Sarah Kanouse
A phalanx of windmills guards the border between Colorado and Nebraska. Visible for miles on the treeless high plains, the giant turbines appear to inch closer as I approach the state line at eighty miles an hour. The windmills embody differences in political culture between the two states: Conservative Nebraska has âuntil recentlyâ done little to encourage the harvesting of its howling winds, while Colorado — with its ridged plateau and peculiar admixture of libertarian, liberal, and green sensibilities — has installed enough turbines to power 800,000 homes.
I didnât expect such a stark physical contrast between the two states. Iâd come to consider a literally deeper similarity: underground on both side of the border, an estimated 150 nuclear missiles remain on hair-trigger alert. Affiliated with Warren Air Force Base, just across the Wyoming border, each two-acre missile site is cordoned off by an unremarkable square of chain link and marked by a single white pole. In underground launch control centers, two-person crews wait around the clock, as they have for fifty years, for a presidential order to launch nuclear Armageddon.
If such an executive order seems chillingly closer now than in decades, most Coloradans hope the underground missiles never see the light of day. Opinions are far more divided on another material also trapped beneath the surface of the earth. Hydraulic fracturing â better known as fracking â is a booming business across the high plains. The practice involves drilling deep and complex wells, first vertically and then horizontally, then injecting a high-pressure mix of water, sand, and chemicals to fracture the rock and release trapped oil and natural gas. While first practiced in the Colorado gas industry in the 1970s, virtually all wells today use hydraulic fracturing. The technology has made previously untappable fossil fuel deposits suddenly lucrative, leading to pitched battles between pro-energy and anti-fracking forces in progressive strongholds like Boulder County. When Longmont voters banned fracking in 2012, the Democratic governorâa former oil industry geologist who famously sipped fracking fluid to prove its safetyâthreatened to sue. In the end, the oil and gas industry did it for him, and the ban was overturned by the state supreme court in 2016.[1]
I first drove through the Pawnee National Grassland (PNG), just east of Longmont, right before Christmas in late 2013. I came for the missiles and stayed for the fracking. Over the next five years I returned many times, filming and photographing this wind-swept land that hugs the Wyoming and Nebraska borders. Iâve long been attracted to overlooked places whose set of dense, contradictory, or extraordinary uses reveals something of the violent histories of the land that tend to be obscured in places more scenic, more picturesque. Notwithstanding the park-like signs on the side of the road, there is no mistaking the PNG for anything but a working landscape. In addition to towering windmills and subterranean missiles, the grasslands are in the midst of a natural gas boom. On any given day, oil industry workers seem to outnumber hikers and picnickers by a margin of at least ten to one. Construction trucks rumble over the hard-packed gravel roads, kicking up clouds of dust as they pass. Drilling platforms, pipes, and storage tanks spring up seemingly overnight. Although the most popular recreation spot on the grassland â the scenic Pawnee Buttes â is protected, drilling rigs and wind turbines on adjacent, privately owned lands are visible enough to warrant an interpretive sign. The beep-beep-beep of service trucks rumbling in reverse mingles with birdsong and the plainsâ legendary, howling wind. At dusk, well flares twinkle on the horizon like fallen stars.
Grassland is the experimental nonfiction film that resulted from these visits to the grassland. The film uses a combination of landscape imagery, found footage, and collage animation to visualize the social logics that bind together the grasslandâs strange bedfellows: the green promise of wind power, the eternal vigilance of nuclear deterrence, and the âunconventionalâ drilling technique born of the desire to blast every last drop of ancient, viscous sunshine from the earthâs crust. This essay presents a more straightforward analysis of the grassland, opened up (or undercut) by a series of animated interludes taken from the film. Potawatomi scholar Kyle Powys Whyte reminds âusââby which I mean the descendants of settlersâthat the unsustainable, climate-threatened, socially unequal landscape of today was the long-sought utopia of our ancestors.[2] âBadâ places with âbadâ ecologiesâin all their apparent weirdness and paradoxâcan reveal the raggedness of our ancestorâs dys/topian project. They can show how it was made and help trace its fractures. They can also reveal other lines of orientation, other horizons of possibility that might once have been taken and may still hold promise for the future.
