Welcome to Truth and Reckoning, a newsletter and podcast from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth.

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance.

In this episode, we speak with Djuli (Julie) Lomboy about her prayer walk along the Columbia River (Imaɬ)

Djuli Lomboy is an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde of Klickitat, Wasco, Chinookan, Molalla, Klamath, Filipino, German, French Canadian and Scandinavian descent. She walked nearly the whole length of the lower river, 300 miles from Astoria to Hanford, starting in June and finishing in July.

We discuss Djuli’s motivation for embarking on this walk, the difficulties she faced along the way, the nuclear contamination of the Hanford nuclear site, other threats facing the river and the riparian communities, the spiritual basis of cultural transformation, and the disconnection of modern society from the natural world.

The world’s greatest rivers are among the most degraded ecosystems. The Colorado River, sucked dry for agriculture in California and the Southwest, no longer reaches the ocean. The Mississippi is so toxified with agricultural chemicals that the Gulf of Mexico at its mouth is lifeless across 7,000 square miles. The Yangtze is now home to the world’s largest dam and not to the Chinese paddlefish and Yangtze river dolphin — both extinct.

And, of course, the Imaɬ (or Columbia). A being as vast as the Columbia is hard to kill. She is still alive. Yet she is dying. Year after year, her waters grow warmer and more difficult for native fish to survive in. Her salmon are dying, with fewer and fewer wild fish, the illusion of their persistence only maintained through a vast network of fish hatcheries, factory farms where eggs are raised into fish like cattle on a feedlot and released for anglers and commercial fishermen to gather into their nets. Her sturgeon, her steelhead, her freshwater mussels and lamprey and all of her inhabitants are dwindling. More than 60 large dams on her mainstem and tributaries shackle her. Her watershed has been deforested, urbanized, poisoned. The soils of her slopes, formerly nurturing wild ecologies, now erode under mechanized plows, carrying chemical fertilizers and pesticides into her waters. Millions of acres of her lands have been buried under concrete and asphalt, a veil of bitumen (tar sands). Wind turbines strike her ferruginous hawks and golden eagles out of the sky. Nuclear waste seeps into her waters at Hanford, [perhaps the most contaminated site in the world] where the plutonium that was used in the atomic bombings of Japan was enriched. Data centers take ever more of her flow, stealing the cold, life-sustaining waters that come from her mountains and necessary for her health and returning it superheated and toxified with chemicals. Up and down her length, industry has had its way.

She is in a cage, and the bars close in tighter and tighter every year.

Yet in those places where people make room for her to heal, she has done so, at least in part. Along the White Salmon, the removal of a dam led to salmon returning where none had been seen for decades. This is essential. But unless the destruction is stopped — not just stopped, but reversed — then there is only one end for her.

There are multiple new nuclear reactors being planned along the Columbia River, most financed by tech companies seeking power for additional data center construction. Fuel for these reactors, if they are built, would likely be sourced from uranium mines in the American southwest, which have left behind a toxic legacy (an estimated 15,000+ abandoned uranium mines in the southwest have never been cleaned up) and have disproportionately harmed the Diné, Hopi, and other regional tribes.

This conversation is an important reflection on personal action, prayer and internal change, the destruction of rivers — the veins of our planet — and more. We thank you for listening.

Links and Resources

* Hanford Challenge – leading watchdog of the Hanford cleanup

* List of dams in the Columbia River watershed

* Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde website

* Prayer Walk on The Imaɬ (Columbia River) – video recorded by Djuli in advance of the walk

* Past, Present, and Future Dead: The Nippon Dynawave industrial accident, Coffin Rock, and ecological collapse

* Impacts of noise pollution on wildlife

* Impacts of roads on wildlife

About the Truth and Reckoning Podcast

If you’re new here, this is Truth and Reckoning, a newsletter from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth.

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance.

In this show, we learn from front-line organizers and communities fighting against environmental destruction. We explore different perspectives and innovative strategies for movement building, the potency and potential of rights of nature, and effective action in defense of our communities. And, we share inspiring stories of people working towards right relationship with the land and each other. The show is hosted by CELDF Community Resistance and Resilience Program Co-Director Max Wilbert.

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About CELDF — Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund

CELDF is a nationwide community of organizers, lawyers, and partners who educate, agitate, and organize to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s reciprocal relationship with the Earth. For over 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate exploitation, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-govern through systems grounded in ecological balance and collective power.

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