Yellowstone Visitor Gets Jail Time for Trespassing on Park Thermal Feature
Coming soon to a lake near you: Floating solar panels
A reservoir is many things: a source of drinking water, a playground for swimmers, a refuge for migrating birds. But if you ask solar-power enthusiasts, a reservoir is also not realizing its full potential. That open water could be covered with buoyant panels, a burgeoning technology known as floating photovoltaics, aka “floatovoltaics.” They could simultaneously gather energy from the sun and shade the water, reducing evaporation — an especially welcome bonus where droughts are getting worse.
Now, scientists have crunched the numbers and found that if humans deployed floatovoltaics in a fraction of lakes and reservoirs around the world — covering just 10 percent of the surface area of each — the systems could collectively generate four times the amount of power the United Kingdom uses in a year. The effectiveness of so-called FPVs would vary from country to country, but their research found that some could theoretically supply all their electricity this way, including Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Papua New Guinea.
“The countries around the world that we saw gain the most from these FPVs were these low-latitude, tropical countries that did not have a high energy demand in the first place,” said Iestyn Woolway, an Earth system scientist at Bangor University and lead author of a new paper describing the findings in the journal Nature Water. “It meant that if only a small percentage of their lakes — this 10 percent — was covered by FPVs, it could be enough to fuel the energy demand of the entire country.”
For developing countries, floatovoltaics could be especially powerful as a means of generating clean electricity. Instead of building out more planet-warming infrastructure running on fossil fuels, like gas-fired power plants, fledgling economies could run panels on land and water, in addition to other renewables like wind and hydropower. With solar power comes autonomy: Utilities don’t have to rely on shipments of fossil fuels, but can tap into the abundant power of the sun.
Floatovoltaic solar panels — which have been proliferating globally, from California to France to Taiwan — are the same ones found on a rooftop. “It’s the same electrical system, same panels, same inverters,” said Chris Bartle, director of sales and marketing at Ciel and Terre USA, which is deploying floatovoltaic systems. “We’re just providing a structure that floats to mount that electrical system.” The solar rafts are anchored either to the bottom of the water body or to the shore, or both, to keep them from wandering.
In many ways, solar panels and bodies of water can benefit one another. Photovoltaics get less efficient the hotter they get, so having them floating on a lake or reservoir helps cool them off. “Because of the cooling effect, we see increased efficiency of the systems,” said Sika Gadzanku, a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado, who studies floatovoltaics but wasn’t involved in the new research. Returning the favor, the panels provide shading, reducing evaporation. If floatovoltaics are spread across a reservoir, that could mean more water would be available for drinking.
If a reservoir is equipped with a dam for hydroelectric generation, the floatovoltaics could hook into that existing transmission infrastructure. (Countries like Kenya, for instance, are building out more of this hydroelectric infrastructure already.) That could save local governments money because they wouldn’t need to string new transmission lines from the floatovoltaics to the nearest city. In the event of a drought, when water levels drop too low to generate hydropower, the panels could still operate as backup power.
A floatovoltaic system in a water treatment pond in Healdsburg, California.
Ciel & Terre International
To do their new modeling, Woolway and his colleagues began with over a million lakes and reservoirs around the world big enough and deep enough for floatovoltaics. Then they whittled those down based on critical qualities. For one, the body of water couldn’t dry up, beaching the panels, or freeze over for more than six months a year, entombing the panels in ice and damaging them. The lake couldn’t be protected by law, either, like as a natural refuge. And the site had to be near a human population that could use the generated power.
A remote lake, by contrast, would require long transmission lines to connect a faraway city to the floatovoltaics. This doesn’t necessarily rule out the technology for more remote communities of people living near an otherwise suitable lake. In fact, floatovoltaics could be particularly potent there as a way to provide clean energy. These cases just weren’t included in the scope of this modeling.
Regardless, all those characteristics considered, the team ended up with 68,000 feasible locations in 163 countries. They found that on average, countries could meet 16 percent of their energy demand with floatovoltaics, but some places could generate a lot more. In Bolivia, for instance, floatovoltaics could provide up to 87 percent of national electricity demand, and in Tonga, they could meet 92 percent. The potential is much lower in the United States, however, meeting just 4 percent of energy demand — even though the country has a plethora of large lakes and reservoirs, overall energy usage is extremely high. In less-sunny climes, like northern Europe, the effectiveness of floatovoltaics drops, but Finland could still satisfy 17 percent of its electricity demand with floating panels.
“The regions or the countries that we saw had the highest potential had these two critical variables, in that they were close to the equator, or were at high elevations, so they received high amounts of incoming solar radiation,” Woolway said. “And secondly, they had large water bodies.”
Covering 10 percent of a 100-square-mile lake, for instance, would end up with a lot more solar panels than covering the same percentage of a 10-square-mile lake. “We considered 10 percent to be a reasonable surface area coverage without having a devastating impact on the ecology and the biodiversity,” Woolway said. “If you were to cover the surface 90 percent with solar panels, there would be no light going into the water itself.”
This is where the new science of floatovoltaics gets tricky, as there’s still little data on the potential environmental and social downsides of these floating systems. Scientists are investigating, for example, whether the floats might leach harmful chemicals or microplastics into the water.
And keep in mind that these ecosystems are solar-powered, too: Light fuels the growth of aquatic vegetation, which feeds all kinds of other organisms. If a floatovoltaic system cuts off too much of that light, it might reduce the food supply, and hinder plants’ ability to produce oxygen. “You’re changing light penetration, and that’s the most fundamental physical variable for an aquatic ecosystem,” said Rafael Almeida, a freshwater ecosystem scientist at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, who studies floatovoltaics but wasn’t involved in the new study. “If you don’t have enough light, and you’re reducing oxygen concentrations in that system, and that may cascade through the food web, potentially impacting fish.” At the same time, early research suggests that the panels can counter the growth of harmful algal blooms that make water dangerous for people to drink.
