Tuesday, November 03, 2009

White Man Speak with Forked Tongue   [William Tucker]

At the committee hearings on the Kerry-Boxer Bill last week, Democrats dutifully trotted out Fawn Sharp, president of the Quinault Indian Nation of Alaska, who assured us that climate change would affect Native Americans more than most others.

“Tribes in Alaska are seeing their villages literally disappear from under them,” President Sharp told the committee. “The melting permafrost threatens to undermine their buildings and all they have ever built and owned. We think it is imperative that Congress take action to prevent this looming catastrophe.”

If things are that serious, apparently the news hasn’t reached the Wampanoag Nation of Massachusetts, which recently asked the Department of the Interior to block the 170-megawatt Cape Wind project off Nantucket, claiming the Atlantic Ocean is their “traditional cultural property.” (This is the project Teddy Kennedy spent his last years trying to prevent.) The New York Times could barely restrain its anger as it editorialized against the tribal claim on Monday:

Tribal officials say their culture requires them to greet the sunrise each day and that this ritual requires unobstructed views. Their claim should be rejected by the responsible federal and state officials. Another round of bureaucratic reviews would drag out an approval process that has gone on much too long and give opponents time to find some other way to derail the effort.

The tribes’ claim seems unsupportable. “Traditional cultural properties” tend to be defined areas — a ceremonial burial ground, for instance — not a huge, unenclosed portion of the ocean. Awarding Nantucket Bay such status could cast a legal shadow over a host of other activities, including shipping and commercial fishing.

There is also evidence that the tribes have been working hand-in-glove with the project’s main opposition group, the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound. The alliance includes many local people but has been largely underwritten by wealthy homeowners from Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod who hate the idea of having 440-foot windmills on the horizon.

Then there’s the case of the Goshute Native American Tribe in Utah, which for a decade has been offering to store the nation’s nuclear waste on its reservation. Environmental opponents have practically sworn to restart the Indian Wars if that one goes through. 

Apparently what Native American think about environmental issues only counts when they’re on your side.

— William Tucker is author of Terrestrial Energy: How Nuclear Power Will Lead the Green Revolution and End America’s Energy Odyssey.

 

11/03 06:30 PMShare