If you know where to go in Death Valley National Park, Wrangell-St. Elias Park and Preserve, Glacier Peak Wilderness, or Bears Ears National Monument, you might come across the remnants of a tramway or a pile of mine tailings or a rusted tank. The artifacts of industrial activity can be startling in the otherwise tranquil natural scene. But there is no mistake. Despite being miles inside a national park, a designated wilderness, or some other conservation area, you can encounter mining claims—they are everywhere. With resource development on public lands once again a matter of national debate, it has become increasingly important to look back and ask: How did protected places and mining get so entangled?

One hundred and fifty years ago, Congress established two foundational precedents for our national landscape a mere 10 weeks apart: the Yellowstone National Park Act, setting in motion “America’s best idea,” and the General Mining Act, which opened public lands to mining exploration. Between March and May, it seems, President Ulysses S. Grant swung from one apex of the pendulum to the other, making it impossible to settle and privatize the public land in Yellowstone while making it easy to extract valuable minerals from almost anywhere they were found without paying a cent. While these decisions seem diametrically opposed, they have shared priorities that ushered in a new land regime in the U.S., based on a fundamental notion of American land defined by a history of Native expropriation, economic liberalism, and segregated land uses.

On March 1, 1872, President Grant signed the Yellowstone National Park Act. It “set apart as a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people” some two million acres in the northwestern corner of Wyoming, leaning just a bit into Idaho and Montana. In this remarkable landscape of geysers and bison and bright sulfuric pools, no one was permitted to settle or occupy the land. The resources—timber, minerals, and the like—were to be kept “from injury or spoliation” and all natural spectacles would be retained in “their natural condition.” No “wanton destruction” of game or fish “for the purposes of merchandise or profit” would be permitted.

But on May 10th, President Grant enacted a bill that has facilitated wanton destruction across many of the country’s public lands and created massive wealth for a few. The General Mining Act of 1872 declared all the U.S. public domain where valuable minerals might be found to be “free and open to exploration and purchase.” This legislation legitimized mining on all surveyed or unsurveyed lands for personal or corporate gain. (The mining that preceded it, such as the California Gold Rush of 49er fame, was simply overlooked trespassing.) The law remains in effect, an emblem to the exploitation of natural wealth for profit as the highest possible good assigned to the natural world.

Both laws thrummed with the cadence of dispossession. From the earliest days of the republic, the nation’s land policy was to take from Indigenous peoples—by war, by treaty, by duplicity or fraud, it did not matter—and then transfer into the private hands of yeoman farmers producing food and virtue on homesteads scattered across the continent. These 1872 laws were partly made possible by the fact that the federal government had ended treaty-making in 1871. Underneath the seemingly empty “pleasuring-grounds” of Yellowstone were the forced absences of Apsaalooké and Shoshone peoples and many other Indigenous Nations in Yellowstone and subsequent public parks.

Similarly, the great mineral rushes, both before and after the 1872 law, routinely invaded Indigenous territory, often in explicit violation of treaty agreements. This stripped land, wealth, and health from Native peoples and provoked ongoing violence, exemplifying a common North American story. The 1872 laws made land either a museum or a sacrifice zone, not a place to live. National parks—and later, national forests, monuments, grasslands, or wildlife refuges—and mining sites, once Native homes, quickly redefined those residents as trespassers.

Both laws also hailed to corporate boards. The Northern Pacific Railroad’s tracks were not laid down yet, but the route took it near Yellowstone’s northern boundary. Like many of the transcontinental railroads, the Northern Pacific faced financial trouble and guarded its territory fiercely from competition. Jay Cooke, the head of the company, saw the possible park as a future revenue stream, and used his influence to encourage Congress to create the park, further entangling corporate interests with national parks.

