Land
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As community caretakers, mothers, and resource stewards, women often feel the impacts of pollution and contamination most directly,
retaining contaminants in their breast and body tissue, experiencing
endocrine disruption, and bearing children with birth defects.
- Approximately 70% of the world's uranium deposits are located on the lands of indigenous peoples. Navajo in Church Rock and Crownpoint, New Mexico, are victims of the nation’s worst radioactive uranium spill – in 1979, a liquid uranium tailings dam was breached and 100 million gallons of radioactive liquid spilled into Navajo waterways.
- Over 60% of African Americans and Hispanic Americans and half of all Native Americans live in communities with unregulated toxic waste sites.
- Tens of thousands of gallons of water per minute are extracted to support Barrick Gold Corporation’s open pit cyanide heap leach gold mine on the Western Shoshone Nation’s sacred Mount Tenabo. Nevada’s gold mines create 86% of the nation’s total toxic mercury waste, and 3% of the airborne mercury pollution, which is equivalent to 25 or more average coal-fired power plants.
- Studies conducted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the University of Michigan have shown that minority and low-income communities in the U.S. have consistently been selected in greatly disproportionate numbers as sites for chemical factories, landfills, and incinerators.
- The Navajo Nation exports 1200% more energy than it uses, especially from coal – the Nation is home to the largest coal strip mine in the United States. It is estimated that some 18,000 Navajo homes do not have electricity.
- Over the past twenty-five years, over twelve thousand Americans – most of them Native American – have been removed from their lands to make way for coal, uranium, and other mining enterprises.
- The warming climate and melting of the polar ice-caps and permafrost are already severely impacting the traditional, subsistence-based lifeways of indigenous peoples in Alaska and the Arctic Circle.
- Tribal communities have tremendous untapped wind and solar energy resources, including 535 Billion kWh/year of wind power generation potential, about 14% of U.S. annual generation; and 17,000 Billion kWh/year of solar electricity generation potential, about 4.5 times total U.S. annual generation.
- A ski resort on the sacred San Francisco Peaks in Northern Arizona proposes to use reclaimed wastewater to make artificial snow on the mountain, which would result in total spiritual desecration and biological contamination, along with increased ski days per year.
- Native peoples and territories have been contaminated with radiation from uranium mining and milling, atomic testing and radiation experiments, and potential sites for radioactive waste dumps.
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