These photos show how coal and uranium mining decimated the Navajo Nation
With jobs came pollution
Three gas flue stacks rise nearly 800 feet into the southwestern sky. These ersatz hoodoos spew out the vaporous waste of spent coal burned to feed the electrical needs of distant cities in Arizona and Nevada and to pump Colorado River water south to Phoenix and Tucson.
The stacks are part of a power plant that, along with coal mines and another generating station, are fresh scars of modernity’s intrusion on the landscape. The plants sit on land leased from the Navajo Nation, 27,000 square miles of arid Colorado Plateau negotiated into existence in 1868 by imprisoned tribal leaders. After the treaty was signed, survivors left internment at Fort Sumner, New Mexico, and returned to their homeland, but they would never truly be able to return to their former lives.
Resource exploitation replaced agriculture as the Nation’s industry. For more than 40 years, thousands of Navajo laborers blasted rock faces to extract nearly four million tons of uranium ore, all destined to become part of the United States’ nuclear arsenal. The one thousand mines run by contractors on leased land operated without regulations until the late sixties; workers spent years choking on radon-rich dust in poorly ventilated shafts while government researchers surveyed their health. In the summer of 1969, more than one thousand tons of uranium scrap and almost 100 million gallons of toxic waste burst from their containment pond at Church Rock, poisoning the Puerco River, which was used by downstream Navajo for farming and swimming.
By the time the dangers of uranium mining were public knowledge, another environmental health hazard was under construction: the Four Corners Power Plant. Between 1963 and 1970, five generators were built and brought online, offering good wages in an area of little opportunity. More jobs came with the Navajo Generating Station, in 1974. But both plants also brought health hazards or climate-damaging exhaust such as nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, fly ash, and carbon dioxide. Terry Eiler took these photographs in early 1972 as part of the newly created EPA’s Documerica Project, and the agency would soon begin to establish rules for power plant emissions. Over the following decades, in response to environmental regulations, both facilities installed pollution controls; when that didn’t work, they shut down generators and cut capacity. The skies above the Grand Canyon grew less hazy, and the air in Navajo communities near the plants became easier to breathe.
Coal-fired power plants have proven less ruinous than uranium mines, and the leases have propped up the tribal government, but low natural gas prices are bringing the industry to an end on the Navajo Nation. Salt River Project, the operator and majority owner of the Navajo Generating Station, is ceasing operations at the end of 2019. Environmental activists are thrilled, but the nearly one thousand employees of the plant and mine will be out of work, living in a place where roughly 40 percent of the population already survives under the poverty line and roughly 50 percent are unemployed.
People in the Nation still herd cattle and raise goats and sheep, as they have for centuries. Highway storefronts sell handwoven rugs and blankets to a growing legion of tourists searching for traditional pottery and turquoise jewelry. But it’s telling that in 2008, following the lead of tribes all across the country, the Navajo Nation finally opened its first casino. Three more followed by 2013, when readers of Experience Arizona magazine voted the fourth and newest one the Best Casino Resort Destination.
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