Interior Secretary Haaland is Coming to Town

August 09, 2021

Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland will be in Humboldt County this week to meet with local, state, federal and Tribal leaders on a number of issues, ranging from clean energy and a massive redwood forest restoration project to investments in Tribal communities and govermental efforts on the crisis of murder and missing Indigenous people.

Haaland will be traveling with White House Council on Enviromental Quality Chair Brenda Mallory and North Coast Congressmember Jared Huffman, according to a news release from his office.

Tuesday's itinerary will include discussions on the "Biden-Harris administration’s efforts to build a clean energy economy and create jobs, including by spurring offshore wind development," the release states. 
 
In June, Gov. Gavin Newsom joined Haaland and other federal officials in announcing an agreement to allow Department of the Interior's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) to offer a lease auction as early as next year for two stretches of California's coastal waters, including an unspecified site about 20 miles off Humboldt Bay, with the other being a 399-mile stretch on the Central Coast northwest of Morro Bay. (Read more about the possiblity of a North Coast wind farm here.)

There will also be meetings with Tribal leaders, the release states, to discuss the administration's "investments in Tribal communities, including an all-of-government approach to the missing and murdered Indigenous peoples crisis," according to Huffman's office.

The Sovereign Bodies Institute, a data-driven nonprofit based in Humboldt, in partnership with the Yurok Tribe, released a report in August of 2020 showing 105 of the nation's missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls were from Northern California. And, most of those cases have never been solved.

The Yurok Tribal Court initiated the To' Kee Skuy' Soo Ney-Wo-Chek' Project — which means "I will see you again in a good way" — with SBI to change those numbers and improve the outcomes of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls cases. Read more about the To' Kee Skuy' Soo Ney-Wo-Chek' Project
and the report here and here. 

On Wednesday, Haaland is schedule to hear about Redwood Rising, a collaborative project by Save the Redwoods League, the National Park Service, and California State Parks to rehabilitate over 70,000 acres of second-growth forest in Redwood National and State Parks.

While Redwood National and State Parks is known for holding some of the world’s last old growth forests, much of the area was still bears the scars of commercial logging. Read more about Redwood Rising here. 


By:  Kimberly Wear
Source: North Coast Journal