How to Change Everything

by Naomi Klein

  The Threat of Coal:

  The rolling hills of this region are dotted with cattle, horses, and striking sandstone rock outcrops—and beneath many of those hills sits a whole lot of coal. The mining industry wanted to get at the coal under and near the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. It intended to build a railroad to take the coal out of the area, to be sent to China and other parts of the world. This mine and railroad, though, could threaten the safety of a key water source, the Tongue River. In addition, the railroad would likely affect the Native burial grounds of the Cheyenne.

  The Northern Cheyenne had been fighting off the mining companies since the early 1970s. But in 2010, the region was in a fossil-fuel frenzy. At that time, nearly half of the power used in the country came from burning coal, and the industry was eager to export the fuel to other countries. Worldwide, the demand for coal was expected to increase by more than 50 percent in just twenty years.

  It wasn’t clear how long the anti-coal voices in the Northern Cheyenne community would be able to hold these companies off. The anti-coal forces had just lost an important vote at the State Land Board about this new mine. It was to be built at Otter Creek, just outside the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, and it was the biggest new coal mine being planned in the United States.

  After losing the vote on the mine, activists had turned their attention to opposing the Tongue River Railroad. Without the new railroad, there would be no hope of getting the coal out—which meant there would be no point in building the new mine. The Cheyenne, though, had not united against the railroad. It seemed likely that both the railroad and the mine might go ahead.

  “There is so much going on, people don’t know what to fight,” Alexis Bonogofsky told me. Her job at the time was with the National Wildlife Federation, supporting Indigenous tribes in their use of their legal rights to protect the land, air, and water. She worked closely with the Northern Cheyenne, who had a proud history of using the law to protect the land.

  Decades earlier the Northern Cheyenne had argued that their right to enjoy a traditional way of life—guaranteed by their treaty with the United States—included the right to breathe clean air. The federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) agreed. In 1977 it gave the Northern Cheyenne Reservation the highest possible class designation for air quality. This let the tribe go to court against polluting projects that threatened the quality of their air. The tribe argued that pollution from as far away as Wyoming violated its treaty rights, because the pollution could travel to the reservation and possibly damage its air and water quality.

  But the Otter Creek mine and the Tongue River Railroad were proving harder to fight. Pressure came from within the tribe as well as from the mining industry. The Northern Cheyenne had recently elected a former coal miner as tribal president. He was determined to open up reservation lands to the companies that wanted to extract—or remove—their resources.

  Some other Northern Cheyenne were also tempted by the mine project. It represented money that the community badly needed. Unemployment was high. Poverty and substance abuse were ravaging the reservation. People’s desperation made them willing to listen when the mining companies came in and promised jobs and money for new social programs.

  “People say… if we go ahead and do this, we can have good schools, a good waste system,” said Charlene Alden, the tough and tireless director of the tribe’s environmental protection offices. It was getting harder to find voices in the community willing to speak out against coal mining. She worried that sacrificing the health of the tribe’s land for coal dollars would push the Cheyenne further away from their culture and traditions. In the end, this could mean more depression and substance abuse, not less.

  “In Cheyenne, the word for water is the same as the word for life,” Alden explained. “We know that if we start messing around too much with coal, it destroys life.”

  It already was. Many houses on the reservation had been built from government kits in the 1940s and 1950s. They were terribly drafty. In the cold winter months, people blasted the heat in their homes, but it flew out through cracks in the walls, windows, and doors. On average, people paid $400 a month for heat, which came from one of two fossil fuels, either coal or propane—a type of gas. Some people, though, paid more than $1,000 each month. To make matters worse, the fossil-fuel energy sources added to the climate crisis that was already hitting the region with long droughts and massive wildfires.

  So the only way to break the deadlock, Alden believed, was to show the next generation of Cheyenne leaders a different path out of poverty and hopelessness, one that would not cost them the land of their ancestors. She saw many possibilities. One of them involved heat and straw.

  A nonprofit organization had come to the reservation a few years earlier to build a handful of model homes. The homes were made with straw bales, which is an ancient method that keeps buildings warm in winter and cool in summer. Alden said that the families in those homes had heating bills of “$19 a month instead of $400.”

  But why did the tribe need outsiders to build homes based on Indigenous knowledge? Why not train tribal members to design and build them, and get funding to do it across the reservation? There would be a green-building boom, and the trained builders could then use their skills in other places, so that more homes could be built without ravaging the land.

  But such a program would take money, which the Northern Cheyenne did not have. People had hoped that President Barack Obama would increase funding for green—or environment-friendly—jobs in disadvantaged communities. This would have helped fight both climate change and poverty, but most of those plans were set aside after the United States had an economic crisis that began in 2008. Still, Alexis Bonogofsky and Charlene Alden wanted to show the Northern Cheyenne that they had possibilities other than coal. They set to work.

  A year after my first visit to the reservation, Bonogofsky called to tell me that she and Alden had scraped together some money from the EPA and the National Wildlife Federation. They were launching an exciting new project: solar-powered heaters. Did I want to come back to Montana to see it and tell people about it?