Conservation and Use
The official story of the Pawnee National Grassland â the one displayed on the US Forest Service Website and available as a PDF download from various agenciesâ digital backdoors â familiarly starts with the arrival of white fur traders, ranchers, the railroads, and barbed wire.[3] Interpretive signs identify the land as Cheyenne and Arapaho, with mention of use by other tribal nations and Paleoindian cultures. They avoid commenting on the broken treaties and violent dispossessionâculminating in the Sand Creek Massacreâthat led to the grassland becoming a largely settler-occupied space today.[4] The Pawnee-Pioneer Trail, a 129-mile scenic byway, acknowledges the Native history of the grassland but places it in the âprehistoric periodâ â redefined as anything pre-Civil War. This rhetorical sleight of hand both temporally distances Indigenous people while erasing their agency and labor in shaping the landâa remarkable example of the framing of Indians as both past and as part of nature, not culture or history. While a Colorado Department of Transportation brochure encourages visitors to âimagine how the shortgrass prairie appeared to Native Americans many centuries ago,â the true heroes of the narrative are the âtough and resilientâ communities that settled there once the original inhabitants had been dispossessed. Indians gazed appreciatively at the scenery; settlers âendured the hardships of wind, drought, and isolation.â
The ecological crisis that followed settlement could have been ameliorated if the government had listened to its own report. The Homestead Act of 1862 offered âfreeâ 160-acre tracks to any white settler who lived on and improved the land for two years. But as early as the 1870s, it was clear this wasnât going to work. Even before Charles Dana Wilbur famously and erroneously proclaimed that ârain follows the plow,â John Wesley Powell counselled the government to pursue a radically different approach to settlement, though the underlying logic of Manifest Destiny was unquestioned. Powell recommended much larger ranches dedicated to grazing, with periodic groupings of homes, services, and infrastructure to âsecure the benefits local social organization and cooperation in public improvements.â[5] Powellâs land management plan was not implemented, and the Dust Bowl ensued a half century later. Franklin Rooseveltâs New Deal stepped in with the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act of 1937, with a mandate âto relocate families, purchase the more severely damaged lands and exert influence on the use of the neighboring land, and maintain stability and flexibility of the land.â While the Soil Conservation Service created the Pawnee National Grassland — and managed it until 1954 — to make grazing practices more sustainable, many ranchers gave up their land as smaller farms were consolidated into larger tracts of cooperatively managed lands. Such New Deal programs resulted in many cases in a secondary settler dispossession (albeit with compensation) less than a single human lifetime after the violent appropriation of Native land. The population of the grassland, never large and subject to wild swings, dwindled still further.
The interpretive and promotional texts surrounding the grassland reveal that the very first national security project â the expansion and consolidation of the nation itself â is an ongoing affair, requiring constant reinscription. They also demonstrate, albeit obliquely, how the land has long been bound up in practices of âenvironmentalityâ: the construction and administration of the environment through the action of government, the production of expert knowledge, and the cooperation of corporate and individual actors.[6] The conversion of western land into settled, private property was an eco-governmental project, initiated by treaties that first established (and then ignored) tribal boundaries, accelerated by the Homestead Act, reinforced by Indian allotment policies, promoted by railroads, and managed through laws regulating public grazing lands.[7]
Since 1954, the Pawnee National Grassland has operated under the auspices of the US Forest Service (USFS). While popularly confused with the National Park Service, the Forest Service manages land not for conservation but for market use. The Forest Service makes decisions about what activities to permit and promote under a strategy called âmultiple use sustained-yield,â which was codified into law in 1960. Under this law, the USFS must manage the public lands under its care in ways that treat equally outdoor recreation, timber and natural resource harvesting, fish and wildlife management, and watershed quality. Conservationists considered this an improvement over earlier guidelines that favored timber development and had seen most national forests heavily logged during the population boom and economic expansion following World War II. The national commitment of the National Forest Service is reiterated in the law; multiple use is defined as âthe management of all the various renewable surface resources of the national forests so that they are utilized in the combination that will best meet the needs of the American people.â[8]
Determining âthe needs of the American peopleâ â let alone who counts as âAmericanâ or âpeopleââis, of course, a highly political question. The government has established a bureaucratic process to manage the politics (and avoid uncomfortable ideological questions): the environmental impact statement (EIS) and the record of decision (ROD). The EIS was mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 as a decision-making tool to evaluate the likely environmental consequences of any development action and present the results for public comment. The ROD then communicates and explains the agencyâs decision to the public. Both documents are lengthy and filled with bureaucratic acronyms and jargon, presenting real challenges to lay participation. Moreover, the process operates under certain assumptions: environmental harms are offset by economic benefits; corporate lobbyists are equivalent to citizensâ groups; land can be owned in parcels whose boundaries determine its fate; any one site is separable from its global context.
