The Navajo Nation's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

In Jan. 2011, the EPA decided to veto the dumping of waste from the Spruce No. 1 Mine. But the agency’s efforts have so far been rebuffed by the courts as an overreach: Under the weird legal regime that governs mining, it’s the Army Corps of Engineers, not the EPA, which has the ultimate say-so over those permits. In 2012, the D.C. district court ruled that EPA lacked authority to veto the permit after the Corps had issued it. However, in fact EPA's decision is based on evidence from scientific research on serious environmental harm from mining. In May 2013, a coalition of Appalachian and environmental groups petitioned the EPA to set a numeric water quality standard under the Clean Water Act to protect streams from pollution caused by mountaintop removal mining . They claimed that “State politics and industry pressure have so far failed to end this pollution without such a standard and more and more streams and communities who rely on those waters are left vulnerable. We need EPA to act now.” The EPA’s authority over the Clean Water Act in respect to Spruce Mine No. 1 was finally affirmed by the Supreme Court in March 2014.

Native Americans that have been mistreated by the oil company. I’ve seen videos of an

This case highlights the likelihood of friendly relations between industry and government. It was recorded that Ford Motor Company dumped paint waste from 1967-1971. I find it hard to believe that not a single government official considered looking into where all of the company’s waste was being disposed of within that four-year period. It also took the federal government until the 1980s to list this area of Ringwood, New Jersey as one of the most toxic superfund sites. While I do understand that historically the United States has had strong ties between industry and government I find it appalling that both federal and state governments failed to advocate for the Ramapoughs.

In 1882, the United States began a series of land boundary decisions which adversely affected the natural resource rights of both Navajo and Hopi tribes, effectively colonizing the Navajo and Hopi tribes through the concept of reservations. Only 42 years ago, in 1974, the federal government partitioned the Big Mountain reservation, where the Hopi and Navajo tribes currently reside, and transferred some of the land to private ownership. Many Hopi and Navajo were relocated to other lands in Arizona, but some 300 families remained at Big Mountain to fight the continued exploitation by private mining companies, primarily the corporation Peabody. Not only were the native people forced to leave their sacred homes, but the relocation sites selected by the federal government were toxic. The sites near Sanders, Arizona, where 100 million gallons of uranium-contaminated water broached a dam and spilled into the surrounding area, were radioactive. The purpose of analyzing this case study in the context of a philosophical paper is: to better understand the evidence that defines the injustice of indigenous enslavement, better understand the process in which our government legalized injustice, and most crucially to start conversations that lead to meaningful recognition that change must be fostered now to dismantle the culture of environmental privilege upon which our nation is built.

Next, the government really wants this pipeline to be built, it could lower prices. They have rerouted the pipeline so it doesn't cross reservation land. ("Standing Rock Fact Checker") The Tribe don't believe the pipeline should not be built. Also, they have started to protest not so peacefully. They are highly against the pipeline and it's starting to show through acts of violence. They're have been

The Army Corps of Engineers held 389 meetings with 55 tribes about the project and met with the Standing Rock Sioux a dozen times. Consequently the tribe wasn’t satisfactory.So let’s imagine a different scenario — in which any group of people in the United States wanted to block development on a certain site. Perhaps it’s the Mormons who hear a skyscraper will be going up in the place where Joseph Smith saw the golden tablets”(Riley). How long can a person survive without water? What would you do if your only source of water was threatened? So what if these questions are raised by a Native person? It isn’t a matter of being Native to understand it, just being human. You might also say, why don’t they just buy the land so it wouldn’t allow the pipeline to trespass through? They can’t buy homes because they can’t have mortgages. They can’t receive loans to start small businesses because they don’t really own their land. They can’t buy and sell land among themselves without the permission of bureaucrats in Washington. What they have is what economist Hernando de Soto calls “dead capital.” After staging protests over the last several weeks, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has managed to temporarily halt the construction of the $3.7 billion Dakota Access Pipeline. The pipeline, which would carry 470,000 barrels of oil a day from North Dakota to Illinois, doesn’t actually go through the reservation land of the tribe, but tribal leaders say it’s on land that has cultural significance to them. According to this you can tell that the people who are taking a stand is making a

Article: Several thousand snow geese have died after a snowstorm forced large flocks to take refuge in the toxic waters of an old open pit mine in Butte, Montana. Now BP-ARCO and Montana Resources, who are responsible for the toxic Pit, face fines. But a bigger question remains: How do you clean up a toxic mess like this, and why hasn’t the EPA forced action?

