Science Literacy Week September 18 - 24, 2023

The Renewable Energy Reader is a concise, reader-friendly sourcebook for U.S. renewable energy law. Each chapter provides historical background as well as illustrations and technology charts to give readers context for better understanding renewable energy sources and related legal issues. Each chapter also includes closely-edited excerpts from some of the most prominent primary and secondary legal sources--articles, cases, statutes, and regulations--highlighting current and potential legal challenges to the advancement of renewable resources. This book provides an accessible reference for lawyers, law students, policy-makers, and the general public, providing an overview of the significant legal implications of renewable energy development. The Renewable Energy Reader is unique because it is the only textbook designed specifically for a two or three hour Renewable Energy Law course or as a robust renewable energy supplement for more traditional energy law texts that cover conventional sources. In addition to focus questions for class discussion, the reader and the accompanying Teacher's Manual include several hands-on Carnegie Integrated Skills exercises to enhance practitioner skills and student learning and to deepen appreciation for the topic areas.

In the years following World War II many multi-national energy firms, bolstered by outdated U.S. federal laws, turned their attention to the abundant resources buried beneath Native American reservations. By the 1970s, however, a coalition of Native Americans in the Northern Plains had successfully blocked the efforts of powerful energy corporations to develop coal reserves on sovereign Indian land. This challenge to corporate and federal authorities, initiated by the Crow and Northern Cheyenne nations, changed the laws of the land to expand Native American sovereignty while simultaneously reshaping Native identities and Indian Country itself.   James Allison makes an important contribution to ethnic, environmental, and energy studies with this unique exploration of the influence of America's indigenous peoples on energy policy and development. Allison's fascinating history documents how certain federally supported, often environmentally damaging, energy projects were perceived by American Indians as potentially disruptive to indigenous lifeways. These perceived threats sparked a pan-tribal resistance movement that ultimately increased Native American autonomy over reservation lands and enabled an unprecedented boom in tribal entrepreneurship. At the same time, the author demonstrates how this movement generated great controversy within Native American communities, inspiring intense debates over culturally authentic forms of indigenous governance and the proper management of tribal lands.

The author requested that a Circle of Elders, including Phil Fontaine, Ron Jamieson, The Right Honourable Paul Martin, The Honourable Jim Prentice, and Dr. Judith Sayers (Kekinusuqs), write the foreword.
Includes bibliographical references and index

In Landscapes of Power Dana E. Powell examines the rise and fall of the controversial Desert Rock Power Plant initiative in New Mexico to trace the political conflicts surrounding native sovereignty and contemporary energy development on Navajo (Diné) Nation land. Powell's historical and ethnographic account shows how the coal-fired power plant project's defeat provided the basis for redefining the legacies of colonialism, mineral extraction, and environmentalism. Examining the labor of activists, artists, politicians, elders, technicians, and others, Powell emphasizes the generative potential of Navajo resistance to articulate a vision of autonomy in the face of twenty-first-century colonial conditions. Ultimately, Powell situates local Navajo struggles over energy technology and infrastructure within broader sociocultural life, debates over global climate change, and tribal, federal, and global politics of extraction.

Often when Native nations assert their treaty rights and sovereignty, they are confronted with a backlash from their neighbors, who are fearful of losing control of the natural resources. Yet, when both groups are faced with an outside threat to their common environment--such as mines, dams, or an oil pipeline--these communities have unexpectedly joined together to protect the resources. Some regions of the United States with the most intense conflicts were transformed into areas with the deepest cooperation between tribes and local farmers, ranchers, and fishers to defend sacred land and water. Unlikely Alliances explores this evolution from conflict to cooperation through place-based case studies in the Pacific Northwest, Great Basin, Northern Plains, and Great Lakes regions during the 1970s through the 2010s. These case studies suggest that a deep love of place can begin to overcome even the bitterest divides.