From 2010-2012, more than 250,000 people were killed in Somalia and millions displaced from their homes after a drought-induced famine hit the country. Donors from all parts of the world sent food aid to the famine-stricken country, but the main armed opposition to the government, Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen, blocked the donations from reaching their intended beneficiaries. At one point, the militant group raided a United Nations Children’s Fund, causing the organization to freeze their work.  

The food insecurity brought out by the famine led to a decline in support for Al-Shabaab, after they were accused of stealing food aid from the communities they controlled. This setback decreased the militant group’s power and helped end the deadly attacks, such as bombing, they carried out to gain control of territory. In the case of Somalia, the severe food insecurity decreased the chance of conflict continuing, as people withdrew their support for militants. But is this true in all cases? Can food insecurity be a mitigator of violence? Or can food insecurity fuel violent conflicts, or vice-versa? 

A 2013 study, released by Stability: International Journal of Security and Development, found that food insecurity is almost always a cause of violent conflicts, but the link between food security and conflict is more complex and varies depending on the political, economic, and social factors. 

According to the researchers, the civil conflict experienced in Somalia is one of three main types of violent conflicts. The other two include urban unrest and communal conflict, which is when two communities fight against each other without directly involving the state. For example, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, lack of land and water led pastoralists and farmers to compete for the same resources and access to food. Approximately 11,000 people died from both sides in massacres between 1999 and 2003. Violence in this region continues to take place today. So how was food insecurity able to decline Al-Shabaab’s power and violence in Somalia? Why isn’t this the case in the Congo?

 Interestingly, the authors found that food insecurity alone does not drive food related conflicts. In the Congo, pastoralists and farmers come from different ethnic groups that have been fighting since colonial times. 

The relationship between food security and violent conflicts is important in urban settings too. Following the 2007-08 global food price crisis, higher food prices led to an increase in urban riots. In one case, 5 people were killed in a market riot. Responses to urban riots varied depending on the type of political institution. Democratic governments applied interventions that directly targeted affected households, using food-for-work and food stamp programs. These programs help the poorest and most vulnerable households. 

In contrast, one-party autocracies, favored export bans, price controls, and consumer subsidies that largely favor “better-off consumers.” Autocracies cater to “better-off consumers,” who tend to be wealthier, urban residents, to maintain the strength of their political institution. Interestingly, this creates a reliance on the government to stabilize prices, but often these strategies strain government finances. Once the government is no longer able to provide financial help, it causes urban riots to break out and perpetuates a cycle of food insecurity and violent conflicts that are not addressed. 

The study also includes policies to address food insecurity and violent conflicts. The researchers propose a peacebuilding approach to help bring peace in post-conflict affected regions. In the Sahel, countries have school-feeding and community involvement programs that not only deliver food quickly to stricken areas, but it also promotes education in times of conflict. This program can create stability for children and prevent them from joining armed groups, while also rebuilding trust among communities. The study also suggests that food security interventions can support political institutions. In Nepal, for example, a nation-wide food security monitoring system has helped the government reduce food insecurity and has improved its relationship with Nepalese citizens by addressing inequalities among ethnic groups. 

Food insecurity is a threat to instability, but its relationship to violent conflict must be understood in context. Not all food insecurity problems are created equally, but the peace-building approach provides an inclusive, long-term change process that can help build resilience to economic and political stresses in conflict-affected countries. In the case of Somalia, the peace-building approach can reduce the risk of violent conflicts from reoccurring by creating institutions that can properly manage disputes and that invest in food security programs. 

Is all urban green space made equal? Is it all enjoyed equally? A 2014 paper by researchers from UC Berkeley, Griffith University, and the University of Michigan that compares greening efforts across the U.S. and China, reveals that in many cities this isn’t the case.

