Portside

If Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump wins the White House in November, his next administration comes armed with plans for a massive deregulation of federally-owned public land—your land, our land, the basis of our shared national identity. This promises a lucrative payday for businesses like oil companies, mining operations and other extractive industries. Under Project 2025, a 920-page playbook spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, such companies would have their projects fast-tracked and could ignore potential environmental destruction. They would also enjoy significant tax breaks.

The Cortez Hills Pit at Mount Tenabo, operated by Barrick Gold Corp., the world’s largest multinational mining corporation. Mount Tenabo and its environs are part of Newe Sogobia, the sacred ancestral land of the Western Shoshone, which has never been legally ceded to the federal government. The Bush administration’s relaxation of mining and environmental regulations opened the region to mining. (Barrick Gold Corporation)

Meanwhile, “green” enterprises would lose Biden-Harris administration incentives and tax breaks. Trump-era orders, such as opening the National Petroleum Reserve of Alaska to leasing and development, would be reinstated to restore “American energy dominance.”

Written by Trump’s current campaign aides and members of his former administration, with contributions from more than 100 conservative organizations, Project 2025 tells its supporters to “go to work on Day One” of the next Trump administration “to deconstruct the Administrative state.”

It promises a national abortion ban, union-busting measures and a halt to climate action. It would terminate the Department of Education and the Head Start program. It would cut the Affordable Care Act, veteran’s benefits, Medicare, health care for the disabled, prescription-drug price controls and much more—page after page, chapter after chapter.

Project 2025 doesn’t just cut. It also adds. It advocates monitoring menstrual cycles and pregnancies nationwide so more women bear more children. It promotes hiring more children to work in what it calls “dangerous occupations.” It is busy assembling lists of thousands of conservative loyalists to be appointed to government positions in a Trump administration.

As voters have begun learning about Project 2025, it has morphed from what Trump called “an action plan” just a few years ago into a cudgel for Democrats. Trump’s campaign now threatens anyone who says Project 2025 has anything to do with him: “It will not end well for you.”

This land is (not) your land

Among the many stunningly beautiful public places that Project 2025 puts at risk are Minnesota’s remote and lovely Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and vast swaths of the ecologically and culturally rich Arctic. New Mexico’s ancient Chaco Canyon would lose its 10-mile protective zone, endangering the 4,700 known archaeological sites located just outside the national park.

The acreage in peril includes land controlled by the Department of the Interior (DOI) and its subagencies such as the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), National Park Service and Fish and Wildlife Service. The total encompasses “500 million acres of federal lands, including national parks and national wildlife refuges; 700 million acres of sub-surface minerals; [and] 1.7 billion acres of the Outer Continental Shelf,” according to William Perry Pendley, who authored Project 2025’s chapter on the DOI.

Pendley, a former oil industry attorney, briefly oversaw the BLM and its nearly quarter-billion acres of public land during the Trump administration, when he finalized plans to permit drilling, mining and grazing on the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah. In 2020, he was removed as the BLM’s acting director after a federal judge determined he had served unlawfully for 424 days without Senate confirmation as required under the Constitution.

Backcountry Hunters and Anglers members enjoy hunting, fishing and other outdoor activities. They promote conservation and education about wild public lands and waters. The group, which includes over 40 state and regional chapters, said Project 2025 would be “detrimental to the future of these cherished public resources and those who rely on them for the pursuit of their outdoor traditions.”

Scientists agree. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) includes scientists, policy experts and others who advocate using “rigorous, independent science” to ensure “a healthy, safe, and just future.” Rachel Cleetus, the group’s policy director, calls Project 2025 “stomach-churning to contemplate. Let’s hope it never gets beyond a theoretical exercise in how to destroy our country and leave our children’s futures dark and uncertain.” 

Lauren Pagel, policy director of the prominent environmental group Earthworks, was unsparing in her criticism. “Every person impacted by heat waves, wildfires and extreme storms deserves leaders who accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels, not offer big giveaways to corporate polluters.” She says Earthworks is “extremely concerned with anything that may impact tackling the climate crisis.”