The mistreatments of Indigenous People are highlighted in Claudia Rowe’s article “Coal Mining on Navajo Nation in Arizona Takes Heavy Toll” and Anne Minard’s article “Navajo Nation Slams Door on Deal That Would Have Allowed Uranium Mining”. Even though the Navajo and the Hopi existed on the land before foreign explorers settled, they are currently given small portions of land and are constantly fighting to survive. Without help or support from the government, Indigenous people struggle to keep their land and fend off big companies from taking it from them. “Most U.S history textbooks acknowledge the devastation of America’s indigenous peoples, the forced relocations and exploitation that left tribes corralled on remote

Water pollution is defined as any chemical or physical change in a body of water that is harmful to the living organisms that embody it. In many cases, water pollution can occur through natural processes like erosion or through pollutants made by man. In the specific case study of the North Dakota oil pipeline, American Indians who are members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe fear that this pipeline would be a major environmental, as well as cultural threat to their land. This pipeline’s route travels right through ancient ancestral lands that are not protected by the reservation. It is feared that the construction of this pipeline would amount in catastrophic environmental damage to the ancestral land, and to the Missouri River if it were

In 2016, Americans elected a new President, Donald Trump. During his campaign, candidate Trump made several promises about the EPA. One of Donald Trump’s campaign promises that I read on www.washingtonpost.com, “the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) might disappear,” reminded me of the “Love Canal” scandal. As a student of biology and geology and a future scientist, the idea that government agencies would no longer assist with the protection of the environment, which includes politicians, was astonishing. According to an Executive Order signed by President Trump and posted on www.epa.gov, the “2015 Clean Water Rule” that protected streams and oceans from environment pollutants was rescinded (2017). The reason the quote by candidate Trump and the executive order by President Trump has any relevance is because these same actions could impact pre-1991 landfills. Landfills built before the 1991 regulations were not required to install barriers that protect the groundwater from carcinogens. There are chemicals that the EPA has determined to cause cancers and presently exist in landfills. Landfills built before 1991 are not required to protect any humans, wildlife or plants, or water from toxins and the new EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt could decide the current regulations are too

One of the Environmental Protection Agency’s critical mistakes is very visible to everyone in the world. The Animas River located in Colorado currently has a mustard hue, due to a mistake by the EPA that involved dumping millions of gallons of pollutants into the water. The EPA reported that the spill happened when one of its teams accidentally caused the contaminated water to flow into the Animas River when trying to treat it inside a mine. The EPA team intended to pump and treat the contaminated water inside the Gold King Mine by using heavy equipment, but things did not go as planned. The orange-yellowish watery mud is enough for people to understand that there is something seriously wrong with the river. Although there are many questions

The recent uproar over the sensitive issue of global climate change has aggressively expanded our government’s ever growing power over the American people. Through the government program too well known as the Environmental Protection Agency, our federal government has made environmental decisions effecting the American people numerous times without our consent. Our current Democratic President and his administration don’t help matters any, since they tend to give in when extreme environmentalists persistently push for these ideas. Needless to say, the Obama Administration’s ongoing force for drastic changes to environmental standards has allowed the Environmental Protection Agency to gain an alarming amount of power, and it is now resulting in harmful effects to many innocent American citizens.

On Sunday, February 2, 2014 on a cold day, a water pipe exploded under a coal ash impoundment at Duke Energy’s Dan River Power Station near Eden, North Carolina. This problem caused a lot of commotion throughout the community, and to make matters worse, Duke Energy didn’t announce this incident until a couple of days later. Duke Energy estimated that between 50,000 to 82,000 tons of coal ash ran into Dan River, causing it to litter and pollute with masses of debris. Duke’s outrageous proposal to fix this problem is to take money out of their customers in order to pay for the damages caused on their behalf. Even if the lower estimates are correct, that’s still 140,000 tons of toxic waste contaminating Dan River.

The Warren County protests provided reason for a U.S. General Accounting Office (1983) study, Siting of Hazardous Waste Landfills and Their Correlation With Racial and Economic Status of Surrounding Communities. That study revealed that three out of four of the off-site commercial hazardous waste landfills in Region 4 ( 8 states in the south ) that happen to be predominantly African American communities, even though they only make up 20% of the region’s population. The protesters put “ environmental racism” on the map. 15 years later, the state of North Carolina is spending over $25 million to clean up and detoxify the Warren County PCB

In “‘Environmental Racism’ Behind Plan to Store Nuke Waste Under Yucca Mountain: Tribes,” it talks about how there was a proposal to store nuclear waste in the Yucca Mountains was shut down by Obama in 2010 has now been revived. The Western Shoshone and Timbisha Shoshone people were not happy about it. They called it “environmental racism”. It goes on and talks about how the Nuclear Regulator commission (NRC) released a report on how the proposal would impact the environment. The article continues to talk about how some of the waste could leak into the groundwater, which would affect the purity of spring’s natives and surrounding people use (ICTMN Staff). The idea that it could be revived is a high-risk situation to them.