A parable
Stretching across Northern Arizona and New Mexico is the largest American Indian reservation in the United States: the homeland of the Diné or Navajo Nation. Within the Navajo Reservation is the much smaller Hopi Tribe, and an area that has been shared by the Hopi and the Navajo lying within a mineral rich geological formation called the Black Mesa. The Hopi have lived on this land for over 1000 years, and their ancestors were a part of the ancient Anasazi Civilization. The Diné migrated to the area from Northwestern Canada, probably sometime in the 14th century AD. While the Hopi and the Navajo have very different cultures and economies, they share a belief that the people came from the Earth, are a part of the Earth, and will return to the Earth. These beliefs are in stark contrast to those of the governments and corporations who have exploited native peoples in order to commodify the Earth's resources.
The Black Mesa, and other areas of the Navajo Nation lands, are rich in coal and uranium deposits and the modern history of the the Dineh and the Hopi is filled with tales of exploitation by government and corporations to extract these resources. This exploitation of the Diné and Hopi, and their lands, is very closely tied to three critical issues currently facing humans on this Earth: the role of fossil fuels in the atmospheric degradation driving climate change, the availability of fresh water for human populations, and the ongoing threat of species self-annihilation by nuclear weapons..
WWII and the Manhattan Project
The Manhattan Project, to develop a nuclear weapon, created a demand for uranium and the Navajo people and their lands were commandeered to provide uranium ore for the project. The Navajo workers were exposed to high levels of radiation during the mining of ore, and the abandoned mines today continue to expose the Diné to unsafe levels of radiation. Their story is told here. The uranium ore was enriched in the first nuclear reactors at the Hanford Site in Washington state –one of the most polluted places on earth. The enriched uranium was then used to build weapons of inconceivable destructive power, which were tested on Yucca Flat at the Nevada test site, formerly part of the homeland of the semi-nomadic Western Shoshone people. Today, the people of the Earth are left with the threat of nuclear war, the Diné with health issues related to radiation exposure, and the surface of the Earth at Hanford Site and Yucca Flat made toxic to humans, and other life, for tens of thousands of years in the future.
The Central Arizona Project
The last and biggest large-scale project of the Bureau of Reclamation was the Central Arizona Project. The Colorado River Compact of 1922 divided the water of the Colorado between Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California, with allocations to meet treaty obligations with Mexico. A particularly engaging version of this story is told in the book Cadillac Desert. To make a long story short, the river water was over-apportioned, and California (specifically Los Angeles) quickly grabbed it's apportioned share. Because of the engineering challenges of Arizona (and other Upper Basin States) in using their apportionment –most of Arizona lies at a higher elevation than the River–Arizona was late to the game. Additionally, there was a problem of financing the project, as all previous large Bureau of Reclamation projects had funded their water boondoggles with hydro-electric power from dams, and there were no good dam locations left. And, it takes a lot of energy –2.8 million megawatt hours per year– to pump 1.5 million acre feet of water per year 336 miles and 2,900 vertical feet from Lake Havasu on the Colorado River to population centers of Phoenix and Tucson in central Arizona. The solution was found in the coal of the Black Mesa on the lands of the Diné and the Hopi. The film Broken Rainbow and this article in Orion Magazine chronicle the resource grab and the fabricated crisis and political railroading that was used to extract mineral rights and favorable terms from the tribes. Thus began the Kayenta Coal Mine which feeds the Navajo Generating Station, which powers the pumps that supply the desert farms and human populations of bone-dry central Arizona. (The mine also fed the Mohave Power Station in southern Nevada, which provided electricity to Los Angeles, and is very interesting story in itself, and resulted in depletion of the aquifer underlying Black Mesa. Cool demolition porn here.)
The Navajo and Hopi have paid a heavy price for the real estate development of Arizona and Los Angels, for nuclear power, and the enormous stockpile of US nuclear weapons.
Thousands of Navajo have been removed from tribal lands to make way for expansion of the coal mines. 90% of the revenues of the Navajo Nation are from royalties from the extraction of energy resources from their tribal lands, and the generation of power from coal on their lands. They are caught in a bind between long-energy contracts and needed economic resources, and the traditional values and the health and wellbeing of their peoples. (If you are curious how this bind plays out politically,
this somewhat long video of the Attorney General of the Navajo Nation telling a gathering of the Diné why they have no choice but to continue down the path). The extraction and burning of coal contributes to the elevated CO2 concentrations in the Earth’s atmosphere, which appears to be altering the rain patterns of the Colorado River Basin. A dryer basin has less water in a river that is already over-apportioned –water that is essential to maintaining the oasis in the Central Arizona desert.
This is the conundrum that we face as humans on this planet: we have accepted a story that our prosperity and survival depends upon the exploitations of the Earth's resources, and yet the playing out of this story is destroying the Earth's ability to sustain us, and forcing us into a faustian bargain of our own creation where we deny the rights of our fellow humans and unnecessarily mortgage the future of our species for the comfort, and aggrandizement, of the few. Which brings me to this: The climate change issue, which dominates the news, is too narrowly defined. Perhaps a more accurate (and moral) framing of the issues embodied in Earth Day is the notion of
Common Pool Resources as defined by the economist Elinore Ostrom. The use of The Commons, the shared resources of the earth, is a moral issue, and an issue of global civil rights, and raises the questions: Who speaks for the Earth? What rights, to the resources of the earth, do we afford to humanity as a whole? What import do we put on our long-term survival and well-being? Do we who are alive today have a right to consume and degrade earth's resource in a way that creates suffering for future generations? Do the few, have a right to monopolize and commoditize the resources that belong to the many?
The Earth will survive humanity in some form, but the future of humanity on Earth is troublingly uncertain. The eminent biologist Lynn Margulis (Gaia Proposition) wrote:
“To me, the human move to take responsibility for the living Earth is laughable - the rhetoric of the powerless. The planet takes care of us, not we of it. Our self-inflated moral imperative to guide a wayward Earth, or heal our sick planet, is evidence of our immense capacity for self delusion. Rather, we need to protect ourselves from ourselves.”
I believe that there is hope for a bright future for Humans on this Earth, but only if we are honest with ourselves, ask ourselves hard questions and are willing to make profound systemic changes to our political and economic systems; to learn from the traditional Diné and Hopi, and the thousands of other indigenous peoples who have suffered greatly under the current systems, and who deeply understand that humans have come from the Earth, are a part of the Earth, and will return to the Earth. Our long-term survival depends on it.
In closing, a quote from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels by way of William Cronon in his excellent book
Changes in the Land:
“The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organization of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature … . The writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men.”
Update for Earth Day 2021
In December, a chapter closed on this story, when the Navajo Generating Station was demolished. While the removal of one of the largest coal-fired electricity generating plants in the US is undoubtedly good news for global CO2 emissions, this is not the end of the story for the Diné and Hopi. They will be living with the environmental and economic legacy of the Central Arizona Project for many years to come. A recent article in Scientific American, and this article from the NRDC, speak to some of the issues including loss of tribal revenue, unemployment, environmental degradation, and the very real risks that the reclamation of the coal mines on the Black Mesa may never be fully or satisfactorily completed -another in a long line of environmental tragedies left in the wake of the resource extraction industry. One can hope that with Deb Haaland heading the Department of Interior, and Joe Biden in the White House, that the Diné and Hopi will be treated fairly and compassionately by the US Government -if so, it will have been a long time coming.