Scientists are still trying to figure out what amount of coverage can still produce enough power to justify the monetary cost of deploying floatovoltaics, while not incurring ecological costs. Each body of water is its own unique universe of chemical and biological interactions, so the same coverage on two different lakes might have dramatically different effects. “Would 10 percent be enough to cascade into system-wide changes?” asks Almeida. “These are things that we really don’t know.”
Researchers also need more data on how effective the panels are at reducing evaporation, and therefore how much water a given system might actually save. “What we are yet to fully understand is that so many of the existing floating solar systems that have tried to collect data on this have been smaller,” Gadzanku said. “So it is more: How do potential evaporation savings scale as you build larger systems?”
Humans rely on bodies of water in many ways other than for drinking. Subsistence fishers rely on them for food. And owners of lakefront properties might bristle if they think floating solar panels would cut their property values.
Still, Almeida says, this new research identifies where floatovoltaics might work, and how much energy they might provide given local conditions. “I think that now what we need,” said Almeida, “is understanding — out of these suitable sites — which ones are really the low-hanging fruits.”
Rivers are the West’s largest source of clean energy. What happens when drought strikes?
In Washington, a dozen dams dot the Columbia River — that mighty waterway carved through the state by a sequence of prehistoric superfloods. Between those dams and the hundreds of others that plug the rivers and tributaries that lace the region, including California and Nevada, the Western United States accounts for most of the hydroelectric energy the country generates from the waters flowing across its landscape. Washington alone captures more than a quarter of that; combined with Oregon and Idaho, the Pacific Northwest lays claim to well over two-fifths of America’s dam-derived electricity. So when a drought hits the region, the nation takes notice.
That happened in 2023 when, according to a recent report, U.S. hydroelectric power hit its lowest level in 22 years. While the atmospheric rivers that poured across California provided the state with abundant energy, the Pacific Northwest endured low summer flows after a late-spring heat wave caused snowpack to melt and river levels to peak earlier than normal. Though dam turbines kept spinning throughout the year — proving that even during a drought the nation’s hydro system remains reliable — last year offered energy providers in the West a glimpse of the conditions they may need to adapt to as the world warms and seasonal weather patterns shift.
While models predict climate change will plunge California and the Southwest deeper into drought, what awaits Washington and Oregon is less clear. The Pacific Northwest will get warmer. That much is certain. But in terms of the rain that places like Seattle and Portland are known for, things get fuzzier.
“Whenever you bring in water precipitation and you’re looking at climate model results, they go in all directions,” said Sean Turner, a water resources and hydropower engineer with Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The Evergreen and Beaver states could get drier or wetter — or both, depending on the time of year.
Nathalie Voisin, chief scientist for water-energy dynamics at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, said much of the latest research suggests an increase in total annual hydroelectric power in the region, but, as Turner noted as well, uncertainties remain. “So as a trend, we see an increase” in annual precipitation, Voisin said, “but we also see an increase in variability of very wet years and very dry years.”
Even during wet years, however, the water won’t fall in a gentle mist evenly distributed from new year to year end. The bulk of it, Voisin said, is expected to come from atmospheric rivers streaming overhead between fall and spring, with rivers running low in late summer as the snow and ice in the mountains that rim the region melt ever earlier and no longer keep the waters as high as they historically have.
These are things that the Bonneville Power Administration — the federal agency responsible for selling energy from the 31 federally owned dams along the Columbia and its tributaries to utilities throughout the region — has a keen eye on. In a fact sheet detailing the agency’s plans to ensure its hydropower resources remain resilient, the administration wrote, “By the 2030s, higher average fall and winter flows, earlier peak spring runoff, and longer periods of low summer flows are very likely.” Those times of lower hydroelectric generation will coincide with periods when rising temps are expected to drive people to demand more from their thermostats to keep comfortable.
The Grand Coulee Dam is seen through the windows of the dam’s visitor center.
Don and Melinda Crawford / Education Images / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Given this, if Western states like California, Washington, and Oregon are to meet the 2045 goals for 100 percent clean energy they’ve set, their utilities are going to have to get creative. As it is, when hydropower fails to meet demand, methane, also known as natural gas, tends to fill the gap — even if power companies can’t say for sure that that’s their backstop.
Seattle City Light, for instance, which provides electricity to over 900,000 people across much of the Seattle area, reportedly has been carbon neutral since 2005 thanks in large part to an energy mix that is nearly 90 percent hydropower — around half of which is supplied by Bonneville Power. But with its standard fleet of hydroelectric plants generating below average, Siobhan Doherty, the utility’s director of power management, said it has had to procure new sources of energy to ensure it can comfortably meet customers’ needs. A fair portion of that power comes from other dams in the area, but some of it is also provided by what Doherty called “unspecified” sources purchased from other providers.
Across the West, when utilities like Seattle City Light purchase energy to cover hydropower shortfalls, most of it comes from gas-powered peaker plants, according to Minghao Qiu, an environmental scientist at Stanford University. As a result, emissions rise. Over the 20-year period examined in a study of how droughts impact grid emissions, Qiu and his colleagues found that temporary prolonged hydropower declines led to 121 million tons of carbon emissions. Qiu also found that the plants belching all that pollution often lay far from where the energy is needed.
While the seemingly obvious solution to this challenge is to rapidly deploy wind and solar, Qiu found that this didn’t actually solve the problem.
“So what really happened there is an implicit market that whoever can generate the electricity with the lowest costs are going to generate first,” Qiu said. This means that solar and wind will send all the energy they can because they’re by far the cheapest; hydropower then provides what it can, followed by fossil fuels like methane to plug any holes. “So when hydropower sort of declines,” Qiu said, “the wind power and solar power is already maxed out,” typically leaving gas plants as the remaining option.
