to the people whose grazing permits were on that land, who had some sort of historical connection to those lands. And then Peabody Coal at that time, their interest was to maintain it, as it were. It was still under their control, so they were just observing what was going on. But they may or may not have had an interest in combining the former Black Mesa Mine Complex, with the key into mine and making one super a mining area.
Andrew Curley: So each of these actors were out there testifying. "We don't want you to put your solar panels here, we want it to come back to us." And then Peabody is happy. We're seen by happy to watch Dune people fight about it. But they had their own interests at play. And when I was interviewing one of the members of Black Mesa United, on the side of the Chapter house, the Peabody guy was standing there. And he was trying to encourage that person who I was interviewing, with the kinds of answers he wanted that person to give.
Andrew Curley: He was like, "Well, this helped you to keep your livelihood, right? This helps you to stay close to home." It was like creating propaganda more than trying to represent what people were really thinking and how people were impacted by the mining.
Julian NoiseCat: So just for context, this is before Wahleah had started Native Renewables. And here she's found herself and her vision at a bit of a crossroads. She's been fighting Peabody Coal for a long time, but she's not really sure what a vision for post Peabody Coal looks like. And at first, she looked into utility scale projects, giant solar farms that have been deployed in other parts of the country.
Wahleah Johns: I love the idea of using reclamation lands for utility scale. But I also learned so much from my own people, it doesn't feel good to use any kind of land for utility scale and flatten it and put a solar farm. There was something around that, that I was challenged with in my own community as well, to take a natural landscape and turn it into a solar farm to me that that hurt.
Julian NoiseCat: So she started thinking smaller, more domestic.
Wahleah Johns: There was a lot of people that came up to me during presentations and they would say, "What about residential solar? There's a lot of families that don't have access to electricity, but if we do home solar," and I kept hearing that from different people for wherever I went, and I think that's when I started to be like, "Yeah, you're right." For me it's such a big impact to bring power to... A family doesn't have access to transmission line and be able to generate power from the sun.
Julian NoiseCat: She teamed up with another Navajo woman, Suzanne Singer, and together they formed a new organization called Native Renewables.
Wahleah Johns: I bring that social justice, environmental justice, indigenous peoples rights, perspective to clean energy. Yes it is dominated majority by white men, and I have built my capacity to understand this technology, I've built my capacity to understand and understand financing. I've built my capacity to see how this actually fits within our communities.
Julian NoiseCat: When did you transition from being environmental justice, Navajo resistance activist to renewable energy nerd.
Wahleah Johns: I think it's when I became a mother, I feel like I had to, I got quiet. It just like put me in a really gentle space to be able to mother young girls. My activism was intense, because I was saying no to coal was a big deal. It's a political deal internally in my own nation, where I was already labeled radical, where I was labeled hurtful things from my own people, and my own political leaders that just didn't see a perspective that I was bringing.
Wahleah Johns: And it made me think about the future, "Okay, what kind of home am I building for my children and my family? And what's the seed, that I'm wanting to plant that Peabody cannot touch, that these political leaders cannot touch, that the federal government cannot touch?" What is it that is going to just create that resilience, that hope about my lineage, my grandmothers that fought hard to resist on this land, and for our teachings and our identity. And that's what I started to really pray about.
Julian NoiseCat: Meanwhile in 2019, the Kayenta mine, a Navajo Generating Station closed. Marking what might be the final chapter in the coal era of the Navajo Nation. Andrew remembers attending a community meeting not long before the end.
Andrew Curley: And it just struck me at that moment, we were just spending so much time and emotional energy. I think this was a Sunday or a Saturday, it was on the weekend. And we were there for hours. And we were just dealing with this existential crisis of coal. And whether or not we should continue with it, what kinds of burdens does it have for the environment? What kind of burden does it have for the community? What kind of burden does it have for the coworkers who lose their jobs? What kind of burden does it have for the tribal government who loser revenues? And so we were stuck with all of these questions.
Andrew Curley: We were just like really pounding our heads against the wall, trying to figure this situation out. And I was thinking, the people who benefited from this the most, which are the communities in Phoenix and Tucson, which is the Salt River Project, they were not in these rooms, they were not in these meetings, they were not pulling their hair out, trying to figure out the future. They were just living their lives like nothing was happening. People were in Phoenix, probably at a pool, having fun, enjoying the cheap energy coming out of their walls and their sockets.
