RIO DE JANEIRO — Pope Francis took on the defense of the Amazon and the environment near the end of his weeklong trip to Brazil, as he donned a colorful Indian headdress Saturday and urged that the rainforest be treated as a garden.
The pontiff met with a few thousand of Brazil’s political, business and cultural elite in Rio de Janeiro’s Municipal Theater, where he also shook hands with Indians who said they were from a tribe that has been battling ranchers and farmers trying to invade their land in northeastern Bahia state.
In a separate speech to bishops, the pope called for “respect and protection of the entire creation which God has entrusted to man, not so that it be indiscriminately exploited but rather made into a garden.”
He also urged attention to a 2007 document by Latin American and Caribbean bishops that he was in charge of drafting, which underscored dangers facing the Amazon environment and the native people living there. The document also called for new evangelization efforts to halt a steep decline in Catholics leaving for other faiths or secularism.
“The traditional communities have been practically excluded from decisions on the wealth of biodiversity and nature. Nature has been, and continues to be, assaulted,” the document reads.
Several of the indigenous people in the audience hailed from the Amazon and said they hoped the pope would help them protect land designated by the government as indigenous reserves but that farmers and ranchers illegally invade for timber and to graze cattle. In fact, grazing has been the top recent cause of deforestation in Brazil.
“We got credentials for his speech and attended so we could tell the pope what’s happening to our people,” said Levi Xerente, a 22-year-old member of the Xerente tribe in Tocantins state in the Amazon, after he attended the pope’s speech. “We hope that he will help intervene with the government and stop all the big public works projects that are happening in the region.”
Xerente, speaking in broken Portuguese, said the biggest threats to Indians in the region were big agribusiness invading land and the government’s own massive infrastructure projects, including the damming of rivers for hydroelectric power generation and roads being carved out of the forest, often to reach giant mines.
Francis thanked Brazilian bishops for maintaining a church presence in the rugged and vast Amazon, which is about the size of the United States west of the Mississippi River. But he pushed church leaders to refocus energies on the region.
“The church’s work needs to be further encouraged and launched afresh” in the Amazon, the pope said in prepared remarks, urging an “Amazonian face” for the church.
He cited the church’s long history of working in the region.
“The church’s presence in the Amazon basin is not that of someone with bags packed and ready to leave after having exploited everything possible,” he said. “The church has been present in the Amazon basin from the beginning … and is still present and critical to the area’s future.”
Catholic priests and nuns have taken up the causes of Indians and of poor subsistence farmers in the Amazon, often putting themselves in danger. Violent conflicts over land rights are common in the region, where wealthy farmers and ranchers are known to hire gunmen to intimidate people into leaving land the government has often set aside as reserves for their use.
In 2005, U.S. nun and Amazon land-rights defender Dorothy Stang was murdered by one such gunman in the state of Para. Two ranchers were later convicted of ordering her murder so they could control a parcel of land the government had ceded to a subsistence farming group Stang worked with.
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Associated Press writer Jenny Barchfield contributed to this report.
Good day, class. Today we’re going to learn about GMOs. Those three little letters have been in the news a lot lately, and most people don’t really know what it means. For example, today in our show prep meeting, I told the guys I was doing a story on GMOs and Ron said:
“What’s the ‘O’ stand for? Genetically Modified…O?”
Organism. Genetically Modified Oganism. It’s also called GE, Genetically Engineered.
This November, Washingtonians will vote on I-522 to decide if foods and seeds containing GMOs should be labeled at grocery and home and garden stores.
Trudy Bialic is director of public affairs for PCC Natural Markets. She wants the labeling. “Essentially all GMOs are either tolerating a pesticide or producing their own pesticide and insecticide. It’s engineered with properties that make the produce its own insecticide. You are eating a registered pesticide.”
GMOs can currently be found in some zucchini and yellow squash and sweet corn, which means they often show up in processed foods that contain corn syrup. But Trudy isn’t taking a stand on whether GMOs are good or bad. She simply wants the products labeled.