These assumptions operate no matter who occupies the White House, although their implementation may differ and yield policies with meaningfully different effects that must be taken seriously. Nevertheless, they are rarely fully protective of the environment due to precisely these assumptions. The Pawnee National Grasslandâs most recent forest plan, approved in 2015 under the Obama administration, determined that oil and gas leasing would be permitted on all of the Grassland except the small, recreationally significant Pawnee Buttes. Up to 243 new wells will be developed on a total of 100,000 acres of public land. In a seemingly paradoxical conclusion, the USFS determined that allowing energy development with a âno surface occupancyâ stipulationâmeaning horizontal drilling from private land into publicâwas better for both the environment and the economy than forbidding it altogether. Fracking public fossil fuels from pads on private land is, apparently, more efficient and less infrastructure intensive than drilling convoluted holes to avoid federal land. Skeptical of the conclusion that more drilling is better for the environment, several public comments decried the exclusion of the social costs of carbon dioxide emissions from the economic impact of energy development. The Forest Service responded that an estimate would be of such a âspeculative nature and high variabilityâ as to be useless and assured that any carbon dioxide generated from the Pawneeâs oil and gas operations will be âinconsequential in the context of global emissions.â[9]
The checkerboard character of land ownership on the grassland does limit the Forest Serviceâs jurisdiction and the existence of frack pads adjacent to the protected scenic buttes demonstrates that simply forbidding drilling on federal land does not stop it. Still, itâs alarming to read such official disregard of the imperative to âkeep it in the groundâ if the worst impacts of climate change are to be averted. Because any individual extraction project will represent a small fraction of global carbon emissions, the Forest Serviceâs logic would suggest that all of them should be approved. Because the casual visitor is hard-pressed to discern jurisdictional boundaries or property lines within the grassland, the large, National Parks-style welcome signs on roads leading to fracking fields suggest that official Forest Service policy today is guided in both by the measured bureaucracy of âmultiple use sustained yieldâ and the fossil fuel nationalism of âDrill, Baby, Drill.â
Of eco-warriors and green soldiers
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, as the multiple use, sustained yield concept came to define the management of domestic conservation lands, the nuclear arms race largely animated US foreign policy. The first inter-continental ballistic missiles capable of striking the Soviet Union came online in the late 1950s, their complicated, labor-intensive liquid fuel ignition process rendered obsolete by solid-fuel technology almost as soon as they were deployed. The Air Force wanted a rocket that could be stored for long periods without deterioration and launch almost instantly, with minimal crew. In 1959, the first solid-fuel missile launched directly from an underground storage silo, and the world entered an era in which bombs capable of destroying the planet could be delivered faster than a Dominoâs pizza. When Rachel Carsonâs Silent Spring was published in 1962, ten silos housing the first generation of solid-fuel inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) came online. By 1966, 1,000 silos had been constructed and missiles deployed â most containing multiple warheads. When the first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970, global nuclear stockpiles exceeded 38,000.
Although the environmental movement is often seen as a reaction to the ecological excesses of American consumer culture, green politics took root in the shadow of the most destructive weapons the world has ever known. The specter of nuclear war made total destruction thinkable and frighteningly proximate, and it became possible to trace a logical continuity between the obvious death drive that prepared to annihilate the planet many times over and the quieter one that treated the earth as if it simply didnât matter. For their part, Cold War strategists actually did care about the environment â as a potential military front. As historian Jacob Darwin Hamblish has shown, the military drew up a number of plans to trigger earthquakes and tsunamis, eliminate forests, wipe out crops, and alter weather patterns.[10] While weaponizing the environment is clearly anything but âgreenâ politics, it required an unprecedented analysis of ecological interconnectedness. Counterintuitively, the military laid at least part of the framework for both systems ecology and contemporary environmental catastrophism.