Pagel points to Earthworks studies that explain how to recycle and responsibly mine lithium, rare earth minerals and other substances needed for a climate-friendly economy. These practices include ways to avoid contaminating water and soil and to protect worker health while extracting the minerals.  

Indigenous sacrifice zones

Tribes have been, and would continue to be, among those bearing the heaviest burden of environmental destruction. The examples are many and extreme. According to Indian Country Today, in 2014 one-quarter of the nation’s 1,322 Superfund sites were on Indian reservations. About 1% of the U.S. population lives with 25% of the country’s worst pollution.

In 1979, the nation’s largest and almost entirely unknown nuclear accident occurred in Church Rock, New Mexico, on the Navajo reservation, when a uranium mine collapsed, pouring 1,000 tons of radioactive waste and 94 million gallons of radioactive slurry over the reservation and contaminating food and water sources. To this day, Navajo babies are born with excess uranium in their systems. The environmental and human health harms far exceed that of the world famous Three Mile Island accident, which also occurred that year, with tiny radioactive releases in Middletown, Pennsylvania.

The Fort Belknap Indian Community, in Montana, is fighting resumption of gold and silver mining in the Little Rockies Mountains on its southern border. For more than a century, rivers originating there have poured down onto the reservation carrying cyanide, arsenic, mercury, acids and other substances used to obtain and process the ore.

In Nevada, environmental and Native rights groups oppose a new lithium mine that would remove massive amounts of precious groundwater, endanger protected habitat and destroy Native graves resulting from an 1865 massacre.

Today, in Utah, the Ute Mountain Ute tribal nation lives with a uranium processing mill next door. The White Mesa Mill stores 700 million pounds of radioactive waste in open-air pits. School buses carrying Ute Mountain Ute children may drive through dangerous sludge spattered on the roads by waste-laden trucks headed for the mill.

Outsiders “look at tribal land as someplace they can do whatever they want,” says Joseph Holley, chairman of the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone Indians, headquartered in Elko, Nevada. The heart of his ancestral homeland has suffered dramatic damage. Nevada’s 70 million acres are 80% federally owned public land, the highest proportion of any state. Much of that is dedicated to the state’s nearly 100 “major” mines, oil fields and geothermal areas, according to Nevada’s Commission on Mineral Resources. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management counts 180,000 active mining claims in Nevada, so the number of major sites could increase under Project 2025.

Nevada also has 200,000 abandoned mines, including 50,000 the state’s Abandoned Mines Program calls dangerous. They have deep open shafts that unsuspecting hikers and dirt-bikers may fall into, explosives left behind that hinder rescue and other life-threatening hazards.

Mining has leveled entire mountains in Nevada, according to Holley. Mount Tenabo, the highest peak of the Cortez mountain range, figures prominently in Shoshone creation stories. Mining pits have demolished half of it, Holley says. Pits throughout the state—active and abandoned—have destroyed other sacred sites, he says. Tribal members can’t carry out certain ceremonies. Herbs they relied on are gone.

More deregulation of federal land would mean “total desecration,” Holley says.

Everyone should worry about the immense de-watering miners do to clear the mine shafts, according to Holley. “Water is essential,” he says. “Mines are getting rid of water, while many of the western states, even huge cities, are running low on it. It’s crazy.”

Congressional Republicans have submitted dozens of bills intended to achieve the land-oriented goals of Project 2025, whether or not they win the White House in November, according to Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.), Ranking Member of the House Natural Resources Committee. Grijalva says the bills’ purpose is clear: “fast-tracking polluter profits, no matter the human or environmental cost.”

Ecologically sound alternatives

It doesn’t have to be that way, Holley says. He points to Ormat Technologies, a global geothermal-energy company. “Before they go out on the land [in Nevada], they come to [our] tribe,” he says. “They explain where they will go and what they will do to harness this renewable energy. They ask if the tribe has concerns. They have offered to set up hot-water baths for tribal members to use for traditional prayers, Holley says.