Manhattan’s High Line has been heralded as the successful implementation of urban green space. It brings in a huge amount of revenue from yearly visitors to the area and has raised property prices in the surrounding area. It is one example of the many kinds of urban green spaces that exist to introduce biodiversity, improve public health, and aesthetically elevate urban areas, like public parks, green walls, trails, community gardens, or even cemeteries. However, it is the same benefits that the High Line has brought about which have resulted in the displacement of residents who lived there before it was built.

The High Line is but one of the paper’s examples of green gentrification, which it defines as the “displacement and/or exclusion of the very residents the green space was meant to benefit” and typically results from the creation of large urban green space which drives up nearby household values and prices out the residents who lived there before. While the creation of urban green space can make neighborhoods more attractive and livable to a wider range of prospective residents, it often drives up housing prices and triggers rounds of gentrification.

In this way, urban green space becomes not only an issue of public health but also an issue of environmental justice, as access to these spaces is often uneven, based off socio-economic background. It is typically low-income neighborhoods and communities of color that are denied the benefits of urban green space that they acutely lack.

Part of the difficulty of designing equitable green space in cores of highly developed and dense cities is that there is no official consensus on how to measure access. The big question the researchers pose is “whether access to urban green space and its health promoting and or protective effects is distributed in ways that disproportionately advantage or disadvantage people on the basis of race, ethnicity, or class?”

The researchers make a case study of the Hangzhou Region, one of China’s “Garden Cities” for innovative and far-reaching strategies to green what is a quickly urbanizing city. Sprawl has subsumed much of its agricultural hinterlands, and the city is plagued with dense air pollution and high temperatures. Despite ambitious and impressive efforts to retrofit green space out of empty lots, old canals, and along transportation routes, the details of Hangzhou’s green spaces disappoint. Many are small and lack facilities, do not encourage active recreation, suffer from congestion, and are close to main roads which still expose people to pollution. Other research has also suggested that there are differences in access by socio-economic status of residents.

The researchers advocate instead for the “just green enough” design intervention, as proposed by the research team Winifred Curran and Trina Hamilton in 2012. This design framework promotes a bottom-up approach instead of a top-down one. A central idea of “just green enough” is that the affected communities themselves come up with green space projects that directly respond to their own concerns, needs, and desires.

A successful example is Greenpoint, a community in Brooklyn that underwent a “just green enough” transformation in 2012. The neighborhood demanded cleanup of a toxic creek and green space development that also allowed for continued industrial production and the protection of blue-collar jobs. Unlike the High Line, the community had a significant role in determining how and where to put efforts to green their city, collaborating with expert planners and scientists. They explicitly wanted to avoid what they termed the “parks, cafes, and a Riverwalk” model of a green city, which would substantially change the character of their neighborhood. The resulting outcome was successful remediation of an environmental justice issue that also avoided sparking speculative development in the area.

The “just green enough” philosophy is expansive with what makes for good green space interventions: they can be small-scale and scattered, as opposed to grander retrofit projects that require large patches of space and can raise property values that price out residents. Interventions like these can take shape in many forms, but it is who leads these projects that can help guarantee their success in serving sustainability, public health, and most importantly the historic neighborhood around the space. Cities are becoming more efficient, healthier, and greener with the creation of sustainable infrastructure and urban greenery; let’s make sure that everyone gets to enjoy it.

Research and Figure source:

Wolch, J. R., Byrne, J., & Newell, J. P. (2014). Urban green space, public health, and environmental justice: The challenge of making cities “just green enough.” Landscape and Urban Planning, 125, 234–244. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2014.01.017

Featured image source:

https://ny.curbed.com/2019/5/7/18525802/high-line-new-york-park-guide-entrances-map by Max Touhey

In the United States, there are extreme disparities between who consumes goods and who is exposed to the pollution caused by the consumption of these goods. Air pollution caused by the consumption of “goods and “services” and their effects on the populations who are consuming and polluting are examined in a 2019  study led by University of Washington and University of Minnesota (Tessum et al, 2019). The study finds that Blacks and Hispanics in the United States disproportionately bear a “pollution burden” compared to non-Hispanic whites in the U.S. (Tessum et al, 2019). Fine particulate-matter pollution (PM2.5) may have decreased over the past two decades, but the inequality in who is exposed to that pollution remains.  