Nonetheless, in a bid to keep its grid carbon-free in the long term, Seattle City Light recently signed agreements to buy energy from two independent solar projects, each with at least 40 megawatts of capacity, and is negotiating other, similar arrangements. The fact Bonneville Power has seen a sharp rise in requests from renewable energy developers to connect to its transmission lines suggests other utilities in the region are exploring similar deals.
While those solar farms, in a sense, address the demands that hydro alone can’t meet, the West’s dams help make utility-scale renewables work. Regardless of the inevitable expansion and improvement of turbine and photovoltaic technology, wind and solar will always be intermittent and weather-dependent. In those moments when the gusts stop blowing and the sun stops shining, something has to top off the grid. “Hydro does that better than anything,” Turner said.
Many of the dams administered by Bonneville Power are already equipped to spin up or down as demand dictates, and their ability to meet these moments was perhaps no more apparent than during the lethal heat dome that gripped the Pacific Northwest for one blistering week in June 2021. As streets cracked and power lines melted, the region’s homebound populations drove electricity demand to record levels. To keep the grid going, Bonneville Power relied on the controversial dams along the lower Snake River. The agency released a statement a month after the heat wave, revealing how critical the four lower Snake River dams were during that disaster. At times, they provided well over 1,000 megawatts of power, which is roughly the average draw in Seattle. And while there are credible reasons to remove the dams, Bonneville Power said that without those resources it likely would have had to resort to rolling blackouts to ensure the system wasn’t pushed past its limits.
That experience, and the many more like it that are sure to come, suggest that even as year-to-year dips impact the nation’s dams, the power they provide will long remain a critical component of a carbon-free future.
Wenatchi-P’squosa people demonstrate against proposed solar project
On a Thursday morning in late March, a group of Wenatchi-P’squosa people and a few dozen supporters assembled amid patches of snow and mud atop Badger Mountain in southeastern Washington. The foggy sagebrush-dotted bluff is among dozens of locations that developers want to use for new renewable energy efforts in the state.
The gathering – the first Indigenous-led demonstration against this proposed development – was intended to highlight threats to cultural resources including food and sacred sites on the mountain. Earlier this year, a ProPublica and HCN investigation found that the state’s process for assessing those resources, which relied on a developer-funded cultural resource survey, had been inadequate. A state archaeologist identified significant shortcomings in the report that was submitted to get the project approved, and the investigation documented bullying behavior by the companies involved.
Colville Tribe Councilmembers Karen Condon (right) and Shar Zacherle speak to the group. “This is still our land,” said Condon. Credit:Emree Weaver/High Country News
The proposed solar project is currently in the hands of a governor-appointed group of state officials who will advise him on whether to permit the project. Organizers said they were concerned that the Energy Facility Siting Evaluation Council (EFSEC) will move the project forward, despite tribal objections. The Colville Tribes have to work with state agencies like EFSEC on consultation and land surveys as part of the permitting process. The tribal nation, along with other Indigenous nations, has formally issued objections but did not publicly support or organize the demonstration. Still, multiple tribal leaders, including council members, showed up and shared their thoughts.
“The Colville Tribe has opposed this project since we were notified,” said Business Councilmember Karen Condon, adding that it breaks her heart and that she personally is opposed. If the solar farm goes in, she said, it will destroy their traditional foods and medicine. “Once our areas are destroyed, our ground is destroyed. We’ll never get that back.”
She said the tribal nation should have a greater say over what happens to it. “This is still our land,” said Condon. “We’re sharing it with those that currently occupy the land, but it’s our land.”
“Once our areas are destroyed, our ground is destroyed. We’ll never get that back.”
“Our people have been coming here since time immemorial to gather our first foods, our medicines,” said organizer Darnell Sam, a former tribal business councilmember and current traditional territories coordinator for the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation. That confederation includes Sam’s people, the Wenatchi-P’squosa. He added that you can’t walk far in any direction without running into a cultural site. “What happens when we come here, and we can’t gather the food? You’re breaking the law. Long before there was any other law, this was the law: that we have to honor the food.” The development would also impact the Moses Columbia and the federally unrecognized Wanapum people, and at least one of the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation. The mountain, located near the town of Wenatchee in central Washington, is “a mother. It’s a grandmother. It’s part of our family,” said Sam.
Darnell Sam, a former tribal business councilmember and current traditional territories coordinator for the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, speaks at the gathering he helped organize at Badger Mountain. Credit:Emree Weaver/High Country News
Another attendee talked about protecting everything that lives on the land. “Our brothers and sisters, the deer, the bear, the elk,” said Sophie Nomee, chair of the Wenatchi Advisory Group to the Colville Tribal Business Council. “These are the things that we have to continue to protect.” She cares about the non-Native current owners of the land, too, she said. “We don’t want them to experience what our ancestors went through, when they had to migrate up to the Colville Reservation.”
For one protester, Steven Wynecoop, it’s not just about sovereignty and culinary tradition. The solar development is a health issue. “We can’t keep living off the foods they give us,” said Wynecoop. U.S. government distribution of canned and processed foods on reservations, along with disparities in food access, has been linked to health issues in Native communities. Clarice Paul, a member of the Wanapum Band, said that her community also has cultural ties to the mountain, and that developments on these sacred lands “go against the grain of historical traumatic healing for our people.”
For some, the demonstration was so important that they pulled their kids out of school to be here. “This is my family’s land,” said Mari St. Pierre, who brought her three children from a couple-hours’ drive away to attend. “A year before my grandma passed, she took us up here to dig for roots.” St. Pierre said she wants her children to continue learning about their ancestral lands, a goal supported by their education at Paschal Sherman Indian School, a residential boarding school originally built by colonizers. The Colville Tribes purchased it in the 1970s to disseminate their own cultural teachings.
