Native news network 6-17-13
SAN DIEGO – The Bureau of Land Management scoping meeting for the Rio Mesa Solar Plant outside Blythe, California likely caused heartburn for the agency, applicant Brightsource, and related subcontractors and agencies last fall. Time and time again Native elders stood up to declare concerns and articulate potentially unresolvable conflicts of values, goals and process.
You can't have "green" without social justice
This clash of cultures and life-ways is the subject of Filmmaker Robert Lundahl's, latest documentary, "Who Are my People?" exploring not whether we should invest in renewable energy sources, like solar and wind in response to climatic change, but where we should put them.
"Who Are My People?" not only deals with technical and policy related questions but explores what is at stake. The deserts of California and the West, it turns out, are a vast cultural repository handed down from indigenous peoples who inhabited the area for thousands of years. And some of that culture seems downright strange to Anglo-European eyes, like enormous geoglyphs or earth drawings, visible from space, including giant human-like forms and complex geometries.
And their remote locations ensure that most Americans have never seen or heard of them, until now. Stranger still, the world's energy companies and partners including Chevron, Bechtel, Florida Power and Light, the German firm Solar Millennium, Israeli Brightsource, and others, want to build energy facilities seemingly right on top of them.
