Meet Out Speakers: Nicole Horseherder

For Nicole Horseherder, “water is life.” As a founding member of the Black Mesa Water Coalition, a member of the Navajo chíshí dine’é clan in the Black Mesa area, and a mother, she is passionate about protecting the water resources that define her home. Horseherder defends her beliefs through action. In 2001, the Black Mesa Water Coalition was formed with the mission to protect both the natural environment and indigenous peoples’ culture from degradation. Nicole was part of one of their first campaigns, which successfully stopped the Peabody Western Coal Company from contaminating and depleting precious groundwater in the Black Mesa area through its use for slurry transportation of coal. Horseherder’s lifestyle reflects a reverence for the place she considers sacred. She is raising her children on rural land long inhabited by her native clan in order to maintain traditional relationships to their food, water, and language. Nicole lives in a place where the modern United States’ values and the Navajo lifestyle rub against one another. Her native farming lifestyle is silenced under the interests of Big Energy and technology is a dangerous distraction from seeing the environment in the ways her ancestors did. Water scarcity in a warming climate makes every one of these concerns more urgent. Despite the challenges, Horseherder has hope for the future: she sees water flowing through everything. Given a cup of water and a cup of oil, she offers, “everyone will always choose the cup of water.”

By: Signe Lindquist

Meet Our Speakers: Dave Olson

If one place could be called the nation’s capital for energy production, that place is Gillette, Wyoming. The sixteen coal mines in the Powder River Basin currently supply 30% of the nation’s electricity. The three mines near Gillette employ 10% of surrounding Campbell County. One such employee is Dave Olson, a Senior Geologist for Alpha Coal West, which operates the Eagle Butte and Belle Ayr mines in the area. A fourth-generation miner that has worked all over the interior West, Dave showed us the operating Eagle Butte pit mine and gave us a crash course in economic geology and the process of coal mining, from assessing reserves to mining to generating electricity. Some of the best coal, Dave explains, has too much overburden (rock above the coal seam) to be mined profitably, limiting the economic supply and quality of coal.

According to Dave, the Clean Air Act triggered coal production in the Powder River Basin in the 1970s because it is “clean coal,” containing fewer sulfate pollutants than coal from Appalachia. Dave is pleased to share how clean Alpha’s mining operation is, with comparatively low-polluting coal, minimal dust during transportation, and reclamation efforts that often leave the land in better condition than before mining.  

Like it or not, coal is currently an important component of our national energy portfolio. Gillette is a perfect place to understand how coal, when converted to electricity, powers the devices that enable you to read this.

By Elizabeth Greenfield

Meet Our Speakers: Mayor Louise Carter-King

Here in Gillette Wyoming Mayor Louise Carter-King can’t imagine what it’d be like without the coal. At Eagle Butte Mine, everyone’s daily purpose and livelihood is dependant on the coal mining industry. Standing tall in her blue blazer with the atom symbol sewn into the upper corner, Mayor Louise Carter-King, the first women to lead here, finds herself adamantly defending this area's coal. A pin near her collar proclaims Gillette the “Energy capital of the nation”. Powder River Basin coal is some of the cleanest in the world, having formed in the presence of freshwater which greatly minimizes its sulfur content. Responsible for 30 - 40% of coal energy produced in the USA and with goals of supplying coal to other countries, Alpha Mines sees a future for coal. Especially considering the “sustainable” ways they mine in a moving pit, reclaiming land as they go with the dug up soils followed by the reconstruction of streams. Reclamation leaves these areas looking better than they did before mining commenced, according to Carter-King. The reality in Gillette is that coal is an available natural resource that should be utilized to meet today’s energy needs overlapped with the belief that “climate change is a moot point”. Carter-King recognizes that something always hurts someone. Utilizing the cleanest coal available to run not only the lights of this place but offer people a life as well is her course of action. There is a great deal to be lost here and coal is the deciding factor for this place's future, Louise Carter-King knows that.

By: Emma Rollins