“For years, scientists have warned about what can happen when climate change supercharges extreme weather events. This is exactly what they meant,” the Milwaukee Sentinel Journal reported, describing the disaster as a 1,000-year flood.

Now, more than a dozen youth from Wisconsin, including Indigenous youth, are filing a lawsuit against the state’s utility regulator to force it to consider climate change when evaluating new fossil fuel projects.

Currently, Wisconsin law blocks the Public Service Commission from taking air pollution – including carbon dioxide emissions – into consideration during the permitting process. Fifteen children and teenagers, ages eight to 17, filed a lawsuit Friday against the utility regulator alleging that the law violates their constitutional rights to life and liberty.

The case is part of a growing climate litigation movement led in part by Indigenous youth. Twelve-year-old Miahlin B., who goes by her tribal name Waazakone, and her three siblings joined the lawsuit because climate change is eroding their traditional ways of life. The children harvest wild rice, which is sacred to their communities, but warming temperatures are making it harder to grow rice successfully. They tap sugar maple trees to make maple sugar, but last year came up dry in part because of a shorter winter season. They fish for walleye and sturgeon, but both fish populations are shrinking as waters warm.

Waazakone told Grist she wants to protect her community for future generations. She describes herself as a water protector, explaining that caring for water is part of her responsibility as a female member of the Little Traverse Bay Band of Odawa Indians. “We need the government to understand that clean water and air is a human right and our most valuable resource,” she said.

The youth plaintiffs are also challenging a Wisconsin law that prohibits the Public Service Commission from mandating more renewable energy from local utilities. Right now, about three-quarters of the state’s electricity generation comes from fossil fuels like oil and gas. That’s on par with the national average but lags far behind states like South Dakota, where more than 75% of its state energy production comes from renewables.

The plaintiffs are represented by Midwest Environmental Advocates, a Madison-based environmental non-profit law centre, and Our Children’s Trust, an Oregon-based non-profit dedicated to advancing youth-led climate litigation. The latter is perhaps best known for its successful litigation against the state of Montana in Held v. Montana. In December, the state’s Supreme Court affirmed that Montana youth have a constitutional right to “a clean and healthful environment” and concluded that the state should take greenhouse gas emissions into account when considering new fossil fuel projects. The state hasn’t considered any new oil and gas projects since then, so it remains to be seen what that will look like in practice.

“Wisconsin doesnʻt have any fossil fuel extraction like Montana, but they do continue to have an electricity sector that’s dominated by fossil fuels. Itʻs the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the state,” said Our Children’s Trust attorney Nate Bellinger, who is representing the Wisconsin plaintiffs.

The non-profit has filed dozens of lawsuits in the United States over the last decade and a half, including one against the Trump administrationʻs reversal of former president Joe Bidenʻs climate policies. Last year, they helped secure a landmark settlement in Hawaii with the case Navahine v. Hawaiʻi Department of Transportation, where youth plaintiffs contended that the state’s commitment to expanding infrastructure to support gas-powered cars and disregard for cleaner options violated their constitutional right to “a clean and healthful environment.” There, the state agreed to develop a plan to zero out carbon emissions from its transportation sector by 2045.

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In Wisconsin, the constitutional right to a clean environment isn’t as explicit as in Montana or Hawaii, where there is language in the state constitution spelling out that right. Wisconsin Democrats tried unsuccessfully earlier this year to add that language to the state constitution. But the attorneys in this new case are arguing that a stable climate system is necessary to achieve the constitutional rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Maria Antonia Tigre, director of global climate change litigation at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, says lawsuits like this take on new salience in light of the Trump administration’s rollback of climate action. “It’s even more important to bring these cases now given the current state of the United States’ stance on climate change in general,” she says.

A spokesman from the Wisconsin Public Service Commission declined to comment on pending litigation.

As state leaders grapple with mounting costs of flood recovery and plead for federal assistance, Waazakone hopes that her lawsuit forces them to take climate change seriously. “I want the state of Wisconsin to realize that you cannot allow businesses and people to continue to erode our futures,” she says.

This article originally appeared in Grist. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Grist is a non-profit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. 

The post The youth-led climate litigation movement keeps growing appeared first on Corporate Knights.

