Renewable energy vs. cultural preservation - Solar, Wind and Land: Conflicts in Renewable Energy Development - page 121

income to tribes, they can also alter the landscapes of reservation lands
and bring environmental and health hazards with them. Understandably,
these bittersweet arrangements have fostered uneasy love-hate relationships
between the energy industry and some tribes.
As renewable energy technologies have advanced in the past decade,
developers and policymakers have once again begun looking more earnestly
to Indian trust lands for energy resources. These reservation lands, once
deemed too rugged and remote for profitable conventional development, are
now garnering attention as valuable potential wind and solar energy sites.
According to one estimate, wind energy resources on Indian trust lands in
the continental United States alone are capable of producing as much as 535
billion kWh of electric power per year—an amount equal to 14 percent of all
U.S. electricity generation. 5 Solar energy resources on U.S. Indian trust lands
could produce up to 17,600 billion kWh of electricity per year, or roughly 4.5
times the total of all of that country's electric generation in 2004. 6
Wind and solar energy development on tribal lands can potentially do
much to improve the lives of indigenous groups. It can provide additional
revenue to tribes, whether in the form of lease payments from outside
developers or direct electricity sales revenues for tribes that develop projects
on their own. New employment opportunities also often accompany these
projects, and such jobs tend to pay decent salaries. And renewable energy
systems can potentially electrify homes and communities that are currently
in the dark on Indian reservations in far-flung areas that have limited access
to the power grid. 7
Renewable energy development is also arguably more compatible with
the values and belief structures of many indigenous groups than other
common forms of tribal revenue-raising such as casinos and coal mines.
Although there is great diversity among indigenous beliefs, 8 some common
threads relating to the natural environment seem to run through most such
cultures. In the words of one scholar, “most native peoples do not think
of nature in exclusively economic terms, as a commodity to be exploited
at will.” 9 Instead, they place exceptionally high value on sustainable living
and harmony with nature. 10 For obvious reasons, renewable energy strat-
egies seem to better respect such harmony than strategies that rely on the
extraction and burning of fossil fuels. The sustainable and more ecolog-
ically-friendly characteristics of renewable energy development can thus
make these projects a particularly appealing enterprise for some tribes. 11
Even wind and solar resources themselves are revered in some indig-
enous cultures, which can sometimes make these groups particularly open
to renewable energy development. For example, the sun has religious
significance among several Indian tribes in the United States. According to
a researcher of this topic:
it is a common characteristic among American Indians to revere the
sun and to value its energy-creating capacities—whether it is for the