“I-522 is really about labeling,” says Trudy. “It’s not about the science. Labeling gives us transparency and it gives us, as shoppers, the ability to decide for ourselves what’s appropriate and best for us to buy and feed our families.”
But not everyone wants the labels. Dana Beiber is the spokesperson for the No on 522 campaign.
“We already have a labeling system that works perfectly,” Dana says. “For folks who want to avoid foods with GE ingredients in them, they can do so by looking for the organic label. So it’s not necessary. The other reason it’s not necessary to put a warning label on these foods is because we’ve been eating them for decades and we have overwhelming scientific research that tells us that the foods are safe.
She says farmers will either have to spend money on a new label, that’s specific to Washington state, or change the ingredients in their product.
“I think it’s consumers who are really gonna end up paying the bill for us,” Dana says. “We can expect our grocery bills to go up by hundreds of dollars per year to pay for this unnecessary labeling system.”
Trudy says 64 countries and a few other states have already passed GMO labeling laws.
“Two-thirds of Washingtonians support labeling of genetically engineered foods. There are only five corporations that are funding the opposition. Five! They’re protecting their profits. Their concern is not the right to know for all Washingtonians. We all should know what’s in our food.”
We already label products with their fat and sodium content, we list all the ingredients, so what’s the harm in alerting consumers to GMOs?
“The fat or the sodium or whether it has eggs or peanuts in it, all that’s placed on every label throughout the country. It’s also on the back of the product. It’s not a warning label on the front of the product. Make no mistake, 522 is a warning label. In fact, the proponents have said they want it to be a skull and crossbones label on the front of a package.”
The spokesperson from Yes on I-522 says they have no intention of using a skull and crossbones, just a simple couple of words.
I suppose it wasn’t really until I was standing on the west side of Hoboken, N.J., in water and oil up to my thigh, that climate change really made sense. And it wasn’t until I was out organizing on New York City’s outer beaches after Hurricane Sandy that I understood my sluggishness on climate justice was nothing short of climate change denial.
It seems like everywhere we turn, we’re being fed the same old climate Armageddon story. You’ve heard it, I’m sure: If we continue to be dependent on fossil fuels, hundreds of gigatons of CO2 will continue to pour into the atmosphere, the temperature will rise above 2 degrees Celsius, and we’re done. There will be a biblical cocktail of hurricanes, floods, famines, wars. It will be terrifying, awful, epic and, yes, as far as any reputable scientist is concerned, those projections are for real.I call this narrative the Armageddon Complex, and my own denial was a product of it. I spun all sorts of stories to keep the climate crisis out of my life, ranging anywhere from “it can’t be that bad” to “if it is that bad, there’s nothing I can do about it,” and “it’s not my role. That’s for climate activists; I’m a different kind of activist.”
I did not act alone, but rather as part of a culture of climate denial among activists, who are already plagued by a tendency to see our work as separate issues vying for attention. The Armageddon Complex tells us that climate activism is about some far-off date, not about the pressing and time-sensitive needs that people around us experience in their day-to-day struggles. It pounds into us the idea that the crisis is more titanic than any other, so if we’re going to do anything about it, we have to doeverything. Most of us won’t put off the pressing needs of our families and communities for something we abstractly understand is going to happen later, and most of us aren’t willing to drop the other pieces of our lives and our movement to do everything, because we already feel like we’re doing everything and barely scraping by as it is. So we deny.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of truth to this story: The crisis is gargantuan, and it’s getting worse. Ultimately only a fundamental social, political, economic and personal transformation is going to get us out of this mess.
But that’s not the whole story. Climate Armageddon isn’t a Will Smith movie about what happens in 10 years when all hell breaks loose. Climate change is already here: Hurricanes that land on families, rising tides that flood homes, oil spills that drown communities and countless other disasters. These are caused by the same economic and political systems responsible for all the other crises we face — crises in which people are displaced from land, families are ripped out of homes, people lose their jobs, students sink into debt, and on and on.