In the United States, communities of color are often situated in closer proximity to hazardous waste sites and power plants. Exposure to PM2.5 increases risk of cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, as well as premature death. Research has long shown that the highest determinant of whether a person will experience the burden of pollution is race, and the 2019 study showed that this is not due to the consumption habits of the affected minority groups. 

This study of racially disparate impacts of pollution builds off of a history of studies that aimed to quantify the burden of pollution of marginalized groups. Dating back to 1986, a nationally representative sample found that Black Americans were 1.54 times more likely to live in proximity to a pollution source than non-Blacks (Mikati et al, 2018, pg.480). In 2010, it was found that mean residential ambient nitrogen dioxide concentrations were 37% higher for non-Whites than Whites, compared to 7% for those living below the poverty line compared to above the poverty line (Mikati et al, 2018, pg. 480). While living in poverty correlates with living conditions that are unfavorable, Black Americans experience significantly more hazardous conditions in their home environments than those living below the poverty line, even after education and income are accounted for. The study also looked at the pollution-inequality metric, analyzing the disparity between the pollution that is generated by non-Hispanic whites and the lesser pollution to which they are exposed.

What derives this disparity is that non-Hispanic whites in the United States consume goods at higher rates than people of color, yet these goods are not being created in their own communities. Non-Hispanic whites in the U.S. are responsible for more pollution than any other demographic group. Goods consumed by non-Hispanic whites are often produced far away from the communities in which they reside. The research team looked at what people in different demographic populations were spending money on (like groceries and gas) and the pollution generated by those activities, and then did a map overlay of the racial-ethnic groups in the locations in highly polluted areas. Non-hispanic whites experience 17% less pollution than they are responsible for while on average, black Americans experience about 56 percent more pollution than they are responsible for through their consumption of goods and services. For Hispanics, it is slightly higher: 63 percent (Tessum et al, 2019). 

Environmental racism is linked to an intentional and systematic attack on communities of color in their neighborhoods. It is no accident that power plants and hazardous waste sites are situated where they are. “Unlike natural events that contribute to ambient PM, such as wildfire, the sitting of  facility is the result of a decision-making process. Disparities in siting may indicate underlying disparities in the power to influence that process,” (Mikati et al, 2018, pg 480). It is often argued that demographics of the neighborhoods surrounding noxious facilities changed after the siting of such facilities, suggesting that racial discrimination isn’t the motive behind communities of color being more likely to experience pollution. However, a 2015 study was published that strongly proved that neighborhood transitions occurred before the siting of most facilities, showing that these facility sitings were actually attracted to people of color and low-income communities (Mohai, 2015). 

What all of this research shows is that there are significant disparities in who is exposed to pollution, who is responsible for that pollution, and evidence that this was no accident. For too long issues of environmental injustice have been framed as unfortunate coincidences with no real accountability on the part of the polluters. An important distinction to make in understanding why PM pollution matters as an environmental justice issue is that it doesn’t affect every person in the U.S. in the same way. Environmental injustice refers to deliberate violence against those without power, but environmental racism encapsulates a history of this violence against specifically non-White communities in America who have disproportionately felt the burden of pollution in their homes. 

“You are what you eat.”  We all know that a healthy diet is essential for good health and nutrition.  But what if munching on nourishing foods not only improves your health, but also contributes to a healthier environment?  This is exactly what a recent study found: a diet comprised mostly of whole grains, nuts, and vegetables can improve both human and planetary health.  Whether you care about your own health or the environment—or better yet, both—choosing a diet for one cause also serves another.  Pretty sweet deal, isn’t it?  

