Hill Heat

On Thursday, September 26, 2024, at 2:00 p.m., in room 1324 Longworth House Office Building, the Committee on Natural Resources, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations will hold an oversight hearing titled “Desecrating Old Glory: Investigating How the Pro-Hamas Protests Turned National Park Service Land into a Violent Disgrace.”

On Thursday, September 26, 2024, at 10:15 a.m., in room 1334 Longworth House Office Building, the Subcommittee on Federal Lands will hold a legislative hearing on the following bill:

• H.R. 9678 (Rep. Juan Ciscomani, R-Ariz.), “Federal Lands Amplified Security for the Homeland (FLASH) Act”.

The FLASH Act includes provisions to:

• Construct roads on federal lands for increased access and patrols by law enforcement and Border Patrol officers
• Ensure access for law enforcement agencies to federal land along the border
• Allow states to place temporary barriers on federal lands to secure the border
• Direct federal lands managers to develop policies and procedures to reduce the trash buildup caused by illegal immigration
• Mitigate wildfires caused by immigration and restart a Trump administration initiative to manage hazardous fuels along the southern border
• Prohibit the housing of illegal migrants on federal lands
• Eliminate cultivation of illegal cannabis on federal lands

On Thursday, September 26, 2024, at 10:00 a.m., in room 1324 Longworth House Office Building, the Subcommittee on Indian and Insular Affairs will hold an oversight hearing titled “Examining Puerto Rico’s Electrical Grid and the Need for Reliable and Resilient Energy.”

Witnesses:

• Manuel Laboy Rivera, Executive Director, Central Office for Recovery, Reconstruction, and Resiliency
• Antonio Torres Miranda, Associate Commissioner, Puerto Rico Energy Bureau
• Juan Saca, Chief Executive Officer, LUMA Energy
• Brannen McElmurray, Chief Executive Officer, Genera PR LLC

Subcommittee hearing.

Witnesses:

• Laurel Schaider, Ph.D., Senior Scientist, Environmental Chemistry and Engineering, Silent Spring Institute
• Sue Fenton, Ph.D., Director of the Center for Human Health and the Environment, Professor of Biological Sciences, North Carolina State University
• Michael D. Larrañaga, Ph.D., P.E., President and Managing Principal R.E.M. Risk Consultants

The Wilderness Act protects 112 million acres of land across the United States from the ravages of industrial development. But for the Indigenous Nations, bands, and tribes that harvested from, cared for, or otherwise managed these so-called “wilderness areas” before they were given this designation by the federal government, the Wilderness Act can feel like yet another instrument of settler-colonial dispossession—a means of enforcing settler law on stolen land. Not only is the legislation’s vision for a landscape “untrammeled by man” built on the racist and genocidal fantasy of terra nullius, but, codified in law, it outlaws the very practices of cultivation and care that nurtured the “wilderness” for untold generations before settler-colonialism took hold.

What’s wrong with the Wilderness Act, and what would it mean to rewrite it today? How might a revised Wilderness Act serve the movement for land rematriation? And how might it guard itself against the libertarian right, which is prepared to exploit any loophole in the law?

Bringing together historians, legal experts, and impacted community members, this Zoom roundtable conversation asks how we should understand the Wilderness Act on its 60th anniversary—a moment both of Indigenous resurgence and a rising far right.

Speakers

• Rosalyn LaPier (Blackfeet/Métis) is an award winning writer, ethnobotanist, environmental activist and Professor of History at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She/they work within Indigenous communities to revitalize Indigenous & traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), to address environmental justice & the climate crisis, and to strengthen public policy for Indigenous languages. The author of Invisible Reality: Storytellers, Storytakers and the Supernatural World of the Blackfeet (2017), she/they are a 2023-2025 Red Natural History Fellow. Rosalyn is an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe of Montana and Métis.
• Heather Whiteman Runs Him (Apsaalooke/Crow) is the Director of the Tribal Justice Clinic and Associate Clinical Professor at University of Arizona Rogers College of Law. Heather served as Council of Record in Arizona v. Navajo Nation and Herrera v. Wyoming for amici Tribal Nations in support of Tribal interests before the United States Supreme Court. She has worked on cases in many venues to protect Tribal relationships to lands and waters. She teaches courses on Tribal Water Law and Tribal Courts and Tribal Law.
• Christen Falcon (Amskapi Piikani/Blackfeet) is a co-owner of a Blackfeet ecotourism transportation business ‘Backpacker’s Ferry’ located on the east side of Glacier National Park. She is a community engagement research specialist working in community wellness development utilizing Blackfeet methodologies and TEK traditional ecological knowledge through the Blackfeet non-profit Piikani Lodge Health Institute.
• Karl Jacoby is Allan Nevins Professor of American History at Columbia University. He has devoted his career to understanding how the making of the United States intertwined with the unmaking of a variety of other societies—from Native American nations to the communities of northern Mexico—and the ecologies upon which they rested. His books include Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves and the Hidden History of American Conservation (2003), Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History (2008), and The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire (2016).