Defeating climate change doesn’t have to mean dropping everything to become climate activists or ignoring the whole thing altogether. The truth is exactly the opposite: We have to re-learn the climate crisis as one that ties our struggles together and opens up potential for the world we’re already busy fighting for.
Climate moment, not climate movement
In addition to the hurricane were important voices that forced me to confront my denial. Naomi Klein has argued that resisting climate change is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to win the world we’ve wanted all along; the proponents of climate change are the same enemies that the Occupy movement and its counterparts around the world have already marked. Vandana Shiva pushes us to see that the intersecting crises of food, climate and economy are all based on a common theme of debt, whileGeorge Monbiot reminds us that the oil profiteering that ruins our climate would be impossible were it not for the insidious relationship between money and politics. These connections mean that the homeowners and activists around the United States putting their bodies on the line to fight foreclosure, the students occupying their universities to fight tuition hikes, the activists fighting for campaign finance reform, the countless who stand up to war — these struggles are our best shot at a climate movement that can really win.
But I learned those same lessons, too, from people in struggle. Farmers in the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement fighting for their land are not so different from the Lubicon Cree in Northern Alberta, Canada, standing in the way of the Keystone XL pipeline that poisons their water, or the residents in Atlanta, Ga., trying to win their homes back from the banks. The working-class white West Virginians resisting fracking are in the same boat as the families in Far Rockaway whose kids’ lungs are infected from living in moldy homes after Hurricane Sandy. They have a lot in common with those in the South Bronx who have been fighting against pollution caused by big business for decades, or the mothers in Detroit who are building urban gardens to cope with food deserts. They’re not so different from the Indian women fighting Monsanto, or those resisting wars fought for oil, and on and on the connections go. We’re all connected by the climate crisis, and the opportunities it opens for us.
The fight for the climate isn’t a separate movement, it’s both a challenge and an opportunity for all of our movements. We don’t need to become climate activists, weare climate activists. We don’t need a separate climate movement; we need to seize the climate moment. Ultimately, our task is to create moments for our various movements that allow us to continue our different battles while also working in solidarity to strike at the roots of the systems beneath the symptoms.
Think Turkey and Brazil. Think Arab Spring, and the uprisings against austerity all over Europe. Think the student movements from Quebec to Chile. Think Occupy. These were collective uprisings that drew lines and demanded that people decide which side they were on. It’s our role to prepare for these kinds of “which side are you on?” moments for the climate by training and practicing, by re-focusing on the issues that connect us, by building institutions that can support us in long-term struggle. We don’t stop our other organizing or drop the many other pieces of our lives; we organize the people with whom we already stand in order to seize these moments when they come — to tell stories, take spaces, and challenge enemies of the climate.
Learning from hurricanes
In the New York City neighborhood of Far Rockaway, climate justice is common sense. What I had only read articles and books about before, I learned a thousand times over from people on the front lines of climate crisis after Hurricane Sandy.
As part of Occupy Sandy and the Wildfire Project, I joined the relief effort, which quickly became an organizing project — training, political education, and supporting the growth of a group that is now active across the Rockaways. Between contesting the city’s vision for a recovery, fighting against stop-and-frisk, and organizing against gentrification, the working-class, multiracial Far Rockaway Wildfire group knows that their task is about more than relief from a hurricane — it is also to deal with the crises that existed before the hurricane, and the systems underlying them.
The fight is about winning back the social safety net that has been slashed by the same economic and political elite that profits from fossil fuels. It’s about the wages that have shrunk as elites have profited, about the jobs working people have lost as the bosses have been bailed out. It’s about ensuring sustainable mass transit so people can get to work. It’s about affordable housing, a need that existed before the storm, made worse now by the threat of disaster capitalist schemes to knock down projects and replace them with beach-front condos. It’s about contesting a political system that uses moments of crisis to further disenfranchise working people and people of color. It’s about overturning an economic system that is wrecking the planet while turning a profit for the most powerful, putting 40 percent of the wealth of this country into the hands of 1 percent of the population. It’s about creating alternatives in our communities, while fighting to make those alternatives the norm.