Julian NoiseCat: I think for the vast majority of the Southwest and the places that the Navajo Nation's coal powered, this entire history was basically out of sight, out of mind. Nobody knows about Peabody Coal, nobody knows about John Boyden. And now that era of the Navajo Nation's history is coming to a close, nobody knows about what the Navajo Nation is dealing with, in the wake of these industries.
Katharine Wilkinson: So not only is there of course, the harm of the coal extraction and the coal burning, but then when those industries start to shut down, there's no plan for how to support the community with the transition.
Leah Stokes: And what does that look like now Julian? I mean, what is the path forward?
Julian NoiseCat: Maybe something that rhymes with mean Blue Steel. I don't know. I think that there's an immense resilience of imagination on the Navajo Nation. I think that it took incredible resolve and creativity to imagine doing something like transforming Peabody Coal's land into a solar farm. I can't think of many more images of climate justice than that.
Julian NoiseCat: But at the same time, the immensity and resilience of the human imagination in a place like the Navajo Nation, very quickly comes up against the limits of capitalism, about against the limits of infrastructure and the limits of investors generosity and things like that. And so I think that those, the hard realities of economics and the immense ability of people to have hope for their future. I think those are sort of the boundaries of the Navajo people's future. Andrew is pessimistic about the prospects for the Navajo and a clean energy future.
Andrew Curley: I think it's really hard to accomplish as it is now, because the whole government apparatus is built around the extractive industry experience, right? It's built around large companies coming in with a lot of money and resources, building the infrastructure needed for that kind of business to happen within the reservation. And that's something that you're immediately finding with alternative energies is they're not like these huge companies like Peabody coming in saying, "We're going to build this huge scale solar field that we're going to then sell to Phoenix and Tucson."
Andrew Curley: It's like smaller, medium sized companies, even really, really small startups that Dune people are trying to initiate, that are putting forward that effort. They're working within a capitalist economy, but don't have capital. And so that makes it more difficult and harder to accomplish your transition goals. So as it turns out, the only successful solar installation that's happened at a scale, that was something that they only recently came online within the last few years.
Andrew Curley: But of course, it's nice. It's on the side of the road and you can see it, but the difference of course, is that it doesn't employ nearly as many people, whereas a coal mine could employ 400 to 500 workers.
Julian NoiseCat: On the Navajo Nation, there have never been easy answers. But against the odds, Wahleah has pressed on. She told me about one family she was proud to support.
Wahleah Johns: On their homestead, their first question was, "Will this be able to power more than two hours of TV?" And we said "Yes." And they were excited because they said the generator doesn't last that long to actually watch a full movie that it usually gets through a half of a movie. He's probably like seven or eight years old. For that to be his first question was like, "Can I watch a full length of a movie?"
Julian NoiseCat: That might not sound like much, but on this reservation, it could be the beginning of something green, maybe even new.
Wahleah Johns: And so that's how I see and envision my work and I want it to be an example for my children and their children that, you can do this, you can create, and we can lean on our traditional values, and we can do this together. All of this doesn't have to happen in some closed door meeting, it can happen here on the ground around this fire. And we can make this decision together.
Wahleah Johns: And I think those are the teachings that have led us to our resiliency. That's the beauty. I would love to see is just going back to these teachings of the sun, to these teachings of where we've come from because that's what's there for us and shows us the way.
Julian NoiseCat: A few months back as the first wave of Coronavirus abed, the Navajo Nation Council passed legislation appropriating congressional funds to provide relief from the pandemic. Native Renewables will use some of that money to begin scaling up their work.
Wahleah Johns: For me and Native Renewables, we just saw an opening where they start to talk about power lines, funding for power lines. And that's when I said, "Hey, let's put some money aside for off grid solar."
Julian NoiseCat: I should have asked this earlier, but what's the Navajo word for solar panel?
Wahleah Johns: Yeah, good question. I don't know. I don't know the top of my head.
Julian NoiseCat: We should figure that out.
Katharine Wilkinson: Well Julian, that story ends on a pretty hopeful note, and it's a nice counterpoint to the earlier episode we did on the CARES Act. It's really nice to see that some of the CARES Act money was going towards good causes and not just a fossil fuel bailout. And it also reminds me of another hopeful fact, which is that the Navajo Nation really brought home Arizona for Biden and helped swing that state blue for the first time in a long time.
