The Earth is being exploited nearly everywhere around the globe, in so many different ways that it can seem overwhelming. These practices affect our Earth, our people, and the plants and animals that share our land with us. Below are some exploitative practices that harm our land, that we’re trying to educate people about and combat.
There are companies all over the world and all over the US harming the environment every day, a ceaseless hunger for wealth that spills from the Southwest into the farthest corners of the world. The Raya band has chosen to focus on a smaller, more manageable part of that wider world. We wish to start closer to home, where the soil remembers our steps and the winds carry the voices of our community.
One of the biggest mining companies that operates in the Southwest is Newmont Goldcorp, a gold mining company that has pursued several ventures all over the world. Another major mining company in the Southwest US is Freeport McMoRan, which operates seven open-pit copper mines.
One of the biggest fracking companies in Texas is Pioneer Natural Resources, siphoning enough crude from the ground to quench over 5% of Texas’ insatiable thirst for oil. Another big offender is Exxon Mobil, a notorious exploiter accounting for nearly 10% of natural gas production in Texas.
The Palo Verde Nuclear Generating station in Arizona is owned and operated by several companies. The WA Parish Generating station in Texas is run by using coal and natural gas, neither of which is an easily renewable resource. This power station runs 25 miles away from the major metropolitan area of Houston, and it is one of the largest polluters in Texas.
These engines of extraction, cloaked in the narratives of growth and necessity, echo a dominion not merely of commerce but of an unrelenting creed of profit over place—a worldview that reshapes lands into ledgers and rivers into revenues. Yet here, on the ground we call home, the stories of resistance take root.