When you’re out on those beaches in Far Rockaway it’s clear that there isn’t any far-off climate Armageddon to wait for. The hurricanes are already smashing down around us, and they’re the same hurricanes as the ones we have fought all along — systems like capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy that shape one another and all the values and institutions that govern our lives. By fighting those systems, we’re already the seeds of the climate movement we’ve been dreaming of. We only need to overcome our denial, find points of intersection in our struggles, and prepare for those moments in which people finally sit down or stand up in the critical intersections of human history. It won’t be long now.
On April 10 of 2013 the Queen of England received a letter sent to her by the Murrawarri Nation of northern New South Wales and Queensland in Australia. This letter was actually a notice for the declaration of independent sovereign statehood of the Murrawarri Nation. The Queen was given 28 days to produce one of three situations accepted in international law as well as British Common Law that recognized the governed taking over or acquiring of new land.
The three situations could have been: 1) A declaration of war and a subsequent victory; 2) The signing of a treaty or agreement; and 3) a lack of occupation of that land by other peoples.
The Murrawarri Nation requested that the Queen give proof of any of these three situations. Treaty documents between the Murrawarri and the British Crown, a deed of concession showing that the Murrawarri have indeed ceded their sovereignty, dominion and ultimate authority to the Crown of Great Britain, or documents showing a declaration of war against the Murrawarri Nation would have all qualified.
However, the fact is that none of these documents exist, the Murrawarri Nation never signed any treaty with the British Crown, and war was never declared. This, along with the decision by the High Court in the Mabo case which stated that the principal of Terra Nullius–that the land was not under occupation at the time of Captain Cook’s coming to Australia–was complete fiction and no longer defensible, meant the Queen could produce no such evidence.
In fact, the Queen did not even respond, allowing the Murrawarri Nation to de facto claim recognition of their Republic as an independent nation.
The Republic of Murrawarri is now functioning with a Peoples Council as an interim government. With its first meeting on July 13 the Peoples Council elected chairman Fred Hooper, passed a resolution to establish a Provisional Council of State. A constitution and a bill of rights have already been drafted.
The permanent government, when formed, will consist of a parliament of 54 representatives appointed by their respective ancestral family groups within their respective provinces. The representatives will strictly be half male and half female. There will also be four representatives from non-ancestral Murrawarri provinces, and residents who are not of Murrawarri descent will be allowed to stay on their land and automatically be granted Murrawarri citizenship.
In the declaration, the Murrawarri strongly claim their right to self-determination in both asserting the existence of this right as well as claiming how the Nation will put it to use.
In the Declaration of the Continuance of the State of Murrawarri Nation, it is stated that:
We the Murrawarri Peoples declareour people have maintained a physical, spiritual and cultural connection to our Ancient Lands, Subsurface, Natural Resources, Waters and Airspace and we did not cede our Sovereignty Dominion and Ultimate Title through any process of treaty nor through any act of war declared on the Murrawarri Nation and its peoples by the British Crown, Government or their servants.
As well as:
The Murrawarri Republic will foster the developmentof the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on spiritual, cultural, freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by our peoples. It will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of culture, religion, conscience, language, and education; it will safeguard our sacred places handed down to us by our creator and our ancestors; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.
The Murrawarri Nation’s act of self-determination has been an inspiring story. Already 27 other Aboriginal groups in Australia have requested Murrawarri’s declarations and constitution to use as templates for their own independence movements. The Republic of Murrawarri is also turning its attention to establishing a reparations and repatriation process with the Australian government and the Queen of England. This would include negotiations for the transfer of all monies collected plus interest by the government and the Crown for the illegal use of land, natural resources, and water within the Murrawarri Republic’s boundaries from the time of the first illegal land grant.
