Category: Environment

Nicole Horseherder, executive director of Tó Nizhóní Áni Credit – Darcy Padilla.

Nicole Horseherder lives in Hard Rock, Ariz., population 53. Hard Rock sits on the Black Mesa, which takes its name from the numerous coal seams running through the plateau in western Arizona.

Horseherder’s home has no running water, as it is prohibitively expensive to drill down to the nearest aquifer that has potable water. Twice a week, she drives her 20-year-old, three-quarter-ton GMC pickup—towing a 500-gal. tank mounted on a flatbed trailer—to a community well 25 miles away.

Coal and water have dominated Horseherder’s life and work for the past decade.

Horseherder is executive director of Tó Nizhóní Ání, an advocacy group she helped form in 2000, which is dedicated to ending the “industrial use of precious water sources.” Tó Nizhóní Ání means “sacred water speaks” in Horseherder’s native Diné or Navajo. Horseherder and other activists won a tremendous victory with the 2019 decommissioning and subsequent January 2021 demolition of the Navajo Generating Station, one of the largest coal-burning plants in the West. In a related move, two coal mines, the Kayenta and Black Mesa mines, were also closed down in 2019.

Horseherder’s work has now shifted to ensuring that there are adequate funds to reclaim and restore the land. She recently testified at an oversight hearing before a U.S. House subcommittee on unfulfilled coal reclamation obligations and the need to ensure that reclamation efforts are enforced. While the amount has not been finalized, Arizona Public Service, the local power company, has proposed over $100 million to be spent on restoring land impacted by coal.

Horseherder, who grew up on the reservation, got involved in the work when she returned home after college and noticed that the watering holes where she had helped graze the family’s sheep as a young girl had dried up as the local water had been redirected to be used in coal production.

She is on the front lines of an increasingly urgent battle that will have to be played out repeatedly in coming years to ward off the most severe consequences of climate change, according to a recently released study by the U.N., which called for a “sharp reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in coming decades.” There were more than 300 coal-fired power plants in the U.S. in 2019, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Horseherder’s fight is a microcosm and a single example of the grueling effort that goes into closing a single coal mine. “It’s tremendously difficult to fight coal companies and power plants,” she says.

(This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.)

Earlier this summer, the Bureau of Land Management for the first time declared a water shortage in the Colorado River. That is your neighborhood. What was your reaction?

We knew that this was going to happen. We knew this day was coming. Fifty years have gone by, and industry has had an enormous impact: irreversible in many instances, on both groundwater and surface water. That water in the upper-basin Colorado River belongs to the Navajo people. Whatever is left has to be carefully managed and carefully used. It’s critical that the rivers continue to flow. The Southwest has a “use it or lose it” law for the water of the Colorado River, and it is very destructive. It’s the perfect example of the colonial mindset in the Southwest. That’s what’s going to destroy the population until we have a mindset change. Now more than ever, an Indigenous mindset is needed.

Can you tell me a bit more about the role water plays in your culture?

One of the teachings of water is that it has the ability to give life, and it has the ability to take life. Human beings were born from and conceived in water and grow in a womb that is filled with water. Water nourishes our development and growth. When we are born, it’s the water that breaks, and so we’re actually born through the force of water. Life springs from water. In our teaching, water was given to us, and it has specific prayers and a specific name and water has a song. There are specific songs that are just water songs. There’s a way of speaking to water and greeting water and making a relationship with water, the same way you make a relationship with your mother. Everywhere you go, you always greet water as your mother. If there’s a flowing river, that’s your mother flowing, and her body is long, and her body can wind, and her body is pure, and it glistens in the sunlight. And so, you speak to her because she’s powerful. These are the principles that we try to pass down to our children.

That’s a different mindset.

In America, you know, we are kind of encouraged to make relationships with other things. We are encouraged to have relationships with corporate executives and boardrooms and money and big houses and fast cars. In our teachings, we have to maintain relationships to the earth and to the sky to the four-leggeds and the wings and the plant life and the water and the sunlight and the air. You have to continue to maintain your responsibility to be a life among life, to be considerate of all things, to not take more than you should and to give when you can. You share this earth with every living being.

How did you get started in this work?

I came home in 1998 and noticed that there was no water here and found out that it was due to the mining, and then organized a group and gave it a name and started advocacy to shut down the industrial use of the water by the coal company [Peabody Coal]. We did everything that we could to raise awareness and compel our local leadership to end the pumping for industrial use.

After a decade of work, how did you feel when the decision was made to close the plant and coal mines?

