(bright music) (rhythmic music) - Welcome to The Newsfeed.

I'm Paris Jackson.

Washington leads an environmental and ecological conservation but the process of creating large scale green energy projects in the state is complicated and has a lot of critics frustrated.

Cascade PBS's Northwest Report's latest podcast series, It's Not Easy Going Green, introduces listeners to key stakeholders who have different reasons why they think the process is broken.

Northwest Reports co-host, Maleeha Syed, and Cascade PBS Reporter, Brandon Block, take us inside the reporting on this complex, local and global issue.

It's not easygoing green dives into the complex situation Washington is facing trying to tackle climate change.

Why did you want to explore this in the latest Northwest Report series?

- We wanted to explore this really broad topic of climate change, but localize it in a way that felt digestible for listeners.

I think a lot of people agree that climate change is something that we need to address, but we don't exactly know how to do that effectively.

And when you look at this series that we did, you realize there's a lot of stakeholders and people who really support the efforts to address climate change, but maybe don't wanna do it in their own backyards.

Like maybe they have opposition to wind turbines or battery storage facilities, or just other projects that they see as disruptive.

And so when we heard that Brandon was working on this story, we wanted to collaborate and be able to tell it really fully.

- Brandon, through your reporting, you introduced us to a lot of different stakeholders.

One in particular is an elder from Yakama Nation who's against a wind turbine project in the Tri-Cities.

Tell us a little bit more about him.

- The elder I spoke to, Jerry Meninick is his name, and he emphasized first of all, the profound spiritual connection that the Yakama Nation has had to this area called the Horse Heaven Hills would, firstly, if he were here, I think you would remind us that this is land that for hundreds of years before white settlers came to this country, was the domain of the Yakama Nation^^ as well as other tribes in the Northwest.

And when that land was relinquished in the middle of the 19th century, it was done so under specific conditions.

It was a treaty signed between the state of Washington that affords the Yakama and these other tribes certain rights in relationship to this land.

And so they have not only a spiritual stake in this land, but also a legal stake in what happens to the land that we're talking about.

And they simply feel that the wind farm, which would be the state's largest as originally proposed, would degrade that land in ways that are irreversible.

- After spending months covering this topic, what was your major takeaway?

- To me, I was interested in covering this topic because I think it shows how differently people think, even if they are concerned about climate change and think it's a real problem, when it comes for you and your neighborhood, there's suddenly a new set of considerations about how far you are willing to sacrifice in order to do something that maybe you think is valuable on the whole, but may not be willing to tolerate in your own backyard.

And then I think, you know, it forces us to ask tricky, difficult questions about whose sets of interests, because we talked about these different stakeholders, including tribes who've gotten a pretty raw deal on the end of energy projects historically in the state.

We have to ask what types of sacrifices the state is willing to force them to make really, because they don't have the ability to simply veto or say no to these projects, to benefit the greater good that we know we do need to build things like this, so it's a tricky equation.

- I'm Paris Jackson.

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