Indigenous peoples have the right to self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.
Disappointingly, since the decolonization era, it has been assumed by many that the right to self-determination is no longer meaningful. However, as exemplified in the case of the Murrawarri Nation, decolonization is far from complete, and the right of self-determination is crucial to the protection of Indigenous Peoples around the world.
Communities and organizations around the Great Lakes received heartening news over the weekend. A plan to ship radioactive waste across the Lakes was officially cancelled after years of community opposition.
Swedish company Studsvik announced that the plan was annulled in its interim report for the first half of 2013.
City mayors, U.S. Senators, environmental and nuclear groups, indigenous communities and other civil society groups raised many important concerns about this shipment including the potential for water contamination and the lack of adequate community consultation. The shipment would have passed through British, Danish and Swedish waters and many European organizations and communities spoke out against the shipments.
This is a huge victory for communities around the Great Lakes and shows what can be achieved when people come together with passion and purpose.
However, the need to protect the Great Lakes from nuclear waste is not over. We need to use this victory as fuel for stopping plans to bury nuclear waste in the Great Lakes Basin. Ontario Power Generation has proposed a plan to bury low and intermediate level waste on the shores of Lake Huron. And there are further plans to find a willing community in Ontario or Saskatchewan that would bear the brunt of a high-level nuke waste site.
Great Lakes Nuclear Hot Spots Map (Credit: Great Lakes United and the International Institute of Concern for Public Health)
Article Adapted for Intercontinental Cry under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA 3.0) license. Originally published at Canadians.org
Connor has served as Commissioner for the Bureau of Reclamation since 2009. He has worked on negotiating and implementing several tribal water rights settlements.
“He has proven himself to be a thoughtful and collaborative leader on some of the toughest challenges at the Department – including finding sustainable solutions to water challenges in the West and resolving Indian water rights claims. Interior will be well served by his commonsense approach in the Deputy position.”
If confirmed by the Senate, Connor would be the first Native American descendant in the second-highest ranking post at DOI. He would succeed David Hayes, who left the Obama administration in June.
Mary Annette Pember, Indian Country Today Media Network
The Iron County Board voted on July 30 to postpone action against the Penokee Hills Education Camp, referring the issue back to the Forestry Committee with instructions to work with county and LCO tribal attorneys to find a legal way to allow the camp to remain in the forest.
About 50 people gathered at the Penokee Harvest Camp immediately before the meeting for a flag raising ceremony and tobacco offering by Bad River tribal elder Joe Rose. Lac Courte Oreilles vice chairman Rusty Barber was on hand to personally raise the LCO flag and underscore the cultural and environmental significance of the Camp. “We want to tell our future generations how to use mother earth in the right way,” he said.
More than 100 people showed up at the Iron County courthouse Tuesday night in support of the camp, many carrying signs supporting the Harvest Camp and treaty rights.
The tiny county board meeting room was filled to capacity forcing many people to wait outside and in the hallway. Several people spoke during the public comment period before board members voted, most in opposition to the mine.
Several people giving public comments were overcome with tears as they spoke of the injustice of putting an open pit mine in the Penokees. Others described how the Harvest Camp had turned around their perceptions of Native people who are often scape goated by the mainstream community as opponents to progress and jobs. Aileen Potter of Montreal, a few miles from the proposed mine described how she was taught to fear Native people as a child. “My dad used to tell us to duck down in the car when we drove through the Bad River reservation,” she recalls.
Originally a mine supporter as a way to generate jobs in the community, she has since changed her opinion after learning more about the potential impact on the water and environment. Recently she worked up the courage to visit the Harvest Camp.
“It was scary for me to go out there. I was nervous but Mel (Mel Gaspar, camp leader) greeted me at the entrance and asked if I had come to learn about what was going on there,” she said.
Gaspar gave her a tour of the camp and described the work being done to identify plant species, teach people about traditional Ojibwe gathering methods and determine the potential impact of the mine on the area.
