A public interest environmental attorney in Oakland, CA, Caitlin has worked with NRDC, Earthjustice, the California Center for Environmental Law & Policy, and the Center for Human Rights and Environment in Argentina. At U.C. Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law, Caitlin chaired the Environmental Law Society and coordinated the first annual Environmental Justice Symposium. Her article “Exempting Department of Defense from Federal Hazardous Waste Laws: Resource Contamination as 'Range Preservation” was published in Ecology Law Quarterly, one of the nation’s foremost environmental law journals. Caitlin's poem entitled “The Nation Waits” appears in Imagining Ourselves, an anthology of women's art and writing published by the International Museum of Women. Caitlin is the Transformative Advocacy director at Women's Earth Alliance, where she works to convene women attorneys and other professionals with women leaders working on environmental justice issues for international journeys of conscious dialogue, experiential learning, and appropriate advocacy.
Environmentally-friendly initiatives such as green jobs are at the center of his economic stimulus plan. So it’s no surprise that Obama’s inauguration will have the smallest “footprint” of any president in history.
On Thursday, a group of senate Democrats led by Barbara Boxer responded to what may be the largest coal-related disaster in history by calling for more stringent rules on toxic byproducts from coal-fired power plants.
This is a guest post by Caitlin Sislin, a public interest environmental attorney in Oakland, California and founder of the Transformative Advocacy program of Women’s Earth Alliance.
On December 22nd, 2008, the U.S. Department of Interior’s Office of Surface Mining granted Peabody Western Coal Company a “life-of-mine” permit for its Black Mesa project. The permit authorizes the Kayenta mine, which generates 8.5 million tons of coal per year to the Navajo Generating Station in Page, Arizona, to continue unabated until 2026.
Navajo and Hopi activists protest this permit as an unacceptable desecration of Black Mesa mountain, regarded as a living, female being and a central component of Native religion. Wahleah Johns, co-director of the activist organization Black Mesa Water Coalition, said that “[t]his decision will uproot the sacred connection that we have to land, water and all things living on Black Mesa.”
Peabody has operated the Kayenta and Black Mesa mines on the sacred Black Mesa mountain since the mid-1960s, to the great detriment of the Navajo nation. Coal extraction destroys the environmental integrity of the mountain, contaminates the air with methane gas, and threatens miners with illness and injury; coal burning is among the most highly-polluting forms of energy production in existence. Navajo land throughout Arizona and New Mexico is littered with coal mines and coal-fired power plants, nearly all of which fail to provide power to Navajo residents, instead exporting the coal and power to far-away urban communities such as Las Vegas and Los Angeles.
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