But that didn’t happen, thanks to the advocacy of Murrawah Maroochy Johnson, a 29-year-old Wirdi woman of the Birri Gubba Nation, who led a lawsuit against the coal company in 2021, and won.

The case was groundbreaking in many ways, but perhaps most strikingly, Johnson’s work helped set a new legal precedent that pushed members of the court to travel to where First Nations people lived in order to hear their testimonies and perspectives, instead of expecting Indigenous people to travel long distances to settler courts. The lawsuit was also the first to successfully use Queensland’s new human rights law to challenge coal mining, arguing that greenhouse gas emissions from the Waratah coal mine would harm Indigenous Peoples and their cultural traditions. Because of the litigation, the mine’s permit was denied in 2022, and its appeal failed last year.

Because of her work, Johnson is now among several of this year’s winners of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize honouring global grassroots environmental activism.

The last few years have been transformative for Johnson, who is the mother of a toddler and expecting her second baby in a few weeks. Grist spoke with her to learn about what motivates her, how she views the climate crisis, and what other young Indigenous activists can learn from her work.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You have been working on behalf of your people since you were 19 years old. What drives you to do this work? 

It’s definitely not a choice. First contact here was just 235 years ago. At that point, terra nullius was declared, which said that the land belonged to nobody, which essentially means that the first interaction with colonizing invading powers was one of dehumanization. They saw us here, but to say that the land belonged to no one really says that we are subhuman. They deemed us of a status where we couldn’t own our own land even though they saw us here inhabiting our own lands, living and thriving. And so there’s a long legacy of resistance in first-contact frontier wars but also through advocacy over the generations. I’m just a young person who gets to inherit that great legacy.

I was raised by very strong parents. My father, my grandfather, my great grandparents, were all resistance fighters. There’s a lot of responsibility that comes with inheriting that legacy and feeling like you need to do your part. But also, I feel like it’s not a choice because at the end of the day, what’s real is our people, our law, our custom – no matter the colonial apparatus attempts to disappear us, dilute us, absorb us into homogenous Australian mainstream and complete the assimilation process. To me, that’s continued injustice that our people face. And every First Nations person, I feel, every Indigenous person, has an obligation to resist that as well. Because at the end of the day, we First Nations people here in Australia, we are the oldest continuous living culture on the planet, and what comes with that is the fact that we have the oldest living creation stories, we have the oldest living law and custom. That in and of itself is so significant that we can’t just allow it to be washed away. I think that there has to be a continued active effort, by my generation and all future generations, to maintain our ways.

For us, colonial, Western, white contact is just such a small blip in time for how long our people have been here and how long we’ve maintained our ways and law and custom and culture. We have to collectively acknowledge that we have a duty of care and responsibility to maintain the way of our people. I’m really proud of being able to inherit that and also having a responsibility to protect and maintain it.

Can you tell me about your perspective on climate change? 

It’s always called human-induced climate change, but I think that that term doesn’t allow for colonial powers to be held accountable, or big polluters. I think it’s actually more accurate to say that it’s colonial-induced climate change, because it’s actually the process of colonization violently extracting and exploiting the resources of Indigenous nations, people’s land, especially in the Global South, that’s resulted in the crisis of climate change that we face today.

I see climate change not just as a crisis, but also an opportunity. In one sense, if what remains of our cultural knowledge is so intimately dependent on our land, and having access to our lands and waters, then climate change is a huge threat. For example, in the Torres Strait and throughout the Pacific, what do you actually do when your country, your homelands, your territory disappears because of the impacts of climate change? What does that mean for our identity that actually derives from being the people of that unique country and that unique place? Climate change could really signal finality of our diverse and distinct and unique cultural identities as Indigenous and First Nations people in the sense that land may become so changed or so disappeared that our people are no longer able to resonate or recognize or identify with it anymore or learn from it anymore. So that’s really scary.

But I think the other side is an opportunity because climate change creates a sense of urgency. It’s that sense of urgency that is going to be pushing our peoples to work collectively as Indigenous and First Nations people around the world, to highlight the importance of the shift required to address climate change, but also to recentre our traditional systems of caring for country and sustainability and living in harmony with the land as a solution to climate change – really combat this normalization of colonial history and the global system and power systems as unquestionable.

