Press Release
For Immediate Release

Indigo Girls Headline Honor the Earth Benefit Concert To Stop Skull Valley Nuclear Waste Dump
October 1 Show at University Of Utah To Renew Citizen Activism

--Grammy Award Winning Indigo Girls will stop in Utah for the third time in the last four years to lend support to Skull Valley Goshute tribal members resisting a high-level nuclear waste dump slated for their land.

An Honor the Earth benefit concert planned for October 1 at the University of Utah's Kingsbury Hall in Salt Lake City at 8:00 PM will call for renewed citizen action against the dump and the clean up of existing toxic waste surrounding the Goshute reservation.

The show will also announce the launch of research into a small-scale solar project on Goshute land as an example of a safe and economically beneficial alternative to the storage of deadly nuclear waste.

Tickets to the concert are $40.00 General, $20.00 Students (Limit 2 per ID) and can be purchased by calling (801)355-2787. Opening for Indigo Girls is acclaimed Native artist John Trudell and his band Bad Dog.

Honor the Earth is a national Native American environmental advocacy group and foundation founded by Indigo Girls and Native activist Winona LaDuke in 1993. The group has organized more than 70 benefit concerts and raised nearly one million dollars for hundreds of grassroots Native groups across North America.

The October 1 concert will benefit two grassroots Skull Valley Goshute groups, Ohngo Gaudadeh Devia Awareness (OGDA), and the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF). Both groups have been fighting plans for the dump for more than seven years in an effort to preserve Goshute culture and protect the health and safety of reservation inhabitants.

The timing of the concert is significant. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is expected to rule on a license for dump as early as January, 2005. Private Fuel Storage (PFS), the consortium of utilities behind the dump, is advertising the above ground facility, with a capacity to store 40,000 metric tons of lethal radioactive waste, in industry publications despite the fact a license has not yet been issued.

In March 2003, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB) denied Private Fuel Storage its license due to the risk of accidents involving F-16 fighter jets which routinely pass over Skull Valley en route from Hill Air Force Base to the Utah Test and Training Range, a nearby bombing range. PFS appealed the decision in May 2003. This past August, 2004, three weeks of closed-door meetings and hearings were held in which the NRC's ASLB discussed the safety issue involving the fighter jets and potential crashes.

"We are asking audience members and the public to continue to say NO! to Private Fuel Storage, and to support tribal members standing on the front lines of this struggle by writing to the NRC and urging them to uphold the ASLB decision," said Honor the Earth Program Director Winona LaDuke.

"There's been enough poisoning of the Goshutes. Military and toxic waste sites surround the community and contaminate not only Goshute territory, but also the entire region. It's time to look toward clean-up, not build-up of the military, and it is time for some new vision," LaDuke said. "Honor the Earth plans to research the viability of installing solar panels on Goshute land as a model of safe economic development and a path to energy justice in Native America."

Honor the Earth, through its Energy Justice Campaign, has launched renewable energy projects on the Pine Ridge Reservation, where two wind turbines are slated, and Western Shoshone territory in Nevada, where a solar project is underway. Utah has immense solar potential, enough to produce up to 69 million megawatt-hours (MWh) per year. In 1999, Utah's total electricity consumption was 22 million MWh.

"We think solar panels are better than nuclear waste," said LaDuke,. "We invite the citizens of Utah to join us at the October 1 show to stop PFS and rally for a safe and just energy future."

Emily Saliers of Indigo Girls added, "It is time to lodge a big stick in the spokes of the military- industrial wheel. you wouldn't want nuclear waste dumped in your backyard, would you? we must abandon the deadly nuclear industry and turn our efforts toward alternative energy sources, such as wind and sun. a new energy paradigm is possible. for the sake of human dignity and our very survival and the survival of future generations, we urge you to get involved."

FOR ARTIST INTERVIEWS:
Cathy Lyons, Russell Carter Artists Management, 404-377-9900

FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Natalie Marker or Faye Brown
Honor the Earth
info@honorearth.org
612-879-7529