“This is my family’s land.”
One supporter, Sonya Schaller, called Badger Mountain a “rare botanical garden.” Attendees proposed other locations for solar arrays: on fallowed farmlands, corporate rooftops, over parking lots or on lands where a Washington State University mapping project has identified least-conflict zones for solar siting.
Nikoda Miller, a Colville tribal member, speaks to the crowd. Mari St. Pierre (middle left), brought her three children from a couple-hours’ drive away to attend the event. Credit:Emree Weaver/High Country News
EFSEC has recently hired a contract archaeological firm to redo technical work after the original developer-funded survey sparked numerous objections from tribes and state agencies. If EFSEC approves the project, the final authority to permit lies with Gov. Jay Inslee. In 2021, Inslee vetoed language in the Climate Commitment Act that would have protected the Indigenous right to free, prior and informed consent to any development proposed on Indigenous sacred lands. On Thursday, demonstrators complained that they felt unheard by the state in general, and particularly by EFSEC. “They’re not listening to tribes. They’re not listening to the public. And that’s a problem. I do look forward to the day that we set up a protest in Olympia,” said Condon. Organizers say that’s the plan.
On the same day as the demonstration, EFSEC had planned a visit to the other side of Badger Mountain to conduct technical work with an archaeologist from the Colville Tribes. But that visit was rescheduled: “They’re afraid of us,” shouted someone in the crowd, to a ripple of applause and war whoops.
“Public participation is an important part of the EFSEC review for all projects,” said EFSEC spokesman Karl Holappa in an emailed statement. “We encourage the public to get involved and weigh in through the public comment process.”
Sam said that organizers weren’t thinking about EFSEC when they planned the event, and he emphasized that they’re not just “a bunch of rowdy, wild Indians.”
“It’s been said, and we’re going to say it again: We’re not against green energy. It has its place, but it’s not here on this mountain,” said Sam. “Let it find its place. Let the governor hear that. Let everybody at EFSEC hear that.”
Sonya Schaller, a supporter from Omak, Washington, holds a sign during a gathering on Badger Mountain in East Wenatchee, Washington. Credit:Emree Weaver/High Country News
The massive copper mine that could test the limits of religious freedom
Earlier this month, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals declined to stop the construction of a copper mine in Arizona on land sacred to the San Carlos Apache Tribe as well as other Indigenous nations. Chí’chil Biłdagoteel, also known as Oak Flat, sits atop the third largest copper deposit on the planet and is essential to green energy projects. The operation, which will be run by Resolution Copper, a subsidiary of mining companies Rio Tinto and BHP, will leave a crater nearly 1,000 feet deep and 2 miles wide.
“Oak Flat is like Mount Sinai to us — our most sacred site where we connect with our Creator, our faith, our families and our land,” said Wendsler Noise of Apache Stronghold, a nonprofit fighting to protect the area. “We vow to appeal to the Supreme Court.”
Over the years, Oak Flat has developed a storied history. In 2014, Oak Flat was a part of a military spending bill that would allow the government to “swap” the area with other land in Arizona. In 2016, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in an attempt to protect it, and in 2021 the Apache Stronghold sued the government, arguing that the land was reserved for the Western Apaches in an 1852 treaty. Then, in 2023, Apache Stronghold made the case that the land transfer would keep them from exercising their religion. The court disagreed.
The issue before the court illustrates a battle between religion, Indigenous rights, and potential solutions to the climate crisis. For tribal nations like the San Carlos Apache who practice what are known as “land-based religions” — ceremonial practices that are inextricably tied to areas Indigenous peoples have relationships with — preserving those lands with religious significance is paramount to the survival, and transmission, of both culture and values to the next generation.
But for developers, the proposed mine would support a few thousand jobs for the surrounding community, inject $61 billion into the local economy, and provide a critical supply of copper for everything from electric vehicles to energy storage systems. By 2031, the world will need almost 37 million metric tons of copper to continue the process of green-energy electrification. Resolution Copper said that Oak Flat could provide a quarter of U.S. copper production.
At the heart of Apache Stronghold’s legal case is something called “substantial burden” — there must be proof that the government has interfered with an individual’s right to practice their religious beliefs. Substantial burden protects U.S. citizens from government interference, unless the government has a really good reason. That means Apache Stronghold’s claim needs to be justified with a high level of scrutiny.
If the case goes to the Supreme Court, and Apache Stronghold wins, the federal government would need to show a compelling reason to destroy Oak Flat.
“If the Supreme Court finds that land transfer of Oak Flat is a substantial burden on Apache religious practice, then the court sends the case back down to the lower court,” said Beth Margaret Wright, who is from the Pueblo of Laguna and is an attorney with the Native American Rights Fund. “Then that would be on the government to prove that the land transfer is narrowly tailored toward a compelling government interest.”
Wright said that’s a pretty high bar for the government to meet, and it’s complicated by the court’s history with land-based religions.
According to the court’s recent decision, Oak Flat is similar to an older case out of California: Lyng v. The Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association. In the 1980s, the United States Forest Service was sued by the Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association over the proposed construction of a road. The Yurok, Karuk, and Tolowa tribes argued the road would irreparably damage an area where tribal members conducted religious ceremonies.
Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the federal government could do what it wanted with its land and said that the government couldn’t be held responsible for the religious needs of its citizens — a kind of “slippery slope” that recognized that a favorable ruling for the tribes would provide a veto button for other Indigenous nations on public projects in the future. In its ruling, the Supreme Court acknowledged that there were deeply held religious beliefs tied to the land, but the road was built anyway.