That reminds me of how, on the video announcing your Goldman Prize, you mentioned that “there’s a lot to be learned from our ways of being.” Can you expand on that idea? 

We’re at this moment where we can really take the best of our traditional ways of being and really use that to influence the decisions that we make about our future. What real climate justice is, to me, is really drawing on the greatest strengths that we have in terms of our traditional law and custom, using that as a guidance system in terms of the decisions we make about what the future looks like.

If you’re going to shift the entire global economy and global structure of how business is done, then you want to be talking to the experts. So you want to be talking to First Nations people and knowledge holders. I think climate change will ultimately lead those who are committed to the current system to be forced to be exposed to the reality that a lot of First Nations people have been living with for a long time: that this current global system doesn’t work for us. In the context of capitalism, it’s designed to work against us and facilitate outcomes for very few.

Climate change is here because of the current global systems, and that means that, eventually, the system will become obsolete. It already is when it comes to the survival of humanity. I think that ultimately people will come to see that the system doesn’t work for them. It’s never been designed to work for the masses.

So, I really see a huge shift toward leadership from First Nations people. Indigenous, or non-Indigenous, people – this is my hope here in Australia – start to act in accordance with traditional principles of caring for country law and custom and really reestablishing old ways, governing ways, of these lands. I think that’s the only way to really address climate change. And maybe I’ve got a huge imagination, but I see it as part of my responsibility to work as hard as I can toward that goal of creating that reality, one in which a modern society essentially adheres to First Nations law and custom in a modern context.

You’ve talked a lot about the importance of drawing from traditional knowledge. When I think about what it means to be Indigenous, I think about both the knowledge we have and also the challenge in bringing that forward because of how colonialism has eroded our ties to both culture and land. What would you say to Indigenous people who care about land and culture but are feeling disconnected from both? How do they find their way back? 

This is one that I actually really struggle with sometimes because in the Australian context here, we had the Stolen Generation, when Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their parents and indoctrinated. So you have whole generations that have been dispossessed of their cultural inheritance, of their families, and also their peoples have been dispossessed of future generations as well. The colonial process was a finely tuned machine by the time it came through the South Pacific and Australia. In one sense, we’re fortunate that it was only just over 230 years ago first contact happened, but at the same time, this colonial apparatus was so finely tuned that they didn’t need as long to do as much damage as they’ve been able to do.

Being in a settler colony, we’re dealing with mass incarceration, mass suicide rates, and the disappearing of our people. It feels like it’s hard to catch up. We can’t take a break or catch our breath because we’re dealing with the very real, frontier issues of losing our people. But at the same time, what’s required for healing and to actually rebuild our cultural strength is time. And actually being able to take the time to be on country, to sit with country, to learn, and to reconnect.

It’s this really delicate tug of war that all First Peoples who have been subject to colonialism have to face, and we have to sort of grapple with on a daily basis: What do we put our energy into? Am I fighting forced child removals and assimilation on the daily? Am I fighting the education system? Am I doing land and country work and going through the legal system? Or am I just sort of operating as an individual, sovereign person, under our own law and custom and that’s how I resist and maintain my strength? It’s so vast in terms of how we have to split ourselves up in a way to deal with the issues at hand, which essentially is the disappearance of our people, but also our way of life and custom.

At the end of the day, for me, I just have to take heed from my ancestors and my own people that we’ve seen the end of the world before. My great grandparents and their generation saw the end of their world already, and they’ve been fighting. They were in the physical frontier on the front line and survived that, and saw everything that they knew to be ripped away from them. So I have to just acknowledge that I’m very lucky to be born in the generation I’m born in, with so much more opportunity. But at the same time, there is that huge gap in familiarity with culture and our ways.

Before your successful litigation against the Warratah mine, you fought against the Carmichael mine, filing lawsuit after lawsuit. But the mine still opened in 2021 and is now in operation. How do you handle such setbacks, and the grief of climate trauma and colonialism? What would you say to other Indigenous activists who are dealing with similar challenges? 

Being a young person, going through that, it’s really hard. You’re up against the actual powers that be of the colonial apparatus: the state government, the federal government, the mining lobby itself, and this idea that our traditional lands should be destroyed for extraction and exploitation for the benefit of everybody else. For the benefit of the state in terms of royalties, and for the benefit of the rest of settler Australia, where we, the people and our lands, are the collateral damage. And so for a long time I was very heartbroken, very depressed. For a long time I didn’t know what my next steps were.

