Thursday, April 10, 2025
4:00 – 5:30 pm
Namaste Lounge
Join the Center for Reimagining Leadership and co-sponsors in the Namaste Lounge for a conversation with Andrew Curley (Diné), an Associate Professor in the School of Geography, Development & Environment at the University of Arizona. He is the author of Carbon Sovereignty: Coal, Development, and Energy Transition in the Navajo Nation (2023).
Indians and Energy Transition: Green New Deal to ‘Drill, Baby, Drill!’
Energy in the United States is a topic of extreme importance. It is foundational to the U.S. economy, infrastructure, development in local communities, and accelerating processes of climate change. In political rhetoric, energy conversations oscillate between broad ideas of clean energy technology to opening more and more protected spaces for oil and gas drilling. Tribal communities are often caught in the middle of these political movements. Native leaders, planners, and workers must anticipate energy headwinds while shoring up their sources of development and revenue while at the same time thinking through the politics of climate change and the negative environmental impacts of energy projects, such as new kinds of contamination, threatening limited water sources or climate change. In this presentation, I will offer new research focused on the perspectives of Diné, Southern Ute Indian Tribe, and Jicarilla Apache community members in places with long histories of fossil fuel production, primarily oil & gas as well as coal and uranium.
Sponsored by: Center for Reimagining Leadership, Environmental Studies Department, Institute for Social Transformation, Kresge College, Rachel Carson College, Science and Justice Research Center