It was a big sense of relief. The land out here and the people have endured and absorbed so much, and they have lost so much. To lose your water source is no little thing.

You are now focused on reclamation and a transition to a sustainable economy. Over $100 million has been proposed by Arizona Public Service, the utility, for a “just energy transition” for the Navajo Nation. How will that be spent?

I hope that the money is used to help all impacted communities recover. It’s not been decided yet because the money hasn’t been given yet. APS has agreed to provide those kinds of transition funds to the Navajo Nation, but the final decision still rests with the Arizona Corporation Commission.

What does sustainable energy look like in Arizona?

We’re pushing for renewable energy to replace coal. The reason I’m pushing so hard for renewable energy—and it’s not a silver bullet, it doesn’t solve all the problems; there’s a lot of problems with solar as well—the material used to make solar panels, and such, but right now it’s the most viable replacement for coal. Anything that continues to be extractive and require combustion requires an enormous amount of water, and water is just something we don’t have in the Southwest. The Indigenous people, especially the Diné people, can’t afford to give up any more water. We cannot afford to negotiate another drop of water for industry.

Based on your experience, how hard will it be to transition off coal nationwide and shut down the hundreds of coal plants still operating in this country?

It’s tremendously difficult to fight coal plants and coal mining. They have good lawyers; they can afford all the best experts in the world, and they can have these experts write their reports for them any way they want. It’s taken a toll on my health, my family. If you’re Indigenous living in America and you’re doing this work, it is tough work, and you are fighting for the lives of every single person in this country because these issues will impact everybody. If not today, it will tomorrow.

Parts of Afghanistan have warmed twice as much as the global average. Spring rains have declined, most worryingly in some of the country’s most important farmland. Droughts are more frequent in vast swaths of the country, including a punishing dry spell now in the north and west, the second in three years.

Afghanistan embodies a new breed of international crisis, where the hazards of war collide with the hazards of climate change, creating a nightmarish feedback loop that punishes some of the world’s most vulnerable people and destroys their countries’ ability to cope.

And although it would be facile to attribute the conflict in Afghanistan to climate change, the impacts of warming act as what military analysts call threat multipliers, amplifying conflicts over water, putting people out of work in a nation whose people largely live off agriculture, while the conflict itself consumes attention and resources.

“The war has exacerbated climate change impacts. For 10 years, over 50% of the national budget goes to the war,” said Noor Ahmad Akhundzadah, a professor of hydrology at Kabul University, said by phone Thursday. “Now there is no government, and the future is unclear. Our current situation today is completely hopeless.”

A third of all Afghans face what the United Nations calls crisis levels of food insecurity. Because of the fighting, many people haven’t been able to plant their crops in time. Because of the drought, the harvest this year is certain to be poor. The World Food Program says 40% of crops are lost, the price of wheat has gone up by 25%, and the aid agency’s own food stock is due to run out by the end of September.

Afghanistan is not the only country to face such compounding misery. Of the world’s 25 nations most vulnerable to climate change, more than a dozen are impacted by conflict or civil unrest, according to an index developed by the University of Notre Dame.

In Somalia, pummeled by decades of conflict, there has been a threefold increase in extreme weather events since 1990, compared with the previous 20-year period, making it all but impossible for ordinary people to recover after each shock. In 2020, more than 1 million Somalis were displaced from their homes, about a third because of drought, according to the United Nations.

In Syria, a prolonged drought, made more likely by human-made climate change, according to researchers, drove people out of the countryside and fed simmering anti-government grievances that led to an uprising in 2011 and, ultimately, a full-blown civil war. This year again, drought looms over Syria, particularly its breadbasket region, the northeastern Hassakeh province.

In Mali, a violent insurgency has made it harder for farmers and herders to deal with a succession of droughts and flood, according to aid agencies.

Climate change cannot be blamed for any single war, and certainly not the one in Afghanistan. But rising temperatures, and the weather shocks that come with it, act as what Marshall Burke, a Stanford University professor, calls “a finger on the scale that makes underlying conflict worse.” That is particularly true, he argued, in places that have undergone a long conflict and where government institutions have all but dissolved.

“None of this means that climate is the only or the most important factor in conflict,” said Burke, co-author of a 2013 paper looking at the role of climate change in dozens of conflicts across many years. “But based on this evidence, the international community would be foolish to ignore the threat that a warming climate represents.”

The combination of war and warming compounds the risks facing some of the world’s most vulnerable people: According to the U.N. children’s agency, Afghanistan is the 15th-riskiest country in the world for children, because of climate hazards, including heat and drought, and a lack of essential services, including health care. Two million Afghan children are malnourished.