Joe Davis, an attorney with Becket Law, the firm defending Apache Stronghold, said the narrow focus on Lyng is what is at issue with Oak Flat: He says it’s the wrong framing.
Five years after the Lyng decision, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA, was passed. Because RFRA was written to expand religious protections, the Apache Stronghold seeks the expanded protections under RFRA to be applied to Oak Flat.
“This is a case, at its heart, about the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which uses different language and is broader than the First Amendment,” said Davis.
And that argument has some history with the courts. In 2012, Becket also defended Hobby Lobby at the Supreme Court and won using the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. In that case, the court decided that under RFRA, the family that owns Hobby Lobby could opt out of providing birth control to employees under federal insurance laws due to religious beliefs. Essentially, the court found that the federal government was imposing a substantial burden because the use of birth control violated the owners’ religious freedoms.
“Hobby Lobby shows that RFRA is very powerful,” said Davis. “This case is an opportunity for the Supreme Court to make good on the promise of RFRA.”
The Ninth Circuit decided that in Oak Flat, substantial burden wasn’t met, citing the Lyng case. But the Lyng case doesn’t define substantial burden, RFRA does, and Davis argues that the court made a leap applying substantial burden when the concept wasn’t used in the Lyng case. Basically, the court didn’t use the broad protections offered by RFRA and instead applied a ruling from a pre-RFRA world.
If the case gets picked up by the U.S. Supreme Court, and Apache Stronghold wins, this would help clarify substantial burden. But with that clarity, there may come many more legal battles testing the limits of the First Amendment for Indigenous peoples.
“It might help us in the sense that now a substantial burden is more encompassing of land-based religions,” said Beth Margaret Wright with the Native American Rights Fund. “But it doesn’t necessarily mean that our land-based religions and practices are forever protected.”
A spokesperson with the U.S. Forest Service, the agency named in the lawsuit, declined to comment citing ongoing litigation.
FBI sent several informants to Standing Rock protests, court documents show
Up to 10 informants managed by the FBI were embedded in anti-pipeline resistance camps near the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation at the height of mass protests against the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016. The new details about federal law enforcement surveillance of an Indigenous environmental movement were released as part of a legal fight between North Dakota and the federal government over who should pay for policing the pipeline fight. Until now, the existence of only one other federal informant in the camps had been confirmed.
The FBI also regularly sent agents wearing civilian clothing into the camps, one former agent told Grist in an interview. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, or BIA, operated undercover narcotics officers out of the reservation’s Prairie Knights Casino, where many pipeline opponents rented rooms, according to one of the depositions.
The operations were part of a wider surveillance strategy that included drones, social media monitoring, and radio eavesdropping by an array of state, local, and federal agencies, according to attorneys’ interviews with law enforcement. The FBI infiltration fits into a longer history in the region. In the 1970s, the FBI infiltrated the highest levels of the American Indian Movement, or AIM.
The Indigenous-led uprising against Energy Transfer Partners’ Dakota Access oil pipeline drew thousands of people seeking to protect water, the climate, and Indigenous sovereignty. For seven months, participants protested to stop construction of the pipeline and were met by militarized law enforcement, at times facing tear gas, rubber bullets, and water hoses in below-freezing weather.
After the pipeline was completed and demonstrators left, North Dakota sued the federal government for more than $38 million — the cost the state claims to have spent on police and other emergency responders, and for property and environmental damage. Central to North Dakota’s complaints are the existence of anti-pipeline camps on federal land managed by the Army Corps of Engineers. The state argues that by failing to enforce trespass laws on that land, the Army Corps allowed the camps to grow to up to 8,000 people and serve as a “safe haven” for those who participated in illegal activity during protests and caused property damage.
In an effort to prove that the federal government failed to provide sufficient support, attorneys deposed officials leading several law enforcement agencies during the protests. The depositions provide unusually detailed information about the way that federal security agencies intervene in climate and Indigenous movements.
Until the lawsuit, the existence of only one federal informant in the camps was known: Heath Harmon was working as an FBI informant when he entered into a romantic relationship with water protector Red Fawn Fallis. A judge eventually sentenced Fallis to nearly five years in prison after a gun went off when she was tackled by police during a protest. The gun belonged to Harmon.
Manape LaMere, a member of the Bdewakantowan Isanti and Ihanktowan bands, who is also Winnebago Ho-chunk and spent months in the camps, said he and others anticipated the presence of FBI agents, because of the agency’s history. Camp security kicked out several suspected infiltrators. “We were already cynical, because we’ve had our heart broke before by our own relatives,” he explained.
“The culture of paranoia and fear created around informants and infiltration is so deleterious to social movements, because these movements for Indigenous people are typically based on kinship networks and forms of relationality,” said Nick Estes, a historian and member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe who spent time at the Standing Rock resistance camps and has extensively researched the infiltration of the AIM movement by the FBI. Beyond his relationship with Fallis, Harmon had close familial ties with community leaders and had participated in important ceremonies. Infiltration, Estes said, “turns relatives against relatives.”
Less widely known than the FBI’s undercover operations are those of the BIA, which serves as the primary police force on Standing Rock and other reservations. During the NoDAPL movement, the BIA had “a couple” of narcotics officers operating undercover at the Prairie Knights Casino, according to the deposition of Darren Cruzan, a member of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma who was the director of the BIA’s Office of Justice Services at the time.
It’s not unusual for the BIA to use undercover officers in its drug busts. However, the intelligence collected by the Standing Rock undercovers went beyond narcotics. “It was part of our effort to gather intel on, you know, what was happening within the boundaries of the reservation and if there were any plans to move camps or add camps or those sorts of things,” Cruzan said.
A spokesperson for Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, who oversees the BIA, also declined to comment.