Julian NoiseCat: Yeah, I mean, the Navajo look compared to the United States government and certainly compared to Peabody Coal and John Boyden, pretty responsible actors in this whole story. At the same time, as Congress was bailing out the fossil fuel industry, the Navajo were in probably some of the most difficult circumstances to engineer and energy transition. We're thinking about that sort of future.
Julian NoiseCat: And at the same time, I think that's not just a Navajo government thing, it's also Navajo voters. If you look at the data coming out of Navajo precincts in the 2020 election, almost every single precinct went over 80% for Joe Biden. And I think there was a lot of hand wringing of course, this election over fossil fuel workers and communities and how they might be swung against democrats who were talking about things like the energy transition.
Julian NoiseCat: And it's hard to make that same argument when we're looking at a place like the Navajo Nation, where coal was a way of life, right? These are coal workers who are showing up and voting for the Democratic Party ticket, and really thinking about what life after fossil fuels looks like in a place where fossil fuels built almost everything.
Leah Stokes: And that's actually what I wanted to ask you about Julian. What you think some of the lessons are, from this story that apply more broadly to the work of climate justice and to a transition towards a post fossil fuel economy?
Julian NoiseCat: So I think we often think about these things in silos, right? Wahleah comes from a family and a community of Black Mesa that was fighting the fossil fuel industry. And stopping the bad essentially, is a major sort of through line in a lot of environmental justice work. And that's often separated from unions and workers conceptually, not in real life. Conceptually separated from the unions and the workers who are in those industries. And very often there is in fact, like a racial and a class divide between, the communities impacted and polluted and the people working in the industries.
Julian NoiseCat: But on the Navajo Nation, it's a much more complicated circumstance where people who are on both sides of this issue of the coal mining are relatives. They might be married to each other or cousins or brothers and sisters, and that sort of a thing. So it's much more I think visceral, both the benefits that come with some of these polluting industries, and also the real harms that come with these industries.
Leah Stokes: Yeah. And I think so often, we think about those two things separately, right? We think about different forces moving, putting on the brake versus putting on the accelerator, so to speak. And it's really fascinating to hear the connective tissue between that work in the story.
Julian NoiseCat: And I think we also sometimes ascribe stopping the bad and building the good to faceless actors, things like a carbon price, that's both going to account for the social cost of carbon, which is a lived experience, not like a conceptual thing to someone like Wahleah, and then the encouragement of incentives to invest in clean energy.
Julian NoiseCat: I think what is really appealing to me about this story, is that all of those concepts and policy ideas and things like that, there're also personal developments and personal struggles that that someone like Wahleah goes through. After Peabody Coal, she herself has to think about, "Am I going to advocate for giant solar farms or am I going to go for something smaller and more residential."
Julian NoiseCat: And so what I thought was exciting about this was that here is a community that has been dealt one of the worst hands in this country, and yet here they are parsing through some of the most challenging questions that all of humanity now faces, that all of societies now face. In mostly very responsible and thoughtful ways, people who worked in the coal industry are trying to grapple with what its end is going to look like for them.
Julian NoiseCat: And in the biggest sense, those human stories are what the energy transition is actually going to look like. It might look like some laws and things on paper, but on the ground in places like Navajo Nation I think, it's going to play out with a lot of trauma, a lot of tragedy but also I think a little bit of hope.
Leah Stokes: A Matter of Degrees is co-hosted by me, Leah Stokes.
Katharine Wilkinson: And me, Katherine Wilkinson.
Leah Stokes: We are a production of Post Script Audio.
Katharine Wilkinson: Jamie Kaiser, Sidney Barton and Stephen Lacey produced the show.
Leah Stokes: Sean Marquand edited, mixed and composed our theme song.
Katharine Wilkinson: Additional music came from Blue Dot Sessions.
Leah Stokes: The show art was designed by Karl Spurzem.
Katharine Wilkinson: Our website was designed by Caroline Hadilaksono.
Leah Stokes: A special thanks to the funders and supporters who made this show possible. The Hewlett Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the 11th Hour Project, UC Santa Barbara and others.
Katharine Wilkinson: You can subscribe on Spotify, Apple, Google podcasts or any other place you get your shows or go to our website degreespod.com.
Leah Stokes: And you can follow both of us, the pod and our production team on Twitter. You'll find our accounts on the website and in the show notes. And if you're liking the show, tell your friends about it.
Katharine Wilkinson: And stay with us as we tell more stories for the climate curious.