PAUL ANDERSON
ROCK AND
A HARD PLACE
Jewell Praying Wolf James, the
carver of the well-traveled totem
and member of the Lummi Nation, expressed sympathy with the
coal-dependent tribes during a
later stop on the totem’s journey
in Olympia, Wash. “We feel bad
for the Crow Nation, the Navajo,
the Hopi. That’s all they got,” he
said. “But we want clean air, clean
water. We want salmon restored
and our children healthy.”
Dig into Native American history and you will strike coal. As
far back as the 1300s, Hopi Indians in what is now the U.S.
Southwest used the fossil fuel
for cooking, heating and baking
clay pottery. In the 1800s, Native
Americans made up much of the
early mining workforce that would
help ignite coal’s long reign as the
go-to fuel source for the country’s
necessities and luxuries — from
transporting goods and running
factories to heating homes and
powering Playstations.
But King Coal’s grip is slipping. The rise of hydro-fracturing
technology in recent years has
unleashed torrents of natural gas,
a cheaper and cleaner alternative,
and left coal-rich states and undiversified coal companies with
a serious revenue problem. Many
HUFFINGTON
02.09.14
have responded by looking to
Asia, where mining local coal, in
addition to building wind farms
and solar panels, has not created
nearly enough energy for the rapidly growing economies there.
Asia’s ready market and America’s still plentiful coal could ma ke
a convenient marriage. Proving
particularly attractive to Asian
buyers is Powder River Basin coal,
which is cheap to extract and relatively low in polluting sulfur. Yet
plenty of obstacles remain in the
The totem
pole stopped
in front of the
Washington
State capitol
building in
Olympia,
drawing more
than 50
opponents of
the proposed
coal ports.