According to the deposition of Jacob O’Connell, the FBI’s supervisor for the western half of North Dakota during the Standing Rock protests, the FBI was infiltrating the NoDAPL movement weeks before the protests gained international media attention and attracted thousands. By August 16, 2016, the FBI had tasked at least one “confidential human source” with gathering information. The FBI eventually had five to 10 informants in the protest camps — “probably closer to 10,” said Bob Perry, assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s Minneapolis field office, which oversees operations in the Dakotas, in another deposition. The number of FBI informants at Standing Rock was first reported by the North Dakota Monitor.
According to Perry, FBI agents told recruits what to collect and what not to collect, saying, “We don’t want to know about constitutionally protected activity.” Perry added, “We would give them essentially a list: ‘Violence, potential violence, criminal activity.’ To some point it was health and safety as well, because, you know, we had an informant placed and in position where they could report on that.”
The deposition of U.S. Marshal Paul Ward said that the FBI also sent agents into the camps undercover. O’Connell denied the claim. “There were no undercover agents used at all, ever.” He confirmed, however, that he and other agents did visit the camps routinely. For the first couple months of the protests, O’Connell himself arrived at the camps soon after dawn most days, wearing outdoorsy clothing from REI or Dick’s Sporting Goods. “Being plainclothes, we could kind of slink around and, you know, do what we had to do,” he said. O’Connell would chat with whomever he ran into. Although he sometimes handed out his card, he didn’t always identify himself as FBI. “If people didn’t ask, I didn’t tell them,” he said.
He said two of the agents he worked with avoided confrontations with protesters, and Ward’s deposition indicates that the pair raised concerns with the U.S. marshal about the safety of entering the camps without local police knowing. Despite its efforts, the FBI uncovered no widespread criminal activity beyond personal drug use and “misdemeanor-type activity,” O’Connell said in his deposition.
The U.S. Marshals Service, as well as Ward, declined to comment, citing ongoing litigation. A spokesperson for the FBI said the press office does not comment on litigation.
Infiltration wasn’t the only activity carried out by federal law enforcement. Customs and Border Protection responded to the protests with its MQ-9 Reaper drone, a model best known for remote airstrikes in Iraq and Afghanistan, which was flying above the encampments by August 22, supplying video footage known as the “Bigpipe Feed.” The drone flew nearly 281 hours over six months, costing the agency $1.5 million. Customs and Border Protection declined a request for comment, citing the litigation.
The biggest beneficiary of federal law enforcement’s spending was Energy Transfer Partners. In fact, the company donated $15 million to North Dakota to help foot the bill for the state’s parallel efforts to quell the disruptions. During the protests, the company’s private security contractor, TigerSwan, coordinated with local law enforcement and passed along information collected by its own undercover and eavesdropping operations.
Energy Transfer Partners also sought to influence the FBI. It was the FBI, however, that initiated its relationship with the company. In his deposition, O’Connell said he showed up at Energy Transfer Partners’ office within a day or two of beginning to investigate the movement and was soon meeting and communicating with executive vice president Joey Mahmoud.
At one point, Mahmoud pointed the FBI toward Indigenous activist and actor Dallas Goldtooth, saying that “he’s the ring leader making this violent,” according to an email an attorney described.
Throughout the protests, federal law enforcement officials pushed to obtain more resources to police the anti-pipeline movement. Perry wanted drones that could zoom in on faces and license plates, and O’Connell thought the FBI should investigate crowd-sourced funding, which could have ties to North Korea, he claimed in his deposition. Both requests were denied.
O’Connell clarified that he was more concerned about China or Russia than North Korea, and it was not just state actors that worried him. “If somebody like George Soros or some of these other well-heeled activists are trying to disrupt things in my turf, I want to know what’s going on,” he explained, referring to the billionaire philanthropist, who conspiracists theorize controls progressive causes.
To the federal law enforcement officials working on the ground at Standing Rock, there was no reason they shouldn’t be able to use all the resources at the federal government’s disposal to confront this latest Indigenous uprising.
“That shit should have been crushed like immediately,” O’Connell said.
In Washington, a missing wolf mystery baffles officials
What happened to the female half of Klickitat County’s two-wolf Big Muddy Pack?
Half-pack: Wildlife biologists collared gray wolf WA109M in January 2021 in Klickitat County. Now his mate has gone missing. Photo: WDFW
By Dawn Stover.February 27, 2024. In April 2023, Columbia Insightreportedthat Southwest Washington had its first gray wolf pack in a century.
The Big Muddy Pack formed when a collared male that wandered into Klickitat County was joined by an un-collared female.
Together they met the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife’s minimum for recognition as a pack: at least two wolves traveling together in winter.
The state wildlife agency’s wolf biologist Gabe Spence told Columbia Insight it was a “big deal” to finally find a pack in the southwestern third of the state.
It seemed likely the pair would produce pups in 2023.
Now wolf experts with the agency aren’t sure the pack still exists.
And some locals are wondering if the wolf may have been intentionally killed.
Missing in action
Since October 2023, the wildlife department’s monthly updates have repeatedly noted that agency experts “conducted monitoring activities” in the Big Muddy Pack’s territory. Those activities have thus far failed to detect the female member of the pack.
The collar on wolf WA109M, the pack’s male, usually transmits his location twice a day. When he’s in rocky or heavily wooded terrain, it can take longer to receive that data.
The state’s wolf team uses the collared wolf’s last known location to look for tracks in snow and check game cameras in the area.
They can also circle over the location with an airplane or helicopter.
The team’s aircraft were grounded by freezing fog and freezing rain for a few days, and team members are still finishing their surveys of all packs in the state.
Data from survey counts, camera footage and reported sightings will be compiled into an annual wolf report that will be released in mid-April, said WDFW statewide wolf specialist Ben Maletzke.
