Coal and Mother Earth: Proposed coal plant pits economy against Navajo beliefs

BURNHAM, N.M. — In a corner of the Navajo Nation burdened by old and heavily polluting coal-fired power plants, it matters little to many tribal elders that another facility promises to be the most efficient and cleanest of all.

With two plants already a dozen miles away, the last thing they want is another one even closer, a 1,500-megawatt project barely two miles in another direction.

"We want the smoke to stop," said 76-year-old Alice Gilmore in Navajo, raising a hand toward the belching plants.

Others say the $3 billion Desert Rock Energy Facility could invigorate the lagging economy of the Navajo Nation, which stretches across parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. Backers say it would bring $52 million a year in revenues to the tribal government and provide up to 400 jobs on a reservation where unemployment hovers around 50 percent.

The plan — the largest-ever economic development partnership for the Navajos — has prompted fierce debate, pitting that economic windfall against environmental concerns and traditional culture on the 27,000-square-mile reservation, rich with natural gas, uranium and low-sulfur coal.

Some Navajos believe they are inseparable from Mother Earth and Father Sky — stewards of the land who must live in harmony with the natural world. There are no Navajo words to describe the complexities of power plants. To many elders, they are big stoves that produce electricity, and the emissions are wild spirits capable of harm.

"You treat your mother with great respect and love," said Harry Walters, a historian and cultural anthropologist at Dine College in Tsaile, Ariz. "You don't give your mother bad food, you don't take your mother to a place where there is bad air, you don't let her drink dirty water."

Gilmore grew up tending goats on a homestead on the reservation and recalls waist-high grass teeming with tiny ground lizards before the coal burning started 44 years ago. While the land is bare now, it would be obliterated by an advancing strip mine that would be tapped for the new plant.

"Sometimes she cries for it when she's alone, for the land and the destruction," says Gilmore's daughter, Bonnie Wethington.

Walters said tribal leaders need only consider the legacy of uranium-mining booms in the 1950s and 1970s — which brought cancer, lung disease and death to the Navajos — to know that Mother Earth will retaliate for coal digging and burning.