Mini Episode: Natalie Arroyo
The Brightline Podcast: Season 2, Episode 4
In this mini-episode, we highlight the work of Humboldt County District 4 Supervisor, Natalie Arroyo, who is helping turn renewable energy investments into an equitable future for Humboldt County communities and Tribes.
Transcript:
Natalie Arroyo: I do think the net gain of clean and renewable energy and the jobs associated with it and all of the potential benefits are worth it, but we’re doing something new and so we have to give it all we’ve got right now.
Aubrey: This is The Brightline Podcast from Brightline Defense. We explore environmental justice issues, or EJ issues, in the Bay Area and California, highlighting the work of community-based organizations, including our own. Today we’re doing another special mini episode that will take us back up to Humboldt county, where one district leader is helping to turn federal investment in renewable energy into an equitable, and environmentally just future for her community.
Natalie: My full name is Natalie Arroyo and I am a Humboldt County District 4 supervisor. So I represent one of the five districts in Humboldt County. So I have a background that’s really, like natural resource planning related. so I’ve done a lot of hands-on fisheries field work. And previously I served two terms on the Eureka City Council. So I have eight years of public service in that capacity under my belt too.
Aubrey: The district supervisors, like Natalie, are responsible for managing the county budget, staff, and policy, and her district is on the northern banks of Humboldt Bay. Back in the 19th and 20th centuries Humboldt’s economy was powered by industrial fishing, and lumber mills. But by 2010, all the mills had been shuttered, and the fisheries weren’t what they used to be.
Natalie: As the commercial fishing sector has declined as the timber industry has declined, we’ve seen a lot of need for jobs that pay a decent wage that people can be trained to do without necessarily going to college.
Aubrey: As a way to restore some of these jobs in Humboldt county, there’s been a lot of investments in aquaculture, and offshore wind energy. And these investments will require a lot of new infrastructure, and to build that new infrastructure, they’ll need a lot of labor.
Natalie: So one of the things that I think is really exciting to folks here is the opportunity for living wage jobs in the green energy sector, and also the opportunity for port related jobs, which have all but died out here in Humboldt Bay. But then there’s also the need, inevitably, for folks to come from the outside. So we will need more housing stock.
So all of that will mean that there’s a lot of construction in the near future. So we’re seeing some interesting industries come to the area that I think, environmental advocates are cautiously optimistic about, but also, concerned to see the impacts of.
Aubrey: Part of what makes Humboldt Bay so appealing to developers is its relative lack of development. It’s a naturally formed bay, and the largest portion of protected water in Northern California. There also aren’t any bridges that would prevent big ships from passing through. But there’s more to consider than just the economy.
Natalie: There’s a very strong presence of tribes here. You know, I grew up in Florida and a part of Florida where most tribal people had been displaced for more than 150 years from that land. And when I moved to Humboldt County, I really began to form relationships with the Wiyot tribe who, have, since time immemorial inhabited the Humboldt Bay Area and beyond, and some of the other tribes in the area, many of whom have Wiyot, ancestry, who have an interest in the area, and a concern about the impacts in Humboldt Bay impacting them.
Aubrey: And those concerns play a unique role in the development process.
Natalie: Ultimately tribes have a right to exercise their right to go through the tribal historic preservation process as well as to formally comment kind of late in the process. I do think developers, particularly developers from outside California sometimes have a hard time understanding, so there’s a very strong and visceral reaction sometimes to being told that, oh, well actually there’s, there are these concerns that have been identified at this stage.
Aubrey: Through it all, Natalie hopes to prioritize tribal knowledge in both process and outcome.
Natalie: How do you manage both the need for a flourishing economy and the need for places for people to live and thrive in healthy ways. and I believe that tribes actually have a lot of wisdom to share in that. And in addition to protecting things that are important, sacred, historical for them, they have a lot of wisdom to share about how to live in this place.
So when we look at, you know, what will happen in the future of Humboldt Bay, I think we will see that be more and more influenced by the Wiyot tribe’s needs and wishes and history. And I, for one, am grateful for that.
[music break]
Aubrey:Wind energy presents a huge opportunity for Humboldt county. But it’s going to take a lot of work to make it happen.
Natalie: So these entities are going through the permitting process and the leasing process and taking all the steps that they need to take to move forward with offshore wind. There’s a lot of frantic work that government needs to do to plan for those inevitable impacts. And I do think the net gain of clean and renewable energy and the jobs associated with it and all of the potential benefits are worth it. We’re doing something new and so we have to give it all we’ve got right now.
Aubrey: As we learned in our episode on Offshore Wind, these kinds of projects require a lot of careful coalition building, like what’s happening at the Redwood CORE Hub.
Natalie: We have a group of institutions and energy specialists and tribes and local community-based organizations that’s been meeting around the topic of offshore wind energy for a while now called the Redwood Region Climate and Community Resilience Hub. And that group has really created some powerful strategies for community engagement.
And so it’s helpful for folks coming into the community to be aware that the level of engagement and interest that people will have in these kinds of developments is really, really high. And, I think folks looking at it from the outside would be perhaps surprised to see how how engaged we are, how, interested the community at large is, and you know, there’s gonna be tough questions, but also a lot of community support to answer, questions that folks from the outside who are coming in to invest here have.
[music break]
Aubrey: This episode was written and produced by me, Aubrey Calaway and our assistant producer Will Entwisle. Original music by Maya Glicksman Thank you to Eddie Ahn, Sarah Xu Cecilia Mejia, and to Natalie Arroyo for sharing her story. This podcast is funded by the Environmental Justice Small Grants from the California EPA.
For more information about Brightline, you can visit our website at BrightlineDefense.org or on social media @brightlinedefense. You can also find a transcript of this episode on our Medium Blog.
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