When Columbia Insight spoke with Maletzke on Feb. 14, the team had one more flight to do and some cameras to check, but they hadn’t yet been able to pick up the Big Muddy female wolf.
“We have not been super successful at finding that wolf, but that doesn’t mean she’s not out there,” Maletzke said. It’s possible she is on a hunting foray, he said, or “she may be more camera-shy” than her collared mate.
Maletzke acknowledged there is a “lot of animosity toward wolves in certain areas,” but he said there is no evidence of foul play involving the Big Muddy female.
Staci Lehman, a spokesman for the department, said “the wolf world can be a rough one. It’s not unusual for a wolf to go on a temporary or permanent road trip to new territories or to run into trouble along the way.”
New model for species recovery
If Southwest Washington’s only known pack has split up or the female has died, that would be “a big loss for sure,” said Maletzke.
In the short term, the loss of one wolf may have an impact for the next year or so, he said, “but over the next two to five years, I think we’ll see an influx of wolves down into the South Cascades.”
Maletzke said the state documented a lot of wolf mortalities in 2023 but is still seeing the species recovering in Washington.
The statewide population of wolves and the number of breeding pairs has been increasing for 14 years.
In its Periodic Status Review for the Gray Wolf dated February 2024, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife recommends that the state reclassify wolves from “endangered” to “sensitive,” bypassing the intermediate designation of “threatened.”
The agency says wolves no longer face a serious risk of extinction throughout a significant portion of their range in Washington.
The Wolf Management and Recovery Plan adopted in 2011 calls for the state to consider downlisting wolves from endangered to threatened when there are at least two successful breeding pairs in each of the three recovery regions for three consecutive years.
But that hasn’t happened yet.
Known wolf packs and single wolf territories in Washington at the end of 2022. Map: WDFW
The Southern Cascades and Northwest Coast recovery region currently has no successful breeding pairs and, with the absence of wolf WA109M’s partner, might have lost its only known pair.
However, the state is proposing to jettison those recovery criteria and rely instead on a new model that estimates current and future population dynamics of Washington wolves.
The model estimates a 100% probability that wolves will “colonize” the southwest recovery region by 2030—meaning at least one wolf territory with two or more adults in it.
The downlisting proposal will be presented to the state’s Fish and Wildlife Commission at a meeting next month, and a decision is expected in June.
Both the draft proposal and the final version published this month note that “the first known pack was documented in [the southwest] region as of 2022.”
With limited resources, an Oregon town plans for climate change
This story was produced through a collaboration between the Daily Yonder, which covers rural America, and Nexus Media News, an editorially independent, nonprofit news service covering climate change.
One of the most iconic landmarks in downtown Grants Pass, Oregon, is a 100-year-old sign that arcs over the main street with the phrase “It’s the Climate” scrawled across it.
To an outsider, it’s an odd slogan in this rural region, where comments about the climate – or rather, climate change – can be met with apprehension. But for locals, it’s a nod to an era when the “climate” only referred to Grants Pass’ warm, dry summers and mild winters when snow coats the surrounding mountains but rarely touches down in the city streets.
Now, the slogan takes on a different meaning.
In May 2023, the Grants Pass City Council passed a one-of-a-kind sustainability plan that, if implemented, would transition publicly owned buildings and vehicles to renewable energy, diversifying their power sources in case of natural disaster.
While passing the sustainability plan in this largely Republican county was an enormous feat on its own, actually paying for the energy projects proves to be Grants Pass’ biggest challenge yet.
The exterior of City Hall in Grants Pass on November 28, 2023.
Claire Carlson / The Daily Yonder
“There are grants out there, but I don’t think we’re the only community out there looking for grants to help pay for some of these things,” said J.C. Rowley, finance director for the city of Grants Pass. Some project examples outlined in their sustainability plan include installing electric vehicle charging stations downtown and solar panels at two city-owned landfills, and converting park streetlights to LED.
Rural communities face bigger hurdles when accessing grant funding because they don’t have the staff or budget that cities often do to produce competitive grant applications. This can slow down the implementation of projects like the ones laid out in the Grants Pass sustainability plan.
And time is not something Grants Pass — or any other community — has to spare.
Global climate models show the planet’s average annual temperature increasing by about 6.3° Fahrenheit by 2100 if “business-as-usual” practices continue. These practices mean no substantive climate change mitigation policy, continued population growth, and unabated greenhouse gas emissions throughout the 21st century — practices driven by the most resource-consumptive countries, namely, the United States.
In southwest Oregon, this temperature increase means hotter summers and less snow in the winters, affecting the region’s water resources, according to a U.S. Forest Service analysis. This could mean longer and more severe wildfire seasons.
The “It’s the Climate” sign was first hung on July 20, 1920, to promote the temperate weather of Grants Pass.
Claire Carlson / The Daily Yonder
In Roseburg, Oregon, about 70 miles north of Grants Pass, a 6.3°F increase would mean the city’s yearly average of 36 days of below-freezing temperatures would decrease to few or none, according to the analysis. Grants Pass would suffer a similar fate, drastically changing the climate it’s so famous for.
Grants Pass has a population of 39,000 and is the hub of one of the smallest metropolitan statistical areas in the U.S. The metro contains just one county, Josephine, which has a population of under 90,000, nearly half of whom live outside urbanized areas. Over half of the county’s land is owned by the Bureau of Land Management or National Forest, and it contains a section of the federal Rogue River Scenic Waterway.
“In the event of a natural disaster, we are far more likely to get isolated,” said Allegra Starr, an Americorps employee who was the driving force behind the Grants Pass sustainability plan. “I’ve heard stories of communities that were less isolated than us running out of fuel [during power outages].”
Building resilience in the face of disaster is a main priority of the plan, which recommends 14 projects related to green energy, waste disposal, transportation, and tree plantings in city limits. All of the projects focus on improvements to city-owned buildings, vehicles, and operations.