While some tribal nations work with sympathetic businesses, others have their own ecologically minded enterprises. The Rosebud Sioux Tribe, in Mission, South Dakota, is using wind and solar power and other means to build a clean-energy economy. The tribe educates its young people about the technologies and the cultural values they support. The Southern Ute Indian Tribe, in Ignacio, Colorado, has a methane-capture operation that sequesters the powerful greenhouse gas emanating from area coal seams and converts it to electricity. In doing so, the tribe helps mitigate climate change while meeting its own energy needs.

Tribal Business News reports that Indian country is poised for a “clean-energy surge.” Driving this are federal investments. These include $2 billion from the Environmental Protection Agency for expanding Native access to renewable technologies, including solar, wind, geothermal and biofuel. The Department of Energy has just given $88 million to bring renewable energy to the Northern California Yurok, Hoopa and Karuk tribes.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Energy Agency offers symposia for tribes, including a recent one on ways to “reduce carbon footprints, create economic opportunities and foster environmental stewardship.” In May, the Southern Ute Indian Tribe and Colorado School of Mines offered an energy-related program with tribal sovereignty as the major focus. The Biden-Harris administration has also announced new national monuments and protections for tens of millions of acres of public land, including 28 million acres recently set aside in Alaska. The administration’s widely reported goal is “30 by 30,” or conserving 30% of the nation’s lands, waters and oceans by 2030. 

Alaska Native Tara Sweeney is credited as a contributor to the Project 2025 chapter that includes Native land issues. Sweeney ran the Bureau of Indian Affairs during the Trump administration and is now Vice President of External Affairs for the oil company ConocoPhillips Alaska. The chapter in question claims deregulation is essential for tribes; otherwise they must “choose between food and fuel.”

Barn Raiser asked Sweeney to comment on today’s tribal energy businesses and collaborations, the sizeable federal investments, tribes’ interest in producing energy that aligns with their cultural values and their apparent disinterest in deregulation. At press time, Sweeney and the ConocoPhillips newsroom had not responded to requests for comment.

The entire story

Tribal energy businesses are among the many Indigenous enterprises making sustainable use of the environment. The Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin has lived in that area for thousands of years. Its reservation features a beautiful, healthy forest that supports its successful timber-products company, Menominee Tribal Enterprises. The 150-year-old conservation group American Forests calls it “one of the most historically significant working forests in the world.”

Big companies and politicians derive their power from stoking division, says Anahkwet, who also goes by the name Guy Reiter. He is the head of Menikanaehkem, a community group on the Menominee reservation. “They look at places where poverty is a major thing and exploit that. They promise jobs, they promise this, they promise that. In reality, they don’t do any of it. They don’t care about the community. It’s about profits over people.”

Reiter says he and other Menominees don’t see a conflict between a successful business and care for the environment, and identify fully with the living world around them. “I am it, and it is me,” Reiter says.

“So what do we do?” he asks. “We love one another, take care of each other.” If you believe in a higher power, you understand that, Reiter says. “You and I are in this together … We all share in this beautiful earth.”

For Indigenous people, carrying this belief into the future means involving youth in their traditions—not in theory but hands-on. Holley and his grandson Julius Jr. sit in a remote Nevada desert camp flintknapping, or shaping, arrowheads. The two are surrounded by relatives and their people’s ancient landscape. Everything around them informs their work as they chip the stone—the jests, the stories, the aroma of cooking meat, the plants, the animals, the nearby sweat lodge, the easygoing lesson and the tactile interaction with the stone.

The deep past is as much a part of the experience as the present. In the desert, Western Shoshone children “might see an old dwelling off to one side, a stream where ceremonies took place and flakes chipped off by ancestors when they worked stone,” Holley says. “The children can then look at our modern camp and see that it reflects the old one, with places to sleep, cook, gather, work and pray. They understand that they are part of the entire story.”
 

[Stephanie Woodard is an award-winning journalist who writes on human rights and culture with a focus on Native American issues. She is the author of American Apartheid: The Native American Struggle for Self-Determination and Inclusion.] 

This article is part of U.S. Democracy Day, a nationwide collaborative on Sept. 15, the International Day of Democracy, in which news organizations cover how democracy works and the threats it faces. To learn more, visit usdemocracyday.org.

“This story was originally published by Barn Raiser, your independent source for rural and small town news.”