The General Mining Law benefited entrepreneurial and corporate development in a much more straightforward way. Obtaining land for mining was simple: locate valuable minerals; claim and take them. If they wanted, the mineral developers could also pay a low fee of $2.50 per acre for placer claims and $5 per acre for lode claims to buy the land. These easy terms conformed to a guiding belief of nineteenth-century economic liberalism- that the government was supposed to facilitate economic development (and then stand back). The federal government and U.S. taxpayers receive no royalties from the minerals subject to the mining law. Over the next century, an area almost the size of Connecticut dropped into private hands on the cheap. Although popular culture depicts a lone grizzled man with a mule and a pan bent over a creek, mining looked much more like underpaid workers with drills rat-a-tatting in the deep dark of western mountains.

In contrast to the conservation and recreation opportunities offered by the creation of the national parks, the General Mining Law brought about major environmental harms, including terrible waste, and continues to do so. Although few large-scale hardrock mining operations have launched in recent decades, 100 million acres of public land can still be explored and, if minerals are located, the process of claiming and taking them is largely the same as it was in the 1870s. Though Congress put a moratorium on patenting the claims in the 1990s, ending outright ownership, extracting minerals does not require land ownership- and mining claims close off the lands to other uses.

Meanwhile, environmental regulations and the bonds posted to support reclamation often are insufficient. To date, more than 50 billion tons of waste have been left behind after mining and processing, harming all manner of lakes and lands surrounding mines. The law’s rare reforms include a leasing system for some resources (like coal and gas) and improved environmental remediation. But the General Mining Law enjoys strong allies in resource-dependent congressional districts who have resisted the few calls for fundamental reform, such as fair royalties and a fund to clean up abandoned mines, that have popped up from time to time.

How can we square Ulysses S. Grant’s contradictory imperatives—to protect the natural world at all costs versus to exploit it without concern? In addition to the way both laws alienated land from its original inhabitants, they reveal a fundamental idea that animates American culture and law: that land is meant to be owned or controlled. From that perspective, tonnage and tourism, price per ounce and entrance fees, show themselves as simply different forms of commodification. While open-pit mines differ from the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River, both require, according to the prevailing ethos, an owner or management goals approved by Congress.

One hundred and fifty years later, we find it hard to conceive of any other way. People have inhabited the continent since time immemorial, but this system is only a century-and-a-half old: Change is possible.

The post What Do Mining Claims and National Parks Have in Common? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the spring of 2019, residents of eastern California’s Owens Valley were on the fight. As is usual in that part of the world—where a century of aggressive water extraction by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has left the valley dry—they were angry about a water project dreamed up by some Southern Californians.

But this was a new kind of fight. Premium Energy Holdings LLC, a small, Walnut-based energy company, had filed for a preliminary federal permit to explore the development of an enormous pumped energy storage facility to be built in the mountainous terrain near Bishop for the benefit of Southern California utilities. The facility’s complex of dams, pipelines, and hydroelectric generation would have flooded sizeable sections of the John Muir Wilderness, destroying critical habitat of several endangered species and beloved recreational landscapes in the process.

After locals submitted scathing feedback during a mandated public comment period, Premium withdrew the federal application associated with the project. But in the three years since, the company has filed for preliminary federal permits for three similar, billion-dollar energy storage facilities in other remote sections of California. Additional pumped storage projects are moving forward near Joshua Tree National Park and in northern San Diego County. Meanwhile, other types of energy storage installations are also being developed across the state, such as compressed air storage facilities near Morro Bay and Rosamond and lithium-ion battery arrays in multiple desert locations. Beyond the state’s borders, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is flirting with the concept of a pumped hydro facility at the Hoover Dam, and Daybreak Power, a private energy developer, is pursuing federal permits to build the 3.6 billion dollar Navajo Energy Storage Station near Lake Powell, a pumped hydro installation that they envision providing electricity to markets in California, Arizona, and Nevada. And these are only a few of the projects currently underway. Electricity storage infrastructure is quietly transforming the rural U.S. West.

Pumped storage facilities consist of two (or more) reservoirs that are sited next to one another, but at substantially different elevations and connected by pumps and a hydroelectric generation facility. They depend on landscape, requiring steep grades, safe sites for reservoir development, and abundant water. When electricity is plentiful and inexpensive (such as around midday, when solar production is peaking), they pump water uphill, only to release it downhill through the hydroelectric generating station to produce power when the sun isn’t out.

