Claire V. Watkins

speaker

479 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 12 Sep

Claire V. Watkins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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Fresh Air · Novelist Claire Vaye Watkins on the beauty & brutality of the desert · 6 Aug 2026 podcast

It's also kind of being besieged by other types of energy development like geothermal and mining.

I mean, mining has been happening out there for a really long time, although the scale is getting bigger and bigger.

The aquifer has been pretty dramatically depleted.

And, you know, there's not a lot of water in this area to begin with in the best of times.

So the natural resources are really being pushed to the brink.

in a pretty dramatic way.

And there's been a long, long history of environmental injustice.

You know, Yellow Pine and where I live is not far from the Nevada test site where the federal government detonated almost a thousand nuclear bombs until 1992 when I was about in the third grade.

And

So it's a place that's been treated like a wasteland for a really long time.

And that story has been very cooperative and convenient for extraction and exploitation of the natural resources.

So I was worried that...

While I feel really convinced that we need to decarbonize the economy and the need for renewable energy is obvious to me, I was really concerned that there would be some really serious sacrifices being made that didn't seem right to me or fair and that I don't think will actually help us transition off of fossil fuels

Well, yeah, I think at one point they say, you know, it's not a blockade because we're not delusional, but they are still very principled.

You know, they can tell that this is wrong.

And so it, I think, is a matter of morality, taking action, even though you don't,

have a real grounded expectation of being successful, I think there's still value in the action to watch and witness and be able to say that you saw what was there.

I mean, that's what drove me out to Yellow Pine was that I wanted to be able to say that I saw it before it was gone.

And I guess I kind of just feel like if you only engage in an action that you're certain is going to be successful, that's pretty cowardly, really.

I mean, we want to be strategic and effective as activists, but there's no guarantee in any of this stuff, and that doesn't mean it's not still a worthwhile way to spend your life.

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