Coloradoâs eco-military nexus is exemplified by two well-known national wildlife refuges near Denver. The Rocky Mountain Arsenal and Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuges sit atop buried contamination at a shuttered chemical weapons plant and plutonium pit assembly facility, respectively. Each takes a different approach to interpreting their military past, with greater or lesser degrees of nuance, but the very process of âmilitary to wildlifeâ conversion almost inevitably risks performing a form of ârepresentational remediationâ whereby powerful cultural associations of nature and purity make the site seem less toxic than it actually is.[11] Moreover, cooperation in the expedited clean-up process and subsequent transfer of the land to the US Forest Service allows the military to recast itself from ecological villain to environmental steward. However, indefinite federal environmental monitoring of these sites â as well as the more mundane contamination of abandoned Atlas and Titan ICBM facilities monitored by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment â demonstrate that the day to day operations and âsustainmentâ of the military are anything but sustainable.
It may be decades before the public learns about the ecological effects of the missiles currently deployed beneath the Pawnee National Grassland. Dubbed âMinuteman,â after the famous colonial militias known for fast responses to British aggression, they can hardly be considered defensive in nature: each missile contains three, independently targeted warheads capable of traveling 6,000 miles in less than 30 minutes. Lest it seem a Cold War relic, the Minuteman III program remains one of the three pillars of US nuclear strategy and has for decades conducted about four unarmed test runs per year. President Trumpâs recent nuclear posture review emphasized âmodernizationâ through the development of smaller, âtacticalâ nuclear weapons â one of the few Obama-era initiatives he has expanded, though heâd never admit it.[12] The Air Force and Navy are jointly developing a fourth generation ICBM expected to deploy in 2029 in more or less the same geographical area as the current ones.[13] The extended timeline nonetheless requires that the military continue its program of âstockpile stewardshipâ for the foreseeable future: testing aging propulsion systems, replacing components as needed, and upgrading computer systems. These are difficult tasks: the original computers that guided the missiles ran on magnetic tape and had a tiny fraction of the power of a first-generation iPhone; non-nuclear components and materials have aged well beyond their intended lifespans; and the daily work of what the Air Force informally calls a missileer has got to be one of the dullest tech jobs in the world. The isolation, stress, and boredom faced by missileers no doubt contributing to a drug and cheating scandal that resulted in the firing of nine Air Force commanders in 2014.[14]
That nuclear missiles first developed in the 1970s persist into the drone age is a reminder that the periodization of techno-historical eras is necessarily untidy, with the earlier regimes persisting, if subordinated, within new cultural logics. The remote launch and guidance systems built for the ICBM program directly contributed to the development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Drones themselves grew out of the 1960s Drone Anti-Submarine Helicopter (DASH) program â small, unmanned anti-submarine helicopters deployed on Navy destroyers and capable of nuclear payloads.[15] The high rate of failure and loss in the DASH program resulted in its closure, and the safety record of military drones remains questionable to this day, with 24 crashes in 2014, according to The Washington Post[16] This checkered history may account for the Air Forceâs announcement that it does not intend to pursue nuclear-equipped drones in the immediate term.[17] However, Sandia National Laboratories and defense contractor Northrup Grummondâlead contractor on the new ICBMsâhave drawn up initial plans for nuclear-powered drones, believing them to be a solution to the limited range, power, and flight time of conventional drones.[18] No doubt such drones would face significant political opposition over safety concerns, but much as climate change has caused some to take a second look at nuclear power generation despite Fukushima, the use of drones for long-term environmental monitoring may well eventually green the image of nuclear-fueled UAVs. Indeed, Russiaâs reported development of a nuclear-equipped underwater drone has the foreign policy world buzzing with speculation that similar American weapons âmay be closer than you think.â[19]
Considering the recent history and proximal future of nuclear weapons allows the presence of ICBMs on conservation lands to seem less an aberration and more a co-incidence that demonstrates just how tightly the military and the environment are intertwined. Just as government action actively produces certain visions and kinds of nature, the military participates in eco-governmentality, too. The national response to environmental catastrophe has already been thoroughly militarized. Anne McClintock contends that the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 was then the single clearest example of eco-militarization. Eight years later, the notion that the military is best equipped to deal with ecological disasters was so ingrained that its operational failures around Hurricane Maria allowed the racist colonial relationship between mainland and island to come into focus.[20] Left largely unquestioned, however, is how military epistemologies came to dominate contemporary discourses of resilience, as well as the consequences of under-investing in community-led responses to environmental disaster.
