Community Partner Highlight: Sierra Club Idaho Chapter

We are grateful for the Sierra Club Idaho Chapter’s leadership and commitment to equity, inclusion, and justice and fro recognizing the complexity of placing a proposed wind project in the viewshed of Minidoka National Historic Site.

In the blog post by Vienne Aberle, Communications & Advancement Assistant for the Idaho Chapter, they state:

“In the case of Minidoka, the wealthy corporate elite from New York, untouched by the atrocities and trauma of unjust incarceration, see little issue in the placement of the wind farm. For Japanese Americans, who are still facing the long term effects of unjust incarceration and now also confront the latest wave of AAPI hate spurred by the pandemic, this is an unacceptable erasure of history; yet, to companies like LS Power, it’s just another Tuesday’s money grab. Just as Japanese Americans were deliberately targeted for discrimination during WWII while their German and Italian American counterparts were not, the Japanese American community is being scapegoated again, faced with two losing options: defy the wind farm and face hatred for seeming to not care about the environment, or support it and lose a piece of history and communal healing at the sacred site. We can examine it with this comparison: we don’t see wind farms proposed on the grounds of Jamestown or Roanoke, Gettysburg or the Mall of America – it likely doesn’t cross anyone’s mind to claim these major historic sites and landmarks of predominantly white history for development of a massive wind farm. When these contradictions pile up, the muddier the water around this project gets.”

Read the Statement of Support: https://www.sierraclub.org/idaho/blog/2022/08/idaho-sierra-club-statement-support-for-friends-minidoka

Read the full Blog Post: https://www.sierraclub.org/idaho/blog/2022/07/colliding-values-issues-around-minidoka-lava-ridge-wind-farm-project