The study, led by researchers at University of Oxford and University of Minnesota, examined the health and environmental impacts of commonly consumed foods.  They tracked the dietary patterns and health outcomes of tens of millions of individuals of a wide variety of ethnicities, ages, and economic status. They examined the human health and environmental impacts of fifteen common food groups such as meats, legumes, vegetables, and fruits.  They evaluated the human health outcomes of consuming these foods by measuring risks of type II diabetes, stroke, coronary heart disease, colorectal cancer, and mortality. The environmental impacts they examined include greenhouse gas emissions, land use, water use, and water pollution.  

While many studies have looked at the human health and environmental impacts of certain foods and diets, very few have examined these two categories of impacts in connection with each other as this one.  Such a unique analysis approach revealed fascinating correlation between these impacts.  

On the positive side, foods associated with significant reductions in mortality also had a low environmental impact.  For example, nuts, whole-grains, fruits, legumes, olive oil, and fish were found to be the healthiest food groups. All of these foods, except for fish, also had the lowest environmental impacts.  

What’s more, foods that have a low environmental impact for one environmental indicator were often found to also have low impact for the other four environmental indicators.  Compared to producing one kilogram of beef, for example, producing one kilogram of legumes requires less water and land, produces much less greenhouse gas emissions, and generates less pollution.  Similarly, if a food improved one health outcome—like coronary heart disease—it was often associated with positive effects on other health outcomes.  

At the other extreme, the environmental impacts of producing unprocessed and processed red meats had the greatest environmental impacts—10 to 100 times larger than those of plant-based foods.  Consumption of red meat, especially processed red meat, is also associated with the highest health risks. This is no surprise. In 2015, the World Health Organization classified processed meat such as hot dogs, ham, sausages, and corned beef as carcinogenic and red meat as probably carcinogenic to humans.  

As a plant-based dietary shift is recommended for both health and environmental reasons,  this research underscores that the path towards improved public health and a more environmentally sustainable future depend fundamentally on the food we produce and consume.  This insight aligns with recommendations from many other commissions and institutions, such as the EAT-Lancet Commission on Food, Planet, Health, World Resources Institute, and the FAO and the Food Climate Research Network.  Without a global shift to more plant-based and plant-rich diets, we are unlikely to meet many of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and reduction in GHG emissions aligned with the Paris Agreement on climate change.  

This large body of compelling evidence illuminating the urgency of a dietary shift, then, begs us to examine the fundamentals of our current food systems.  How are incentives guiding consumers’ decisions concerning food consumption?  

If the health and environmental consequences of consuming food are factored into the price of food—that is, if food price reflects not just the cost of production but the full cost of the human health and environmental impacts associated with its consumption—the worst foods would be the most expensive options and should cost more than they currently do.  

Appropriate policies can encourage diets that are good for both our own health and the environment.  In the meanwhile, we as consumers need to keep educating ourselves of the implications of our consumption and make informed decisions to the best of our ability.  The priority in achieving the shared goals of human and planetary health can perhaps be best captured by seven words from famous American food writer Michael Pollan: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”  

Three years ago, the Executive Director of West Virginia’s Mountaineer Food Bank announced: “We’re out of cash.” These four words signaled that the last line of defense against hunger for 16% of West Virginia’s population was at risk. Community members were shocked and worried. The institution that was supposed to be there for them when they had no other options was about to collapse.

Luckily, West Virginians mounted a monumental fundraising and volunteering effort, and together they “bailed out” the food bank. This isn’t happily-ever-after for Mountaineer Food Bank, though, which (like many other rural food banks) still teeters on the verge of bankruptcy. A recent study draws upon 3 years of extensive institutional ethnography to expose the harsh truth of how the US food banking economy really functions both to exploit and neglect hungry communities, especially in rural settings.