But the reality is that I feel very much so guarded by my ancestors and all our people. I had time to mourn and get back on my feet before the opportunity to join the Youth Verdict case against the Waratah coal mine came along.

All I can say is we kept going. We’re fighting for our people, every single day. And something that I was always reminded of along the way was that even though it might not be the silver bullet that makes significant change, it’s still important that we create our own legacy of resistance and that we do our best every day to maintain what we hold dear.

We’ve got to do the work because we’ve got to do the work. It stands on its own and it’s our obligation as traditional custodians every day to do the work of maintaining and protecting country. We put on the record that we don’t consent, this isn’t free, prior and informed consent as we are entitled under the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. And every step of the way, just maintaining that resistance, even if it’s just telling our story and challenging the prevailing, dominant, colonial narrative, I think is important to do every single day.

So in terms of advice, I think it’s to keep going. Take a break when you need to. And have a cry, because I cried for, like, eight years straight, but I think just knowing what some of my own people have been through and the horrors that they had to deal with, it’s the responsibility that we inherit to maintain the fight and continue on as best we can.

We might not be able to solve everything in one or two generations. But again, we’re the oldest living culture on the face of the earth. So, in that respect, we’ve been here the longest and, as long as my generation and our future generations maintain our own identities, cultural identities, and resistance as best as we can, we’ll be here long into the future as well.

This article originally appeared in Grist. Read the original story here. 

The post ‘Keep going’: How an Indigenous woman fought a coal mine and won appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Attorneys familiar with Federal Indian law say it’s uncommon for U.S. courts to side so clearly with tribal nations and actually expel developers trespassing on their land. But observers also see the ruling as part of a broader trend: Gone are the days when developers could ignore Indigenous rights with impunity. Now, even if projects that threaten Native land and cultural resources ultimately proceed, they may come with years-long delays that tack on millions of dollars. As more companies look to build wind and solar farms or mine minerals for renewable energy, failing to recognize Indigenous sovereignty could make the clean energy transition a lot more expensive and much farther away.

“I think tribes are starting to see that they have more leverage than they thought, and that they’ve previously exercised, over all this infrastructure that’s on their land,” said Pilar Thomas, an attorney, member of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe of Arizona and former deputy director of the Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs at the U.S. Department of Energy. “They want to make sure that they’re getting their fair share.”

Rick Tallman, a program manager at Colorado School of Mines’ Center for Native American Mining and Energy Sovereignty who has spent more than two decades working on financing and consulting for clean energy projects, calls the Osage Nation ruling a wake-up call.

“If you’re going to develop energy in the U.S. you’ve got to do it with the support of tribal communities,” he said.

According to Tallman, investors don’t like uncertainty. He said a lot of infrastructure funders are very conservative and won’t back a project unless they are confident it will succeed, which includes getting the buy-in of affected Indigenous Nations. There’s no upper limit to how much the project could cost if investors don’t get it right.

One analysis from researchers at First Peoples Worldwide at the University of Colorado at Boulder estimated that resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline drove the project cost upwards of $7.5 billion. That includes more than $4.3 billion in divestment from banks backing the project and nearly $1.4 billion in additional operating costs, not to mention millions spent to hire law enforcement.

Marion Werkheiser, founding partner of Cultural Heritage Partners, said the costs are so high that some renewable energy projects never even get off the ground, citing the Cape Wind project in Nantucket Sound that was opposed by members of the Wampanoag Tribe.

And it’s not just a U.S. trend; Indigenous peoples around the world are fighting to enforce their rights, especially the right to free, prior, and informed consent to projects on their land — a concept enshrined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. However, the U.S. hasn’t codified that into law, and compliance globally is spotty.

“Renewable energies are actually not that good in respecting Indigenous rights,” said Genevieve Rose from the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs. “They have this feeling that because they bring up something good, something green, that they are automatically a good thing.”

If you’re going to develop energy in the U.S. you’ve got to do it with the support of tribal communities.