In partnership with Starr and the Grants Pass public works department, a volunteer task force of community members spent one year researching and writing the sustainability plan. In spring 2023, it was approved by the Grants Pass City Council.
Now, the public works department is in the grants-seeking stage, and they stand to benefit from the influx of climate cash currently coming from the federal government.
Money for sustainability, if you can get it
In 2022, the Biden administration passed the single largest bill on clean energy and climate action in U.S. history: the Inflation Reduction Act, which funnels $145 billion to renewable energy and climate action programs. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, passed in 2021, allocates $57.9 billion to clean energy and power projects.
“It’s almost like drinking through a fire hose with the grant opportunities, which is a curse and a blessing,” said Vanessa Ogier, Grants Pass city council member. Ogier joined the council in 2021 with environmental and social issues as her top priority and was one of the sustainability plan’s biggest proponents.
Grants Pass city council member Vanessa Ogier at City Hall on November 28, 2023.
Claire Carlson / The Daily Yonder
But competing against larger communities for the grants funded through these federal laws is a struggle for smaller communities like Grants Pass.
“I really don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, but when a small community only has one grant writer and they have to focus on water systems, fire, dispatch, fleet services, and they’re torn in all these different ways, it can be difficult to wrangle and organize all these opportunities and filter if they’re applicable, if we would even qualify,” Ogier said.
Having a designated grant-writing team, which is common in larger cities, would be a huge help in Grants Pass, Ogier said.
A 2023 study by Headwaters Economics found that lower-capacity communities – ones with fewer staff and limited funding – were unable to compete against higher-capacity, typically urban communities with resources devoted to writing competitive grant applications.
“[There are] rural communities that don’t have community development, that don’t have economic development, that don’t have grant writers, that may only have one or two paid staff,” said Karen Chase, senior manager for community strategy at Energy Trust, an Oregon-based nonprofit that helps people transition their homes and businesses to renewable energy. Chase was a member of the volunteer task force that put together the Grants Pass sustainability plan.
When the Inflation Reduction Act money started rolling in, many of the rural communities Chase works with did not have plans that laid out “shovel-ready” energy and climate resiliency projects, which is a requirement of much of the funding. Grants Pass’ sustainability plan should give them a leg-up when applying for grants that require shovel-ready projects, according to Chase.
“Most of my rural communities pretty much lost out,” she said.
This is despite the approximately $87 billion of Inflation Reduction Act money classified as rural-relevant, rural-stipulated, or rural-exclusive funding, according to an analysis from the Brookings Institute. Rural outreach is part of the Biden administration’s larger goal to put money into rural communities that historically have been left out by state and federal investments.
But this outreach isn’t perfect. Most of the federal grants available to rural communities still have match requirements, which are a set amount of money awardees must contribute to a grant-funded project.
The Brookings Institute analysis, which also looked at rural funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the CHIPS and Science Act, found that “over half [of the rural-significant grants programs] require or show a preference for matching funds, and less than one-third offer flexibility or a waiver.”
Of the rural-exclusive and rural-stipulated programs, less than one-third of the total grants offer match waivers or flexibility to reduce the match requirement. This makes getting those grants a lot harder for rural communities with smaller budgets.
Help from the outside
To address limited staffing, in 2021 the Grants Pass public works department applied to be a host site for an Americorps program run out of the University of Oregon.
The program, coined the Resource Assistance for Rural Environments (RARE) program, assigns graduate students to rural Oregon communities for 11 months to work on economic development, sustainability planning, and food systems initiatives. An Americorps member was assigned to Grants Pass to work as a sustainability planner from September 2022 to August 2023.
Kyrrha Sevco, business operations supervisor for the Grants Pass public works department, at City Hall on November 28, 2023.
Claire Carlson / The Daily Yonder
Without the Americorps member, Grants Pass officials say there’s no way the plan would have been written.
“She came in and learned about the city and the operations and the technical aspects of it and was able to really understand it and talk about that,” said Kyrrha Sevco, business operations supervisor for the public works department. “That’s hard to do.”
Bringing outsiders in can be a tricky undertaking in a rural community, but RARE program director Titus Tomlinson said they collaborate with the host sites to make the transition for their members as smooth as possible.
“When we place a member, we place them with a trusted entity in a rural community,” Tomlinson said. “[The site supervisor] helps them meet and engage with other leaders in the community so that they’ve got some ground to stand on right out of the gate.”
Each participating community must provide a $25,000 cash match that goes toward the approximately $50,000 needed to pay, train, and mentor the Americorps member, according to the RARE website. Communities struggling to meet this cash match are eligible for financial assistance.
Grants Pass paid $18,500 for their portion of the RARE Americorps grant.
Director of public works Jason Canady at City Hall on November 28, 2023.
Claire Carlson / The Daily Yonder
Allegra Starr, the Americorps employee, no longer works in Grants Pass since completing her 11-month term. In her stead, a committee of seven has been created to monitor and report to the city council on the progress of the plan’s implementation.
Much of this implementation work will fall on the director of the public works department, Jason Canady, and the business operations supervisor, Kyrrha Sevco.
“There has to be that departmental person who’s really carrying that lift and that load,” said Rowley, the Grants Pass finance director. “It’s the Kyrrhas and Jasons of the world who are leading the charge for their own department like public works.”
Now, Canady and Sevco are laying the groundwork for multiple solar projects. Eventually, they hope to bring to life what local high school student, and member of the original volunteer sustainability task force, Kayle Palmore, dreamed of in an essay titled “A Day in 2045,” which envisions bike lanes, wide sidewalks, solar panels, and electric vehicle charging stations on every street corner.
“A smile spreads across your face as you think of how much you love this beautiful city,” Palmore writes.