The omission is particularly striking because the militaryâs outsized contributions to both global toxins and the carbon dioxide emissions that increase the severity of âextreme weather,â as the Department of Defense (DoD) now euphemistically calls climate change.[21] Indeed, the Pentagon is the single largest global emitter of carbon dioxide and generates as much toxic waste as the five largest chemical companies combined.[22] During the younger George Bush administration, the DoD lobbied hard for blanket exemption from most domestic environmental lawsâeven while operating the now-inactive Army Environmental Policy Institute to reframe the military as an environmental steward.[23] And while Trump swiftly nullified almost all of his predecessorâs actions on climate, Obamaâs very first measureâa 2009 executive order directing the federal government to lead by exampleâincluded provisions by which the military could exclude itself from the targeted reductions.[24] The incongruous presence of ICBMs on the Pawnee National Grassland, then, materializes the general state of exception that characterizes the militaryâs relationship with — and authority over — the environment. In a political moment characterized by official climate denialism, extreme tax cuts, and lavish military spending, the Department of Defense may well end up the only arm of the government most prepared for the ensuing climate chaos, with profound effects on how problems are framed, how communities are mobilized, and how adaptation is implemented.
Winds of Change?
The checkerboard ownership patterns that allow fracking and ICBM silos beneath the Pawnee National Grassland also afford the operation of the largest windfarm in Colorado. Built entirely on private and state-owned (but not federal) land, Cedar Creek Phases I and II comprises nearly 400 turbines with a generating capacity of 550 MW â enough to power almost 100,000 homes. With the population of Colorado booming, the windfarm goes a long way to meeting the stateâs goal of 30% renewable energy by the year 2020.
The Cedar Creek project was spearheaded by BP Wind Energy and is jointly owned by BP, Australiaâs Infigen Energy, and the San Diego-based Sempra Generation. According to BP, the siting within the national grassland is purely for technical reasons: thereâs a lot of wind, few buildings, and even fewer trees. The companies negotiated leases privately with landowners and the state of Colorado to put up the turbines. Although the turbines are located entirely within the boundary of the grassland, Forest Service had no input on the siting and approval of the wind farm because it avoided any federally-owned land. The cooperative management and conservation mandate of the grassland notwithstanding, the Forest Service was considered nothing more than a neighboring landowner. Although Cedar Creek is adjacent to important bird nesting grounds, and with research raising questions about the effects of turbines on bird populations, the Forest Service was neither approached nor asked by the company to weigh in. Instead, it was the Nature Conservancy, a private nonprofit, that raised questions about the impact on birds. BP ultimately donated $75,000 to the Conservancy during the construction of phase one to purchase conservation easements to offset the projectâs potential disruption of bird nesting habitat.[25]
Wind farmsâ effects on birds must be put into perspective by considering the astonishing number killed annually in the US by collisions with buildings (100-900 million), encounters with housecats (1.3-4 billion), and the catastrophic effects of climate change that wind power might mitigate.[26] With recent estimates of bird deaths from wind turbines at less than 600,000 per year, the issue has not gained much public attention beyond ecologists and bird-lovers.[27] More often, public concerns center around the aesthetics of the development. According to the Forest Service, some visitors at Pawnee feel the windmills mar vistas of the famous buttes; others see them as inspiring signs of environmental progress.[28] Both positions channel longstanding tensions between the romantic and the utilitarian that have long shaped American environmental discourse and policy. But, both also perceive the grassland primarily as an image rather than a living and ever-changing assemblage of wind, land, organisms, law, policy and property.