  Absolutely.

  The Promise of Sunlight:

  My return trip to the reservation could not have been more different from the first, in both weather and spirit. It was spring. Tiny yellow wildflowers and bright green grass covered the gentle hills. Fifteen people had gathered on the lawn in front of a house. They were there to learn how a simple box made mostly of dark glass could capture enough heat to warm the whole house.

  Their teacher was Henry Red Cloud of the Lakota people. He had built his first wind turbine, a machine that captures wind power to make electricity, out of parts from a rusting truck. Later he won awards for bringing wind and solar power to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

  Now he had come to teach these Northern Cheyenne youth how to install solar heaters on their reservation homes. The heaters were worth $2,000 each but were being installed for free, thanks to the funds Bonogofsky and Alden had gathered. The devices would cut heating costs in reservation homes by as much as half.

  Red Cloud wove his technical lessons about the solar heaters together with thoughts about how “solar power was always part of Natives’ lives…. It ties in with our culture, our ceremony, our language, our songs.” He showed the trainees how to use a tool called a Solar Pathfinder to find where the sun would hit each side of the house every day of the year, because the solar boxes need at least six hours of sunlight a day to work well. For a few houses that were nestled too tightly against trees or mountains for the boxes to be used, Red Cloud reasoned that solar roof panels might be used on them instead, or another renewable power source.

  One of the last houses to get a solar heater was on a busy street in downtown Lame Deer, the small town at the center of the reservation. As Red Cloud’s students measured, drilled, and hammered, they started to draw a crowd. Kids gathered to watch the action. Old women asked what was going on. “Half t
he cost of electricity?” they said. “How do I get one?”

  Henry Red Cloud (center) and his solar warriors install solar panels, a step toward green, renewable energy—and environmental justice.

  Red Cloud smiled. This is how he builds a solar revolution on Indigenous lands—not by telling people what they should do but by showing them what they can do. Several of those first students took more training with Red Cloud. Others joined them. He was teaching them, he told them, not just to be technicians but to be “solar warriors,” fighting for a way of living grounded in gratitude and respect for the Earth.

  In the months and years that followed, the fight against the Otter Creek mine and the Tongue River coal train sprang back to life. And suddenly there was no shortage of Cheyenne to hold protests. They demanded meetings with government officials and made passionate speeches at hearings. Red Cloud’s solar warriors were front and center, wearing red “Beyond Coal” T-shirts.

  Vanessa Braided Hair was one of Red Cloud’s star students and also a volunteer firefighter. In the summer of 2012 she’d battled a fire that had burned more than ninety square miles (230 square kilometers) of land. It had destroyed nineteen homes on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation alone.

  So Braided Hair did not need anyone to tell her that we are in a climate crisis. She had seen it. She welcomed the chance to be part of the solution to climate change—but it went deeper than that. As Red Cloud had said, solar power fit with the worldview in which she had been raised. “You don’t take and take and take…. You take what you need and then you put back into the land,” she said.

  Another of Red Cloud’s students, Lucas King, spoke to coal company representatives at a hearing about Otter Creek. “This is Cheyenne country. It has been for a long time, longer than any dollar has ever lasted…. Please go back and tell whoever you have to that we don’t want [coal development]. It’s not for us. Thank you.”

  The solar warriors and other Cheyenne kept resisting the railroad and mine plans. So did people outside the reservation. Students from the University of Montana started a movement they called the Blue Skies Campaign to help organize protests in neighborhoods along the rail lines that already existed. The students knew that in many such towns, coal trains are run through poor neighborhoods, choking them with coal dust and the fumes of diesel fuel. Blue Skies held protests, organized marches, and went to city council meetings to urge action against existing and new rail lines and fossil-fuel developments.

  In August 2012, people sat on the steps of the state capitol for five days to protest the state’s leasing of land to oil companies. Two years later, fifteen hundred people from a dozen Montana communities held a statewide day of action for clean energy. In 2015, when the Northern Cheyenne Tribal Council held a vote about the Tongue River Railroad, not a single vote supported the railroad.

  With grassroots activism blocking the railroad, there would be no new mine at Otter Creek. Yet larger forces worked against the mine too. Coal’s time as an energy superstar was drawing to an end. The market for coal began to lose strength as more and more people woke up to its problems, which included dangerous work in mines as well as pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Demands for clean, green, renewable energy grew louder. Coal mines in the United States began closing, and plans for new ones fell through. In early 2016, the company behind the Otter Creek mine and the Tongue River Railroad went bankrupt.

  Green, renewable energy is far better for all of us than fossil fuels. But building renewable energy projects is also an opportunity to right the injustices that many Native People still suffer. That means doing these projects with the active participation and consent of the Native Peoples who live nearby, and for their benefit. Unlike the residents of New Orleans, who were shut out of jobs in the recovery work after Katrina, Native People must take part in the projects that are built on their lands, as with Red Cloud’s solar boxes, so that skills, jobs, and money flow to their communities.