It’s hard to imagine the US food banking economy – which is so intrinsically connected to traditional American ideals of goodwill and charity – as exploitative. But, this study leaves little room for doubt. Researchers conducted over 100 in-depth stakeholder interviews, surveyed 600 local West Virginian emergency food agencies (EFA’s), and crafted a detailed geographic analysis to model the rural West Virginian anti-hunger network. This research reveals the dark underbelly of the donation-based American anti-hunger movement.

Traditionally, American anti-hunger efforts have focused on people donating unwanted or unneeded foods to organizations that will distribute it to people in need – think canned food drives. Donating to food banks is considered an act of individual charity. More often, however, the US government, US food production firms, and large retail centers act as primary donors to food banks.

Emergency food networks take donated food that has no market value (meaning it has no willing buyers or sellers, and in some cases might not even meet certain food safety requirements), and revalue it by sorting, processing, warehousing, and distributing it to a new market of consumers unable to access traditional retail sources.

The authors of this study don’t think the American system of large-scale food donations should be viewed as a charitable operation. Firms receive numerous benefits from donating to food banks. They get significant tax breaks, and can cultivate a positive corporate image by simultaneously reducing food waste and fighting hunger.

Most troubling, the study reveals that the American food banking system implicitly subsidizes waste processing for the US food industry. For instance, Kroger supermarkets actually saves $1.5 million annually in landfill fees by donating excess food to food banks rather than throwing it out. Federal programs like The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP) also unload excess product – in the form of commodity crops – onto the anti-hunger sector. Anti-hunger workers are, in effect, “waste workers” employed in a unique recycling industry where fair compensation for labor is not expected. Viewed this way, large-scale donations to food banks aren’t charity, they’re a cheap release valve for industry when supply outpaces demand.

And, the morally questionable intentions of large-scale food donation aren’t even the worst part. Subsidizing industry’s food waste processing is really expensive for food banks, yet they receive minimal government funding for overhead costs or management. Food bank workers have to pick up donations from stores, warehouses, and factories – a service donors are not expected compensate for. Amateur anti-hunger volunteers weigh, sort, process, organize, and manage inventory, all while performing strict record keeping and paperwork in order to ensure donors get the proper tax breaks. Such demands have stretched charities and their volunteers thin.

These burdens affect most food charities, but especially those in rural areas. Rural food banks are few and far between compared to their urban counterparts. While two food banks work together to cover New York City’s land area of 300 square miles, only on food bank exists in expansive rural Alaska, and it’s responsible for 663,300 square miles. Not only do workers in these rural food banks have to travel much longer distances to pick up donations, but they also have to distribute the food to large, spread-out networks of food distribution sites.

With such daunting distances to travel, Feeding America ­– a national-level organization that coordinates and manages American food banks – has started to seek out new strategies for their rural food banks. Notable among these are “agency enabled pickups”, which change the path food takes from donor to beneficiary. In addition to their already existing workload, rural food banks are directed to train distribution agencies such as church groups and soup kitchens to pick up food directly from donors rather than from the food bank itself. The food bank takes on a managerial role for these agencies, which become “de facto mini-food banks”.

Tiny, volunteer and community driven agencies are now expected to complete the extensive accounting, transparency, processing and sorting that was already a burden on their comparatively well-funded and well-trained regional food banks. This rural strategy is attractive to Feeding America as it reduces the distance food has to travel from donor to beneficiary, but it actually makes things worse, shifting the immense labor burden of revaluing industrial food waste further away from donors, onto the communities in need themselves.

The fundamental imbalance between large industrial food donors, the charitable food network, and its beneficiaries can be seen on the plates of America’s rural poor. Most of the time, these plates hold the odd assortment of commodities Kroger needed to throw away. Its not dignified, but its something. Every once in a while, the food bank goes bankrupt, leaving plates empty, and people with nowhere to turn.

Big Pharma. Big Oil. Big Wind.

Wait, what? Big Wind?

