Our Last Best Chance 

Four years ago, we took a stand in these pages that still keeps us up at night from time to time.

It was November of 2019 and the Humboldt County Planning Commission was poised to decide whether to permit a company called Terra-Gen's plans to construct 47 wind turbines along Monument and Bear River ridges overlooking Rio Dell. There was plenty to dislike about the project. Environmentalists warned of the potentially dire impacts it could have on bird populations and other wildlife, that newly cut and expanded service roads would silt rivers and that the project would clear carbon-sequestering forests and prairies. But the strongest voice of opposition came from the Wiyot Tribe, which considers Bear River Ridge — known as Tsakiyuwit in Wiyot — a sacred high prayer site from which the Wiyot could see a large expanse of the tribe's ancestral territory.

Noting the attempted genocide of the Wiyot and all Native people in California, as well as the fact that Tsakiyuwit was stolen by notorious militiaman and murderer Seth Kinman, bringing it into white hands, we wrote that we could not support the industrialization of a sacred Wiyot site over the tribe's objections.

"We are in a historical moment between the attempted destruction of a people and a planet, and whatever we do next," we wrote. "If we are to move forward as an equitable society, it cannot be with further harm to Native land and culture."

It was the right decision, as were those of the Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors to scuttle the project. But it also came with a very real cost.

Had the project moved forward, it would have now been powering 40,000 homes — about two-thirds of Humboldt — for two years. Instead, our natural gas power plant has continued spewing emissions into the air as the climate crisis tumbles toward the brink of no return.

Last year was the warmest on record since 1850, by a wide margin, as sea surface temperatures reached record highs and Antarctic sea ice hit records lows. Extreme weather events have become commonplace, with devastating fires, floods and extreme heat. More than 20 species went extinct in the United States alone. Global greenhouse gas levels, meanwhile, continued to rise.

To get off this fast track to global destruction, we urgently need to stop burning fossil fuels. We need to stop burning them to fuel our cars, manufacture and ship our goods, and — most of all — power and heat our homes.

Humboldt County now has the potential to play an outsized role in efforts to wean the globe from fossil fuels as the proposed site for this offshore wind farm.

There are a lot of unknowns with the project, which would use a largely untested technology to locate 900-foot-tall wind turbines on massive floating platforms tethered to the seafloor 21 miles off the coast, transporting the electricity via a submerged cable to an onshore substation. Two companies that won leases for the project are currently crafting plans, which will then be subject to a thorough environmental review led by the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the California Coastal Commission. That process should offer a far clearer picture of potential impacts of the unprecedented projects and what can be done to mitigate them.

But as this process moves forward, it's been distressing to see several local tribes — including the Yurok Tribe, the Bear River Band of Rohnerville Rancheria and the Trinidad Rancheria — announce their opposition to the project, while the Wiyot Tribe has opted to wait to take a stance until more information is available.

We hope local, state and federal officials, as well as the multinational corporations looking to build these farms and the state-of-the-art port needed to service them, will not make the mistake Terra-Gen did and think tribal concerns can be brushed aside or purchased away. It should go without saying that these are sovereign nations and need to be treated as such, approached respectfully in an earnest effort to find consensus.

The hard truth is we're just about out of time and drastic solutions are necessary if we as a species and a planet are going to have a chance at clawing our way out of this crisis. And there's no next project that will allow Humboldt County to step into a leadership role in that global effort.

As such, we need to make sure the science is sound and the mitigations sufficient, and that every possible effort is made to ensure the concerns of those whose ancestors have called this coastline home since time immemorial are heard and met.