In comparison to the dusty and noisy oil and gas fields just to the south, the Cedar Creek Wind Farm seems like a 62,000-acre green energy haven. But, the companies that operate it may be hedging the climate change bet. While Australiaâs Infigen specializes in renewable energy exclusively, Sempra and BP combine extensive holdings in fossil fuel infrastructures with investments solar and wind. Despite a growing fossil fuel divestment movement and long-term economic trends favoring renewable energy, the chaos of different state energy policies and the current administrationâs full-throated endorsement of extraction means that fossil fuels are likely to remain the lionâs share of the US energy market far longer than the climate can handle. Fossil fuel infrastructure is very much expandingâand not just the visible high-profile pipelines like Keystone XL. Every region has its own pipeline project. Sempra, for example, opened the 1,700-mile Rockies Express natural gas pipeline just to the north of Cedar Creek in 2009, with a spur connecting PNG natural gas to national distribution. Incidentally, the Rockies Express pipeline begins in Rio Blanco County, CO â site of one of the first Project Plowshares experiments designed to judge the feasibility of detonating nuclear bombs to stimulate natural gas production from deep underground wells.[29] It worked, but the gas was too radioactive to use. Hydraulic fracturing is todayâs answer to the same technological questionâonce again demonstrating continuities between old and new technologies and between national security and energy security.
Rusty windmills also dot the grassland, their dents, clang, and squeak contrasting with the sleek, whooshing blades of Cedar Creek. Their spinning does not generate electricity for faraway consumption but instead runs mechanical pumps that draw water to the surface from deep underground. Cattle still graze this land on what remains of the consolidated, cooperative ranches established by the Soil Conservation Service in the 1930s, and ornate wrought-iron ranch signs mark several gravel intersections. Apparently, abandoned settlementsâtheir barns slouching under crumbling roofsâbetray human presence with the incongruous sight of camper vans and clotheslines. Even the village of Keotaâwhere James Michener wrote his blockbuster novel Centennial long after the townâs population was last recorded, in 1958, as 15âstill has at least one family. My impulse to keep signs of contemporary life out of the camera frame is motivated by an admixture of respect for privacy, fear of confrontation, and an inability to kick the ruin porn habit. In this, I have company: an image search for Keota pulls up enthusiast and tourist photos of the same structures that appear in my film, along with historical imagery from PBS documentaries and Common Core-compliant Colorado history curricula. A somewhat smaller adventuring community also indulges in exploration and image-making of abandoned nuclear missile silos, especially a certain Atlas complex just outside of Denver, and at least one US company specializes in retrofitting ICBM sites as highly secure, underground, luxury homes. The attraction to such places betrays an attachment to certain persistent ideas about danger, power, and masculinity that can be safely consumed at a temporal remove. âFrontierâ ghost towns become romantic when, among other things, sewage treatment, vaccines, and prohibitions on marital rape are taken for granted; retro-futurist technologies of thermonuclear war hit the right mix of spooky and quaint inside a crumbling silo only because the nukes have already been removed.
Conclusion
The conditions of the present are rapidly eroding the remove from which nostalgia for the atomic age or Wild West can be indulged. Trumpâs hyper-individualistic, ecocidal, and misogynistic braggadocio draws on myths of Western masculinity that must be taken seriouslyâand foughtâno matter how buffoonishly presented. His regressive policies of environmental deregulation and nuclear expansion aggressively threaten the planetâs future. An increasing number of scientists fear the climate has already passed several tipping points, and belief in âinevitable collapse, probable catastrophe and possible extinctionâ shadows the global climate strikes and âFridays for the Futureâ movements.[30] In this context, the Pawnee National Grasslandâs simultaneous investments in green power, hydrocarbons extraction, and nuclear militarism seem emblematic of a society locked in the impasse of âcruel optimism,â the term Lauren Berlant coined to describe the psychic space in which âattachments to what counts as life come to make sense or no longer make sense, yet remain powerful as they work against the flourishing of particular and collective bodies.[31]
In ten or more trips to the Pawnee National Grassland, I have seen only one child: racing a bike, alone, up and down a flat, sunbaked, dirt road. Iâve seen only a few adults, for that matter, and only a handful whose bodies were not encased in the hard outer shell of a vehicle. The Grassland is a place where human fragility is palpable. I sense my smallness beneath the skies of the Western plains, beside a windmill, in furtively photographing a launch pad, in the anxious drumming of an oil well. This unruly, un-pastoral, and overlooked land is bound up in different ragged and overlapping stories of national security â stories that began long ago but are still up to us to complete.
All media by and courtesy the artist.