Potter has been trying to educate other people in her community about the dangers presented by the mine but opines that although many not support it, they are afraid to speak out against it. “They may be afraid of being penalized at work or becoming targets in the community, “ she speculated.
The boardroom debate became heated when board member James Lambert complained that the camp was not about treaty rights but was in fact a protest against the mine. “I don’t consider this to be a treaty rights issue at all,” he interjected during the public hearing portion of the meeting.
Although the board charged the Forestry committee to work out a way for the camp to remain in the forest, it is unclear if such an arrangement is possible under current Wisconsin state statutes. Corporation counsel for the Iron County board Michael Pope expressed concern about ensuring that any agreements between the county and LCO tribe met with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources approval. If the county does not conform to DNR statues, it runs the risk of losing financial support and grant monies administrated by the DNR.
Paul DeMain, spokesperson for the Harvest Camp was pleased with the county’s action and hopeful that the attorneys can arrive at a decision that both sides can agree on.
“This decision gets the issue back where it needs to be in order to find a middle ground,” he observed.
Joseph Pinardi, Iron County board chairman was clearly eager to get Iron County out of the national spotlight and return to “business as usual” as he described the work for the normally sparsely attended meetings in this small county.
He told a reporter that the controversy surrounding the Harvest Camp was “seriously blown out of proportion.”
The camp has become a political lightning rod and will continue to draw fire from both sides.
In June Wisconsin Rep. Mark Honadel (R-South Milwaukee) rallied fellow Republicans to introduce a bill into the state budget that would restrict public access to mining sites under the auspices of concern for public safety. He told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that public access is already restricted from areas where mining is going on. “It just makes common sense,” he said.
The bill didn’t pass however because it was “too rushed” according to Honadel. He told the Daily Reporter, however, that the state assembly should act quickly to introduce a separate bill that restricts public access.
After visiting the Harvest Camp in July, however, state Senators Bob Jauch (D-Poplar) Dale Schultz (R-Richland Center) and Tim Cullen (D-Janesville) announced that they will introduce legislation to address workplace safety and ensure public access to open managed forest land. The proposed Gogebic Taconite (GTAC) mine is located on such land.
Public access and public gatherings have been a sore spot for the Gov. Scott Walker administration. Harkening back to the 1960’s Vietnam protests, groups have gathered in the capital rotunda daily to sing protest songs. The Solidarity Sing Alongs held at the capitol building in Madison protesting the Walker administration since 2011 have grown in size. In response, Walkers administration revised the buildings public access policy, requiring groups to get permits for organized activities. Last week, over a three-day period, police arrested nearly 100 people for singing in the capital rotunda including a mother who was led away in handcuffs as her young daughter stood by. Protesters were issued citations in the amount of $200.00.
The Walker administration described the sing-alongs as disruptive and claimed that the gatherings discouraged others from visiting the building. Protesters, however, maintain that it is their constitutional right to gather and petition their government. Earlier in July, a federal judge upheld Walkers change in access policy.
On July 30, Walker supporters occupied the capital rotunda leaving protesters to gather on the lawn outside the building. The Wisconsin State Journal described the gatherings as “dueling protests.”
Several opponents to the GTAC mine have also participated in the sing-alongs including Rebecca Kemble of The Progressive Magazine whose parents were arrested for their participation last week. Tom and Joan Kemble are 85 and 80 years old.
As for the Harvest Camp, it’s time to “hunker down” according to DeMain. Camp organizers will continue with their work of educating the public about the cultural and environment significance of the Penokee Hills and hope to expand to create a public market for Native artists. “If we build it, they will come,” DeMain said.
A dead gray whale that washed up on the Washington coast overnight Sunday was likely killed in a collision with a ship, researchers determined after a preliminary necropsy. And you’ll soon be able to see the skeleton up close.