The technology isn’t actually anything new. While companies such as Premium tend to frame their projects as cutting edge, several large-scale, utility-owned facilities have operated within and beyond California for decades. Because of their scale, however, the facilities are extremely expensive to develop and cumbersome to permit. These obstacles have meant that no new utility-scale facilities have come online in California since Pacific Gas & Electric’s Helms Power Plant, located east of Fresno in the Sierra Nevada, in 1984.

Why are they back on the table now? The new need for storage infrastructure is a side effect of California’s aggressive embrace of wind and solar electricity generation. Since 2002, the state’s Renewables Portfolio Standard (RPS), a policy geared at expanding clean electricity generating capacity via binding targets, has set continuously escalating renewable energy procurement requirements for its load-serving entities (the industry term for a utility). This transition accelerated in 2018, when the California legislature passed SB100, a bill requiring that 100% of the state’s electricity be produced by “zero emission energy sources” by 2045.

But renewable sources have a reliability problem: unlike fossil fuel sources, which can provide a constant stream of electricity, windmills and solar panels can’t produce when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine. This means that the state needs on-demand, zero-emission electricity generating capacity—typically referred to as energy storage—to use during those times. It also means that this storage will only become more important for the state’s grid as renewable energy development increases.

To achieve this, the California Public Utility Commission (CPUC) has included electricity storage targets in the energy procurement orders it has issued in support of meeting the RPS, including dramatic increases in 2013 and 2021. So far, this has mainly resulted in a rapid expansion of lithium-ion battery storage facilities, usually connected to renewable energy generation sites. Many of these installations are concentrated amid the desert scrub of eastern Kern County and look like unexceptional clusters of smallish beige outhouses to the untrained eye.

But a detail of the 2021 procurement order has ensured that other technologies will be part of the new storage rush. The new target of 1000 MW of long-term electricity storage creates a need for facilities capable of holding the energy in reserve past the typical four-hour maximum of lithium-ion batteries—like pumped storage. So, with political will on their side, energy companies are rushing to permit possible pumped storage projects. (And though the RPS is specific to California, the storage rush isn’t: Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada also all have their own tax incentives in place designed to encourage the development of energy storage infrastructures.)

Cheerleaders tout these storage projects as essential to the transition from fossil fuel dependence to renewable energy. But—as the resistance from the residents of the Owens Valley shows—the installations can also bring serious negative impacts to local environments. In eastern Riverside County, for instance, locals have been fighting the Eagle Mountain Pumped Storage Project for thirty years, arguing that pumping desert groundwater to power the system will disrupt the fragile desert ecosystem, threatening its flora and fauna.

Given the urgent need for climate mitigation, it’s easy to cast local resistance to such projects as selfish NIMBYism. But many rural residents have already lived through the negative effects of extractive infrastructure on their home landscapes, and don’t want a repeat of those destructive experiences. While these pumped storage projects won’t spew much carbon, they would use enormous volumes of scarce water in ways that will desiccate some habitats and inundate others. Some of the projects also threaten homelands and sacred sites of Native communities, making them only the latest in long histories of violent dispossession. For rural communities, storage projects, despite their sustainable branding, are just more of an old pattern: abusing hinterland terrain to preserve urban consumption.

More difficult, but more equitable, would be to work to develop a grid that doesn’t treat rural areas as sacrifice zones. Incorporating more robust local consultation requirements into the permitting processes for utility-scale storage would help to halt or amend destructive projects. Prioritizing the development of smaller, more distributed renewable energy generation and storage infrastructures that can be sited within metropolitan areas will also help to redraw the lopsided geography of the state’s energy networks—and help city dwellers better understand the impact of their energy consumption. Such a fundamental reconsideration of the grid and its uses is intimidating, but necessary if we want the state’s pursuit of climate justice to be anything more than a branding exercise.

The post The Rural Price Tag of California’s Clean Energy Transition appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.