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What’s the difference between Indigenous nations co-managing or co-stewarding their land? A lot.

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For a decade, wind farm companies had been eyeing Molok Luyuk — a mountain ridge of religious importance to tribes in northern California, whose people have worked for years to protect it. It’s also widely biodiverse with elk, mountain lions, and black bears, as well as 40 rare plants such as the pink adobe lily. 

Mia Durham is the secretary for the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, a tribe that has been in a relationship with Molok Luyuk for thousands of years. In response to petitions filed by wind energy companies that wanted to develop the area, the tribe and its allies asked President Biden to protect it in 2019. 

“That’s what heightened it for us and put us on track of moving forward as quickly as possible,” Durham said. “We wanted to protect sacred sites that are there. They were …

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With energy demand surging, utilities fall back on their old standby: Fossil fuels

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This coverage is made possible through a partnership with WABE and Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future.

Georgia is enjoying an economic boom. Lured by tax breaks, high-tech data centers and manufacturers are flooding the state. It’s a trend state leaders are celebrating at every opportunity.

“We have seen over 171,000 new jobs come to our communities, we brought in over $ 74.5 billion of investment to the state,” Governor Brian Kemp told a gathering of lawmakers, business leaders, and other Georgia bigwigs earlier this year.  

But that growth has created a problem: all the new businesses need lots of electricity. 

The state’s largest electric utility, Georgia Power, now says it needs significantly more energy, significantly sooner than planned to meet the spike in demand. So the company is …

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Fighting drought, potato farmers in northern Minnesota overdrew their water permits by tens of millions of gallons

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This story was originally published by the Star Tribune.

During the 2021 drought, nearly 800 Minnesota farmers with high-capacity wells pumped 6.5 billion more gallons of water than their permits allowed, state records show.

Farms on land owned or operated by R.D. Offutt Co., a potato-growing giant that has become one of the biggest water users in the state, were responsible for 23 percent of the excessive pumping.

“That’s quite a bit of overuse,” said Randall Doneen, a section manager for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. “We’re trying to get people back into compliance.”

The overpumping in 2021 put more stress on already depleted aquifers, lakes, and streams and raised the risk that neighboring wells would run dry.

A Star Tribune review of water permit data reported each year to the DNR found more than three of four water …

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California offers $100 million for tribes to buy back their land. It won’t go far.

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When he was 10 years old, Terry Supahan’s mom bought him a new bike. Supahan, a member of the Karuk Tribe in Northern California, had only ridden second hand bikes before. A hundred years earlier, the state of California had stolen millions of acres of land from his tribe and more than a hundred others. In 1968, the state sent checks to individual Indigenous people to pay them back. Supahan’s mom used the money she received — about $ 100 he recalls — to buy the bike, a moment that Supahan remembers fondly, but laughs at now. How could a bicycle compare to millions of acres of stolen land?

The check was part of a $ 29 million land settlement for roughly 65 million acres of land — two-thirds of the entire state — stolen from Indigenous people. That works …

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