-Rick Tallman, a program manager with Colorado School of Mines

But her colleague David Berger said there’s more awareness and resistance from Indigenous peoples, and companies are being forced to factor in those costs. He pointed to Norway, where the state-owned company that developed an illegal wind farm has agreed to pay Indigenous Sámi people about $675,000 every year for the next 25 years for violating their rights. “What’s good is you have that legal structure so communities can push back,” Berger said.

Wesley Furlong, an Anchorage-based senior staff attorney at the Native American Rights Fund, said more tribes are filing lawsuits in the U.S., partly because the legal landscape is changing. For example, the National Historic Preservation Act, a federal law managing the preservation of historic resources, has been around since 1966, but it was only in 1999 that the federal government codified regulations related to communicating with tribes about projects that affect them, and the rules weren’t fully in effect until 2004. Some tribes are just now learning about their rights.

Another reason for the increase in lawsuits is because some tribal nations have more resources to fund litigation. “Indian gaming has been a game-changer for tribes to be able to raise revenue and hire attorneys,” Furlong said.

That combination of more legal tools, more financial resources and more education about Native rights, Furlong said, has led to more tribes getting involved in energy developments on their traditional and ancestral territories, including lands with historic connections and are not owned by a tribe. And he only expects that to continue: Most of the U.S. reserves of lithium, copper, cobalt, and nickel — metals key to the clean energy transition — are within 35 miles of Federal Indian Reservations, according to a study by the investment firm MSCI.

That’s something renewable energy developers need to be aware of, said Thomas. “I am a staunch believer that if you are within spitting distance of a tribe that you should be engaged in outreach to the tribe,” she said.

Not every project is going to get buy-in, she adds, but she encourages companies to have patience and continue to reach out to tribes even if they don’t respond. Furlong from the Native American Rights Fund said project proponents may erroneously assume that tribes will always be opposed, forgetting that tribal governments want what’s in the best interest of their citizens.

Bottom line, it’s much less costly for companies to invest in tribal consultations and get them right from the get-go, says Daniel Cardenas, the head of the National Tribal Energy Association and a member of the Pit River Tribe who has consulted with tribes and companies regarding fossil fuel projects. “The cost of engagement is almost nothing compared to the cost of what they’re going to have to pay [if they don’t do it right],” he said of developers.

Werkheiser has seen some progress, with some banks, insurance companies, and energy developers adopting Indigenous peoples policies to guide their investments and some companies undergoing voluntary certifications to show their projects are ethical and respectful of Indigenous rights. “Financial institutions are recognizing that this is a real business risk and they’re building it into the cost of capital for these companies,” she said.

But overall, change is slow, she said.

“For the most part, the renewable energy developers are repeating the mistakes that fossil fuels developers have made over the years,” she said. “They’re not engaging with tribes early as potential partners and information sources during their planning process, and they are basically deferring their own relationship with tribes to the federal government.”

That’s a mistake, said David Kane, a consultant who leads WindHorse Strategic Initiatives. Energy companies often mistakenly perceive tribal chairs as though they are the equivalent of small-town mayors, rather than recognizing them as heads of state.

I think tribes are starting to see that they have more leverage than they thought.

-Pilar Thomas, an attorney

Because of that, he says, companies often disrespect tribes from the beginning by sending lower-level representatives to liaise with them, and many companies may never even step foot on a reservation or go before tribal councils. Developers often complain that it takes a long time to build relationships with tribal members but Kane says it’s better to do so before projects get underway.

“There’s still a lot of mistrust of white men and with good reason,” he said. And the energy industry, including renewables, he said, is still predominantly white and male.

Another challenge is that sometimes companies assume what will work with one tribe will work with another, said Cardenas from the National Tribal Energy Association.

“There’s 574 tribes, and each one operates differently and independently,” he said. “So if you know one tribe, you just know one tribe.”

He thinks tribal nations should be seen as partners, even sponsoring partners, with shared equity in the developments. There’s growing interest: Over the past two decades, tribal nations have pursued hundreds of clean energy projects, with the Inflation Reduction Act recently increasing funding for such projects.

But in the meantime, costly litigation continues. Last week in the U.S., four tribal nations sued a developer to prevent a $10 billion wind energy transmission line from going into operation. And in Oklahoma, the Osage Nation is now seeking damages from Enel. A judge still needs to decide how much that will cost the company.

This article originally appeared in Grist. Read the original story here.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org.

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