  The Cheyenne show us that shifting from mining coal to building wind and solar farms can and should be more than just flipping a switch from dirty underground power to clean aboveground power. It can also set right old injustices. The best way for a green-energy revolution to succeed is to involve and lift up communities, not just corporations. That’s how you build an army of solar warriors.

  SACRIFICE ZONES

  The burning of fossil fuels is the biggest driver of climate change. But even if fossil fuels didn’t heat the planet, it would still be worth switching to clean, renewable power like the solar heaters on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. The communities that live close to where fossil fuels are extracted, processed, transported, and burned know that these fuels are unhealthy for people as well as for the planet.

  Depending on fossil fuels to power our lives means sacrificing people and places. To extract these fuels, people’s healthy lungs and bodies must be sacrificed to the bad air and the dangerous work of coal mining. People’s lands and water are also sacrificed to damage from mining, drilling, and oil spills.

  Just fifty years ago, scientists giving advice to the United States government spoke of the possibility of “national sacrifice areas.” Some began to say that it was necessary to let certain people and regions suffer harm in order to benefit the country as a whole. One such zone is Appalachia, a region of the eastern United States, from northern Georgia and Alabama to southern New York.

  Appalachia has long been known for two things: beautiful mountain scenery, and coal. Now, in too many parts of the region, the first thing has largely been sacrificed for the second. Mining companies have blasted away entire mountaintops, occasionally displacing whole towns. They have dumped the waste into valleys and streams, simply because that type of mining is cheaper than digging underground.

  For a government or society to be willing to sacrifice whole regions and communities in this way, it must see those people as set apart somehow, and less valuable than other citizens. Stereotypes are developed that cast hardworking people in these regions as somehow less than others. Then those stereotypes become the excuse for not protecting those communities from harm. That’s what happened to the Black residents of New Orleans, before and after Hurricane Katrina. And it happened in Appalachia, too. People from there used to be insultingly called “hillbillies.” Stereotypes portrayed them as ignorant, drunk, and lawless. And that stereotype served a profitable purpose: once someone has defined you as a “hillbilly,” who cares about protecting your hills?

  It happens in cities, too. North America’s power plants and oil refineries, which create noise and pollution, are overwhelmingly located next to Black and Latinx communities. Companies put them there because they believed that poor people would not have the political or economic power to demand better treatment—unlike wealthier areas, which often get the attention of politicians because the people who live in them can afford to make political donations and hire lobbyists to promote their interests in state capitals and in Washington, DC. That inequality in power is why people of color have been forced to carry the poisonous burden of our economy’s reliance on fossil fuels. This is known as environmental racism.

  For a very long time, the sacrifice zones of the world had certain things in common. They were places where poor people lived. Out-of-the-way places. Places where people had little or no political power, usually because of their race, their language, or their social class. And the people who lived in these places knew they had been written off.

  But the sacrifice zones are now getting bigger. Coal may be on the way out, but our hunger for energy has led the mining industry to invent new ways of getting oil and gas out of the Earth. One way is hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking. Liquid forced into the ground under high pressure fractures—or breaks—the rock. Then the natural gas or oil trapped within the rock can be pumped out. Although fracking carries the dangers of leaks, fires, water contamination, and making the ground unstable, companies consider the sacrifice worth it if they can sell the fuel a
t a profit.

  Fracking and other new techniques have begun to pull fossil fuels from sites where it was once too difficult and costly for the industry to reach the fuels. Oil and gas under the deep ocean, for instance, or mixed into beds of shale or sand became much more feasible to extract. These new technologies created a huge boom in fossil fuels, which only kept the problem of greenhouse gases alive in a new way.

  And all that fuel has to move. In the United States alone, the number of railcars carrying oil rose from 9,500 to almost half a million between 2008 and 2014. More oil spilled from US trains in 2013 than in the forty years before combined. After a fall in oil prices and a shift to more oil being moved through pipelines, less oil is traveling by train now in the United States, but millions of people still live in the path of poorly maintained “oil bomb” train lines. In July 2013, a train with seventy-two cars full of oil exploded. As a result, half of the downtown of Lac-Mégantic, a small town in Quebec, Canada, was flattened. Forty-seven people died.

  An investigation by the Wall Street Journal newspaper in 2013 found that more than fifteen million Americans lived within one mile of a well that had been recently drilled or fracked—a well that could potentially be the source of an oil or gas leak or a fire. “Energy companies have fracked wells on church property, school grounds and in gated developments,” wrote journalist Suzanne Goldenberg in another newspaper, the Guardian.

  In 2019, the administration of President Donald Trump said it would now allow fracking on the borders of some of America’s national parks—something oil companies had dreamed of for a long time. In Great Britain, the areas being considered for fracking add up to about half the entire island.

  No place, it seems, is safe from being sacrificed if fossil fuels can be extracted from it. Our sacrifice zones are getting wider and wider. And as you know, the pollution, waste, and destruction caused by extracting coal, oil, and gas from the Earth are only part of the problem. The other part is the greenhouse gases that enter Earth’s atmosphere when those fuels are eventually burned. They are driving climate change, and climate change threatens everyone and every part of the world.