[1] Hickenlooperâaka âFrackenlooperââtook so much political heat for siding with industry in these early cases that he eventually brokered compromise measures that launched the nationâs first methane monitoring and established an oil and gas task force to mediate between municipal and corporate interests in order to keep fracking bans off the ballot. His industry-friendly approach is now out of step with Democratic voters increasingly unwilling to compromise over the livability of the planet: Hickenlooperâs 2020 presidential campaign fizzled in just a few months, and although he is now running for Senate, he stands to the right of the Democratic field. Herrick, John. âHickenlooper is pitching his climate credential on the Senate trail. Itâs a tough sell.â The Colorado Independent. November 18, 2019. https://www.coloradoindependent.com/2019/11/18/hickenlooper-fracking-climate-plan-senate/.
[2] Whyte, Kyle P. 2018. âIndigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of the Climate Change Crisis.â Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. 1:1-2, 2018, 224-242.
[3] âArapaho & Roosevelt National Forests Pawnee National Grassland – History & Culture.â Nebraska National Forests and Grasslands – Buffalo Gap National Grassland. https://www.fs.usda.gov/detail/arp/learning/history-culture/?cid=fsm91_058308.
[4] The Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1851 established the sovereign territory of a half-dozen Indigenous nations, including the Cheyenne and Arapaho. Sovereignty became deeply inconvenient once gold was found on some of this land, and the Treaty of Fort Wise was swiftly imposed in 1861, removing the Cheyenne and Arapaho to southeastern Colorado and abolishing traditional forms of communal land tenure in order to encourage the settlement and farming. That both Cheyenne food ways and the very arid land were not suited to settler-style agriculture was immaterial to the treaty authors, leading to great hardship and starvation. When men left to supplement their diet with buffalo, women, children, and elders encamped under both an American flag and a white flag of truce were massacred by Colonel John Chivington and the US Army in 1864 in the notorious Sand Creek Massacre. This attempted extermination was not entirely successful, however. While the 2010 census reports only fifty Native Americans in the 2,460 square mile tract that includes the PNG, the two federally-recognized tribes descended from the survivors of Sand CreekâNorthern Cheyenne of Montana and the Cheyenne and Arapaho of Oklahomaâhave nearly 20,000 enrolled members.
[5] Powell, John Wesley. Report on the Arid Lands of the United States and a More Detailed Account of the Lands of Utah (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1878).
[6] Agrawal, Arun. Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).
[7] Allotmentâthe practice of dividing communally-held tribal lands into smaller, individually owned parcels (and then selling the âexcessâ lands to white settlers)âwas federal policy from the passage of the Dawes Act in 1887 to the Indian New Deal of 1934. However, individual land ownership was sometimes a treaty requirement much earlier than that, as with the Treaty of Fort Wise that abrogated Cheyenne and Arapaho sovereignty in what is now the Pawnee National Grassland.
[8] Public Law 86-517. âMultiple Use-Sustained Yield Act of 1960.â June 12, 1960.
[9] USDA Forest Service, âPawnee National Grassland Oil and Gas Leasing Analysis Final Environmental Impact Statement,â December 2014, p. 317, and USDA Forest Service, âRecord of Decision for the National Grassland Oil and Gas Leasing Analysis,â dated February 2014 and signed February 9, 2015, p. https://data.ecosystem-management.org/nepaweb/nepa_project_exp.php?project=41812.
[10] Hamblish, Jacob Darwin. Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
[11] Havlick, David. Bombs Away: Militarization, Conservation, and Ecological Restoration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); Krupar, Shiloh. Hot Spotterâs Report: Military Fables of Toxic Waste (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
[12] Paltrow, Scot. âIn modernizing nuclear arsenal, U.S. stokes new arms race,â Reuters, November 21, 2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclear-modernize-specialreport/special-report-in-modernizing-nuclear-arsenal-u-s-stokes-new-arms-race-idUSKBN1DL1AH.
[13] Osborn, Kris. âBy 2029, America Will Have a New ICBM That Can Launch a Nuclear War.â The National Interest. June 20, 2019. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/2029-america-will-have-new-icbm-can-launch-nuclear-war-63422.
[14] Botelho, Greg. â9 Air Force commanders fired over nuclear missile test cheating.â CNN. March 27, 2014. https://www.cnn.com/2014/03/27/us/air-force-cheating-investigation.