Though many rural residents perceive wind energy as a way to retake control and strengthen rural communities through local economic development, the majority of wind farms in the United States are owned by large-scale, multinational conglomerates with little direct local ownership. US tax breaks for wind development are regressive – meaning the largest companies will receive the most benefit – and overwhelmingly reward large-scale wind production at the expense of more localized, smaller scale projects.

That’s Big Wind. But is Big Wind a bad thing, deserving of the same type of scorn as Big Pharma or Big Oil?

A new study published in the Journal of Rural and Community Development explored whether who owned wind energy projects in the Prairie Pothole region of Minnesota and South Dakota – a vast plain dotted by rolling glacial hills and small glacial potholes filled with water – actually mattered in determining how residents of three communities felt about the developments.

Ultimately, who owned the wind projects didn’t seem to have a significant impact on how residents felt about the projects.

“Big Wind,” as corporate wind projects have been coined, didn’t seem to be viewed more or less favorably than municipal or cooperative projects. What mattered more, perhaps predictably, was local context. No one community will responds same way to wind.

This might come from the general nature of wind projects. Even those that are more “locally” owned aren’t necessarily small or participatory.

Over the past decade, two primary forms of “locally owned” wind farms have developed. Non-profit rural electrical cooperatives been providing power to local communities for decades. More and more, they’ve tested the breeze and built large-scale cooperative wind projects across the Prairie Pothole region.  Cities have also seen the way the wind is blowing, and municipally owned wind projects on public land have also become more common in the Midwest.

But as tax-exempt bodies, neither of these types of wind projects are eligible for the same tax cuts as Big Wind – a policy that functions to shut out community-led participatory wind projects.

Local people seem to know about these dynamics. In one Minnesota community, a resident lashed out about subsidies “making some fat cat richer off my dollar,” and while few held such negative impressions, most respondents identified the owners of wind farms as being “outsiders.” And in many insular rural communities, that’s about the worst thing you can be. But residents said this about the corporate, municipal, and cooperative projects alike. So if all owners are outsiders, is there any real difference in perception of these projects?

What mattered to residents seemed to boil down first to jobs. Across the Midwest, rural downtowns are riddled with empty storefronts. Businesses pack up and leave, and people often follow, leaving gaps in the social fabric of formerly close-knit communities. Boosting employment is crucial for these rural towns that see most of each high school graduating class leave and never look back.

Many residents surveyed had high hopes that wind farms would strengthen their rural communities through investment and employment opportunities.

These expectations have gone largely unmet. Beyond the construction phase – which was described by one South Dakotan as “all hell [breaking] loose overnight” and mostly employed outsiders – there were few long-term local jobs provided by wind.

Despite the lack of local jobs, respondents still see the turbines as an economic boon – regardless of ownership. The turbines spin cash into the local economies. And even though residents complained about large companies getting federal and state tax breaks to build, it was increased local revenues, such as property taxes, from these farms that helped rural communities keep school in session.

This impact is critically important in small Midwest towns with shrinking populations where schools are often the lifeblood of community.

Photo by Don Poggensee, USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service. (2001)

The wind turbines are also helping small communities redefine themselves and their identity in the face of this out-migration. The Prairie Pothole region is an aesthetically unique landscape, made up of rolling green hills and dotted with small lakes. The addition of wind turbines is an aesthetic shock, but one that has been integrated into community identity in many cases. One Minnesota community even labeled themselves the “Wind Energy Capital of the Midwest.”

So does Big Wind matter? The study suggests it really doesn’t. Not only are there few aesthetic and operative differences between corporate, municipal, and cooperative projects, community members derive the same benefits, aesthetic appeal, and identity markers from each project. Big Wind seems to exist on paper, in reports like this, but on the ground in the Midwest the concept seems as distant as the owners themselves.

The lower 48 States of America is made up of around 1.9 billion acres of land. From 1776 to 1887, the U.S. government seized over 1.5 billion of those acres from Native American ownership by conquest, treatises, and purchase. Since then, Native Americans have continued to lose land, but in a different way.