The 39-foot adult female was found Sunday night on the beach in Grayland near Westport. Its carcass will be stripped and the skeleton sent to the Westport Aquarium, the owner of the aquarium told KBKW in Aberdeen. Marc Myrcell says he plans to put it on display in the future.
Jessie Huggins, with Cascadia Research, says the whale suffered broken bones and bruising in front of the blowhole, near the whale’s jaw. “It’s like the bridge of the nose near the cheek” on a human, though that comparison is not exactly equivalent, Huggins tells theDaily World.
Myrcell plans to get a backhoe to drag the carcass about 1,000 feet up the beach in the next couple of days to private, wooded land, where it will be allowed to decompose.
The whale is the second to wash up on the Washington coast in the last month. A fin whale was found dead on the beach near Ocean Shores in early June. Its carcass eventually washed out to sea. In April, another fin whale was found on the shore in Burien. Wildlife officials towed it to another beach where it was allowed to decompose.
It started with a spark — an interest in green energy. This glimmer of curiosity led Lyle Wilson, an instructor at Oglala Lakota College in South Dakota and U.S. Army veteran, to start researching renewable energy technologies such as solar, wind and geothermal. Now sparked by Lyle’s interest, members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe of the Pine Ridge Reservation are finding new possibilities in their clean energy capabilities.
As part of his work at Oglala Lakota College, Lyle works with students in the applied sciences department to construct houses for members of the tribe. He envisioned taking the work a step further by integrating solar panels into new homes to help reduce power bills. To make it happen, Lyle reached out to Solar Energy International (SEI), which helps coordinate solar training courses for the Energy Department’s Solar Instructor Training Network.
From there, a group of students and instructors at the college signed on for SEI’s Photovoltaic (PV) 101: Solar Design and Installation course, in which they set up their first grid-tied photovoltaic system. This introduction served as fuel for their solar fire. Next, about 20 people took part in SEI’s PV 203: Solar Electric Design (Battery-Based) class. This course allowed them to install two 250-watt solar panels on their construction trailer.
“Most kids don’t want to sit in class — they want to get out and do things,” said Lyle. “We did a short one-day lesson in the classroom then went down to the yard and designed, connected, and built the system over two days. Our students were actually sort of stunned to learn how easy it is to do something like this once they understand the fundamental concepts.”
The mobile solar energy system built through the PV 203 course now provides enough power to run electric tools at construction sites, supports community service projects and serves as an educational resource for school-aged children.
Lyle sees these accomplishments as just the start. With more knowledge, more possibilities come into focus. Up next, the students hope to take another SITN course on setting up their own power grid. This would offer potential savings for the tribe, provide a degree of energy independence and empower students by bringing new job skills into the community.
“We could install 40 panels as a test to see how much money we could save by getting power from the sun,” said Lyle. “Then we could pass that information on to the tribe.”
WENATCHEE, WASH. — Firefighters are making progress against two big wildfires burning near Wenatchee and Goldendale in Eastern Washington.
They have completed a line around the fire that burned about 35 square miles around Satus Pass, about 15 miles northeast of Goldendale. Spokesman Dam Omdal says more than 1,300 firefighters are mopping up hot spots and strengthening the lines. Evacuations have been lifted. Highway 97 remains closed between Goldendale and Toppenish.
At the 93-square mile fire south of Wenatchee, spokeswoman Linden Lampman says fire retardant drops Tuesday and about 80 hot shot firefighters working overnight prevented the fire from spreading south into Kittitas County where some residents have been evacuated. Nearly 400 firefighters are on the scene.
This Monday, July 29, 2013 photo shows the Colockum Pass fire burning in the mountains which has also burned its way down to the banks of the Columbia River. The Colockum Pass fire has grown to more than 10 square miles burning 5 five homes in addition to other structures 20 miles south of Wenatchee. (AP Photo/The Seattle Times, Steve Ringman)
The fire danger remains high through Thursday with the threat of lightning strikes from thunderstorms.
July 24, 2013 