[15] Anderson, Brian. âThe U.S.âs First Drone Could Drop Nukes.â Vice Motherboard. October 12, 2011
[16] Chow, Emily, Alberto Cuadra and Craig Whitlock, âFallen from the Skies: Drone Crash Database.â The Washington Post. Originally published June 20, 2014, last updated Jan. 19, 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/drone-crashes/database.
[17] Leslie, Carlin. âFuture Outlook Released for Remotely Piloted Aircraft.â US Air Force. April 04, 2014. http://www.af.mil/News/ArticleDisplay/tabid/223/Article/475227/future-outlook-released-for-remotely-piloted-aircraft.aspx.
[18] Fielding, Nick. âUS Draws up Plans for Nuclear Drones.â The Guardian. April 02, 2012. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/apr/02/us-plans-nuclear-drones.
[19] Bitzinger, Richard A. and Christine M. Leah, âNuclear-Armed Drones? They May be Closer Than You Think,â The National Interest, October 13, 2016. http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/nuclear-armed-drones-they-may-be-closer-you-think-18034.
[20] McClintock, Anne. âSlow Violence and the BP Oil Crisis in the Gulf of Mexico: Militarizing Environmental Catastrophe,â E-MisfĂ©rica 9:1-2, 2012, http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/e-misferica-91/mcclintock.
[21] The military has long considered climate change a national security issue, and even current Defense Secretary Mark Esper stated that âclimate change is something we have to take into accountâ during his confirmation process. See Femia, Francesco and Caitlin Werrell. âThe New U.S. Department of Defense Leadership Team on Climate Security.â The Center for Climate Change and Security. July 22, 2019. https://climateandsecurity.org/2019/07/22/the-new-u-s-department-of-defense-leadership-team-on-climate-security. However, under pressure from Donald Trump, a number of official documents were rewritten to remove explicit references to climate change. See, for example, Chris Mooney and Missy Ryan, âPentagon revised Obama-era report to remove risk from climate change,â The Washington Post, May 10, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2018/05/10/pentagon-revised-obama-era-report-to-remove-risks-from-climate-change.
[22] Sanders, Barry. The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism (Oakland: AK Press, 2009).
[23] Established in 1990s under the elder President Bush, the Army Environmental Policy Institute has a web presence that has not been updated since 2011. See http://www.aepi.army.mil.
[24]> Obama, Barack H. Executive Order 13514âFederal Leadership in Environmental, Energy, and Economic Performance, October 5, 2009. https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/DCPD-200900783/pdf/DCPD-200900783.pdf
[25] âWind farm turbines could top 400.â Bizwest. April 23, 2010.
[26] McDonald, Charlotte. âHow Many Birds Are Killed by Windows?â BBC News. May 04, 2013. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22395664; Milius, Susan. âCats Kill More than One Billion Birds Each Year.â Science News. January 29, 2013. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/cats-kill-more-one-billion-birds-each-year.
[27] Smallwood, K. Shawn. âComparing Bird and Bat Fatality-Rate Estimates Among North American Wind-Energy Projects.â Wildlife Society Bulletin37, no. 1 (March 2013): 19-33.
[29] Project Plowshares was a program of the Atomic Energy Commission (predecessor to the Department of Energy) to develop civilian uses for nuclear weapons and atomic science.
[30] Bendell, Jem. âDeep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy.â IFLAS Occasional Paper 2. July 27, 2018. See also Extinction Rebellionâs standard recruitment talk, âHeading for Extinction and What to Do About It,â which has been delivered hundreds of times around the world by grassroots XR activists.
[31] Berlant, Lauren, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 13.
Sarah Kanouse is an interdisciplinary artist and critical writer examining the politics of landscape and space. Migrating between video, photography, and performative forms, her research-based creative projects shift the visual dimension of the landscape to allow hidden stories of environmental and social transformation to emerge. Her solo and collaborative work has been presented through the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Documenta 13, the Museum of Contemporary Art-Chicago, The Cooper Union, The Smart Museum, and numerous academic and DIY venues. Her writing on contemporary art, landscape, and ecology has appeared in Acme, Leonardo, Parallax, and Art Journal, as well the edited volumes Ecologies, Agents, Terrains; Critical Landscapes, Art Against the Law, and Mapping Environmental Issues in the City.