RSVP

Legislative hearing on:

• S. 4444, Crow Revenue Act, to take certain mineral interests into trust for the benefit of the Crow Tribe of Montana
• S. 4633, Northeastern Arizona Indian Water Rights Settlement Act of 2024
• S. 4643, Zuni Indian Tribe Water Rights Settlement Act of 2024
• S. 4705, Yavapai Apache Nation Water Rights Settlement Act
• S. 4998, Navajo Nation Rio San José Stream System Water Rights Settlement Act of 2024

Business meeting to vote on:

• S. 465, BADGES for Native Communities Act, to require Federal law enforcement agencies to report on cases of missing or murdered Indians
• S. 2908, Indian Buffalo Management Act, to assist Tribal governments in the management of buffalo and buffalo habitat and the reestablishment of buffalo on Indian land
• S. 4370, Tribal Forest Protection Act Amendments Act of 2024

RSVP

The Farm SoHo NYC – Coworking Office Space

447 Broadway #2nd floor New York, NY 10013

U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, will convene a full committee hearing on Wednesday, September 25, 2024, at 10 A.M. EDT to consider the following Presidential nominations:

Nominees:

• Carl Bentzel to serve another term as a Commissioner on the Federal Maritime Commission
• Thomas Chapman to serve another term as a Member on the National Transportation Safety Board
• Lanhee Chen to be a Director on the Amtrak Board of Directors

Full committee markup of:

• H.R. 9671, Department of Energy Artificial Intelligence Act of 2024. Provides guidance for and investment in the research and development activities of artificial intelligence at the Department of Energy.
• H.R. 9710, Small Modular Reactor Demonstration Act of 2024. Amends the Energy Policy Act of 2005 to support a program to advance the research, development, demonstration, and commercial application of small modular reactors and micro-reactors in order to accelerate the availability of United States-based technologies.
• H.R. 9720, AI Incident Reporting and Security Enhancement Act. Directs the Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology to update the national vulnerability database to reflect vulnerabilities to artificial intelligence systems and study the need for voluntary reporting related to artificial intelligence security and safety incidents.
• H.R. 9723, National Windstorm Impact Reduction Program Reauthorization Act of 2024. Reauthorizes the National Windstorm Impact Reduction Program (NWIRP), providing critical funding for the program to continue its research into how to mitigate the injuries and property damage caused by windstorms.

The Committee on Rules will meet Monday, September 23, 2024 at 4:00 PM ET in H-313, The Capitol on the following emergency measure:

• H.R. ___ – Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2025

The Committee on Rules will meet Monday, September 23, 2024 at 4:00 PM ET in H-313, The Capitol on the following measures:

• H.R. 3334 – Sanctioning Tyrannical and Oppressive People within the Chinese Communist Party Act
• H.R. 8205 – Keeping Violent Offenders Off Our Streets Act
• H.R. 8790 – Fix Our Forests Act
• H. Res. 1469 – Ensuring accountability for key officials in the Biden-Harris administration responsible for decisionmaking and execution failures throughout the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

H.R. 8790 would fast-track logging on public lands, bypassing essential environmental reviews and endangering wildlife, clean air, water, and the health and safety of our communities, explains the John Muir Project.

• NEPA Rollbacks: This bill weakens the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), limiting environmental reviews and public input—key goals of Project 2025.
• Endangered Species Act (ESA): Provisions in H.R. 8790 undermine ESA protections for wildlife habitats, reflecting Project 2025’s push for economic interests over environmental safeguards.
• Federal Land Management: H.R. 8790 promotes increased logging on BLM and National Forest lands, aligning with Project 2025’s priorities for extraction industries.
• Anti-Climate Science Rhetoric: This bill misuses wildfire narratives to justify logging, despite the fact that most fires this year have occurred in grass, rangeland, and shrublands—not forests. This highlights that logging is not a solution to the real causes of wildfire activity, such as climate change and urban development. For detailed fire data, please refer to this tool.