WATER CRISIS

The human race needs to be educated on how to live in the riches of our lands, while taking care of the land and the natural resources that originate with it. Until 45 years ago the coal of the Black Mesa laid untouched and was worth around $100 billion. Today, surrounding cities (southern California, Arizona, and Nevada) have promised energy, but the Hopi and Navajo reserved lands lay in devastation. Due to the strip mining, the Black Mesa has suffered human rights, ecological destruction, water loss, and water pollution.

 

The Black Mesa is an upland mountainous mesa of Arizona, which sits in Navajo county. What is a mesa? A mesa is an isolated flat- topped hill with steep sides, found in landscapes with a horizontal strata. The Black Mesa takes its name from the layer of black lava rock (coal) that coated the inside of the mesa about 30 million years ago.

 

At first the idea of extracting coal and getting rich was a brilliant idea until the companies in charge were contaminating the water resource, which lead to the shutting down of the project in 2005. Leases were signed secretly by the Hopi and Navajo tribal councils and the Peabody Coal Company of Kentucky in 1966, with no larger tribal mandate on either side. The Navajos tried to block the mining equipment by setting up blockades in the road. In claiming the leases were illegal because they had been signed without attendance of minimum people, the Hopi priests sued their tribal council. According to Lifsher (2006) of The New York Times, under a proposed agreement with Edison, the Navajo nation and the Hopi tribe of northern Arizona would supply the 1,585-megawatt plant in Laughlin, Nev., with water from tribal lands and coal from the Black Mesa mine, which is owned by the tribes and operated by Peabody Energy Corp. In return, Edison and its partners in the Mohave power plant would make a series of payments to the tribes.

 

To meet the needs of environmental codes, Edison needed to install pollution-control equipment that controlled the sulfur dioxide emissions from the plant and would cost about $1 billion. Bulldozers began to structure the under layers into hulking piles of waste left over after the re-sorting of coal, dynamite exposed the mineral bed, and steam shovels loaded the coal into transport trucks. Controversial issues began to occur when Peabody had to use water from the Navajo Aquifer at the Black Mesa mine to move crushed coal through a 273-mile (Lifsher) pipeline to the power plant. The Indians were enraged because they relied on the aquifer for drinking, farming, and livestock. Within a few decades, thousands of years of water had been used up. According to Broder (2006) of The New York Times  the company was supposed to install scrubbers to clean its smokestacks of sulfur dioxide emissions and negotiate new coal and water supply agreements with Peabody and the tribes. But it decided not to. By the time the coal was extracted, the land turned gray, vegetation disappeared, the air was filled with coal dust, and the groundwater was contaminated with toxic runoff.

 

When the slurry pipelines from the coal began to be known, environmental groups (The Grand Canyon Trust, the Sierra Club and the National Parks Conservation Association) sued the Southern California Edison and the three other owners of the Mohave Generating Station because of repeated pollution violations. The environmental groups gave the plant operators six years to comply with the consent decree, which was signed in 1999 (Broder). Finally the water had become more important than the coal.

 

Both sides gained and lost something. Within 35 years of mining the Peabody Company created jobs that payed as much as $80,000 a year, with benefits included. The Peabody Coal Company exploited and enriched the reservations. “It provided $89 million a year in payroll, lease payments, taxes and other benefits to this region, where unemployment among the Hopi and Navajo was nearly 40 percent” (Broder). Terminating the power plant hit the local tribal economies right in the face. The plant was the only supply of coal from the Black Mesa mine, and 600 high-paying jobs for nearby residents were discharged when the Mohave plant closed. All the millions of dollars in royalty the Hopi and Navajo government received yearly vanished.

 

America is known for dividing and conquering everywhere they go to get anything they want. But why would you commit human rights abuse to your own people? Cultures that don’t have powerful media are threatened everyday with extinction. The Native Americans need a voice too. A voice that needs to be heard before damage has already been done.