A 2016 journal article by Rebekah Martin from the American Indian Law Review critiques the recent Cobell Buy-Back program as a means of reclaiming Native lands. It is important to note that this article was written before the start of the Trump administration—there are threats to the outcomes of this program since this piece was published.

The Cobell Buy-Back Program stemmed from a 1996 lawsuit against the Department of the Interior; it was accused of mismanaging Native land trusts and funds. After a lengthy legal battle, the Cobell settlement, which led to the buy-back program, became the most recent solution to modern Native land loss.

The $3.4 billion Cobell settlement passed in Congress in 2010 promised $1.9 billion in Trust Land Consolidation. This means that over a 10-year period ending in 2022, there is a multi-billion dollar fund devoted to reforming fractionated land for Native American tribes.

Fractionation developed in tandem with assimilation policy. The Dawes Act of 1887 assigned native tribes of America to designated land plots, separating tribes from their traditional lands and forcing them to assimilate to western culture. All allotted lands were owned and controlled by the Department of the Interior, and land transfers went through the Secretary of the Interior. The Department of the Interior’s land inheritance system led to fractionation.

Simple Fractionation Diagram

Fractionation of land ownership refers to the federally-controlled transfer of land from an owner to all descendants in equal parts. Since the Dawes Act, one piece of allotted land might have over 1,000 heirs claiming ownership of the land, some non-Native, with shares growing exponentially smaller each generation. With too many owner claims, tribes posit that use of the land—cultural, agricultural, religious, or otherwise—is essentially impossible.

Though the Dawes Act was over a century ago, there have only been a few movements to address this problem—one in the 1930s, the 1980s, and early 2000s. Each attempt had some benefits, but they largely failed to ease fractionation. Most were overgeneralized policy for a large range of unique tribes with limited interaction with Native leaders and governments.

Table 1. Major Federal Land Legislation since 1887

The Cobell program aims to pay heirs to turn over their land holdings to tribal nations to form larger tracts of Native-owned land. The mission of the program is to, “allow individuals to receive monetary benefit from their land and allow the tribes to retain ownership of land as a whole,” explains Martin. Consolidated land allows tribes to reconnect with culturally important lands and have autonomy over land use.

However, this program has drawbacks. There is a noted lack of trust in the U.S. government due to a history of forced land seizures, poor legislation, and the trust ownership system—tribes today are wary government collaboration. More recently, President Trump has cut back on tribal aid, and has no plan to continue this program after 2022.

Moreover, the process of buying and selling land under the settlement has a limited time-frame before the Department of the Interior will claim the land. Plus, at the end of the 10-year Cobell program, all remaining money will return to the U.S. Treasury. Martin writes that this looming government control hinders progress and patronizes tribes.

Even so, this program has been successful. By September 2016, the Department of the Interior was working with 25 tribes and had bought more than 850,000 acres of land for tribal ownership. The program also raised $30 million towards an education scholarship fund, and  increased social programs to assist tribes with ownership rights.

Martin ends her critiques on the Cobell Buy-Back program with  suggestions about future solutions that the Cobell program does not cover.  She writes that while unlikely, the best solution would be “to remove the U.S government from its role as a trustee entirely, allowing indigenous landowners and tribes to finally obtain actual independence and autonomy”.

The Cobell program has been effective thus far, with land sales and scholarship funds far surpassing expectation. However, this program isn’t perfect; and unluckily, the strides made under the Obama administration will likely not be continued under Trump. In her article, Martin ends with a message of hope—and hopefully, the success of the Cobell program will help to drive further successes, even under an ever-difficult government system and conservative administrators. If Trump works against funding or tribal aid, it may just be time for protests, campaigns, and more federal lawsuits. The administration needs to know that this success is just the beginning.

Fractionation diagram source: http://www.srstbuyback.com/fractionation.html

Featured image source: http://users.humboldt.edu/ogayle/land_transfers.jpg