That is in sharp contrast to Afghanistan’s part in global warming. An average Afghan produces 0.2 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year, compared with nearly 16 metric tons of the average American.

The collapse of the government has also made Afghanistan’s participation in the next international climate talks entirely uncertain, said one of its members, Ahmad Samim Hoshmand. “Now I don’t know. I’m not part of any government. What government I should represent?” he said.

Until recently, he had been the government official in charge of enforcing the country’s ban on ozone-depleting substances, including refrigerants used in old air-conditioners and that are banned by the Montreal Protocol, an international agreement that Afghanistan had ratified. Just days before the Taliban seized Kabul, he fled to Tajikistan. The traders of illegal substances whom he helped arrest are now out of prison, keen to exact revenge. He says they will kill him if he returns.

Hoshmand is now scrambling to emigrate elsewhere. His visa in Tajikistan expires in a matter of weeks. “My only hope is the ozone community, the Montreal Protocol community, if they can support me,” he said.

Afghanistan’s geography is a study of extreme hazard, from the glacier-peaked Hindu Kush mountains in the north to its melon farms in the west to the arid south, stung by dust storms.

Climate data is sparse for Afghanistan. But a recent analysis based on what little data exists suggests that a decline in spring rains has already afflicted much of the country, but most acutely in the country’s north, where farmers and herders rely almost entirely on the rains to grow crops and water their flocks.

Over the past 60 years, average temperatures have risen sharply, by 1.8 degrees Celsius since 1950 in the country as a whole and by more than 2 degrees Celsius in the south.

“Climate change will make it extremely challenging to maintain — let alone increase — any economic and development gains achieved so far in Afghanistan,” the United Nations warned in a 2016 report. “Increasingly frequent and severe droughts and floods, accelerated desertification, and decreasing water flows in the country’s glacier-dependent rivers will all directly affect rural livelihoods — and therefore the national economy and the country’s ability to feed itself.”

This is the country’s biggest risk, Akhundzadah argued. Three-fourths of his compatriots work in agriculture, and any unpredictable weather can be calamitous, all the more so in a country where there hasn’t been a stable government and no safety net to speak of.

The Taliban, for their part, appear more exercised by the need to scrub women’s pictures from billboards than addressing climate hazards.

But climate change is a threat multiplier for the Taliban, too. Analysts say water management will be critical to its legitimacy with Afghan citizens, and it is likely to be one of the most important issues in the Taliban’s relations with its neighbors as well.

Already on the Afghan battlefield, as in many battlefields throughout history, water has been an important currency. The Taliban, in their bid for Herat, a strategic city in the west, repeatedly attacked a dam that is critical for drinking water, agriculture and electricity for the people of the region. Likewise, in Kandahar province in the south, one of the Taliban’s most critical victories was to seize control of a dam that holds water for drinking and irrigation.

Climate change also stands to complicate the Taliban’s ability to fulfill a key promise: the elimination of opium poppy cultivation. Poppies require far less water than, say, wheat or melons, and they are far more profitable. Poppy farming employs an estimated 120,000 Afghans and brings in an estimated $300 million to $400 million a year, according to the United Nations, and has, in turn, enriched the Taliban.

Areas under poppy cultivation grew sharply in 2020.

Analysts said the Taliban would seek to use a poppy ban to gain legitimacy from foreign powers, such as Qatar and China. But it is likely to face pushback from growers who have few alternatives as the rains become less reliable.

“It’s going to be a gigantic political flashpoint,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, who studies the region at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

The last drought, in 2018, left 4 million Afghans in need of food aid and forced 371,000 people to leave their homes, many of whom haven’t returned.

“The effects of the severe drought are compounded by conflict and the COVID-19 pandemic in a context where half the population were already in need of aid,” U.N. humanitarian coordinator Ramiz Alakbarov said by email from Kabul on Thursday. “With little financial reserves, people are forced to resort to child labor, child marriage, risky irregular migration exposing them to trafficking and other protection risks. Many are taking on catastrophic levels of debt and selling their assets.”

Akhundzadah, a father of four, is hoping to emigrate, too. But like his fellow academics, he said he has not worked for foreign governments and has no way to be evacuated from the country. The university is closed. Banks are closed. He is looking for research jobs abroad. For now, there are no commercial flights out of the country.

“Till now, I’m OK,” he said on the phone. “The future is unclear. It will be difficult to live here.”