Photography by John Collins Rudolf The Navajo Generating Station is the largest coal-fired power plant in Arizona, burning about 8 million tons of coal annually.

Coal mining in Black Mesa keeps much of the Valley’s air and water running, but are we cooking the planet –
and making our Navajo neighbors sick – just to
keep ourselves cool?


It’s a five-hour drive from Phoenix to Black Mesa, a vast high-desert plateau in northeastern Arizona where Peabody Energy extracts millions of tons of coal each year from two massive strip mines. Along the way – just south of Tuba City, one of the westernmost villages on the Navajo reservation – the highway passes below a pair of towering transmission lines. Pull over there and step out of your car, and in the almost total stillness of the desert air you will hear the sound of electricity crackling and sizzling as it travels from the Navajo Generating Station near scenic Lake Powell to Phoenix, Mesa and Scottsdale. These power lines, hung from horizon to horizon, are the almost ghostly connection between Black Mesa and the rest of the world.

Keep driving, and in less than an hour you will approach a series of cliffs that mark the southwest edge of Black Mesa. The mesa is shaped like an open hand, with five big fingers pointed southwest toward the Valley, and the mining area, or leasehold, covers about 100 square miles in the north, near what would be the wrist. To get to the leasehold you follow Highway 160 from Tuba City up into the Klethla Valley, a broad plain lying between the Shonto Plateau to the northwest and Black Mesa to the east. The mesa rises several thousand feet above the valley floor and from a distance really does look black, though only because of its dense stands of pine.

A rail line parallels the highway through much of the valley, all the way to the mine entrance. This is the Lake Powell Railroad, an electric rail line that for each of the last 33 years has carried about 8 million tons of coal from the Kayenta mine on Black Mesa to the Navajo Generating Station. This plant, along with the coal-fired Four Corners power plant on Navajo land a few hundred miles to the east, forms the cornerstone of Phoenix’s energy infrastructure.

“Without those coal plants you could not keep the air conditioning and the lights on in the Valley,” says Ed Fox, vice president and chief sustainability officer for Arizona Public Service Co. “It is the piece that keeps the rest of the system going.”

The coal burned in the Navajo Generating Station does more than simply keep the lights on. It also provides 95 percent of the power for the Central Arizona Project, the vast system of canals and water pumps that brings billions of gallons of water from the Colorado River to central Arizona – between 45 and 50 percent of all water used in the Valley.

“It’s a huge piece of our operation,” says David Modeer, general manager of the Central Arizona Project. “Without that station, we don’t have any power to move that water.”

The benefits that Black Mesa’s coal has brought to the Valley are almost immeasurable. Yet they have not come without a price.

Vernon Masayesva, 70, lives in Hotevilla, one of the five Hopi villages perched on the cliffs at the mesa’s southern edge. As a young man he used to listen to Hopi elders denounce the plans to mine coal on the mesa as a violation of their obligation to protect the natural world. Later in life, he was elected to the Hopi tribal council and then became Hopi tribal chairman. As chairman, he gained access to records detailing the deals struck by Peabody with members of his tribe.

“It was a scandalously bad deal,” he says. “When I started poring through the records it made me sick to my stomach.”

Masayesva has long been one of Peabody’s staunchest opponents and today advocates for an end to coal mining, which he fears is destabilizing the climate – an event foretold in Hopi prophecy. “Everything is going out of balance,” he says. “We are at the 11th hour.”

Today a cultural clash is occurring on the reservation. Some older Navajo residents cling to Peabody and the benefits it has given the tribe. The next generation of Navajo disagrees, saying solar and wind are the future. The result could tip the scale back in favor of the Earth and paint one of Phoenix’s cornerstones green, drastically changing how the Valley receives its most precious resource: water.

High-voltage transmission lines on Navajo Nation land near Tuba City carry electricity from the Navajo Generating Station near Page south to cities such as Phoenix, Scottsdale and Mesa.

The sale of coal to the Salt River Project, which operates the power plant, is immensely profitable for Peabody but also for the Navajo and Hopi tribes, who lease the land to Peabody and receive a royalty for every ton of coal produced. Peabody’s annual payments are the largest single sources of revenue for both tribal governments and help fund core services like education and health care on the reservation. Peabody also provides desperately needed jobs to tribal members, who receive preferential hiring at the mines.

“Coal is the Navajo Nation’s largest resource,” says George Hardeen, a spokesman for Navajo Nation President Joe Shirley Jr. “In terms of funding the Navajo government, it’s pretty significant.”

Since mining began in the early 1970s, Peabody has contributed almost $3 billion to the tribes in coal royalties, business payments, taxes, wages, benefits and charitable contributions, including more than $7 million in scholarships for tribal youth every year. The company’s largess has helped it forge close ties with key tribal leaders; in a recent statement, Navajo Nation President Shirley praised Peabody as a “good corporate neighbor” and an “exemplary employer” of Navajo workers.

Peabody, for its part, has worked hard to cultivate an image of corporate sensitivity. The company has won awards for its attempts to replant native vegetation on reclaimed mining lands, and in a recent interview, a Peabody spokeswoman described the company as “guests” on the land.

“We have been a partner with the tribes for almost 40 years, and it’s brought enormous economic benefits to the region,” says Beth Sutton, director of corporate communications for Peabody Energy, the conglomerate that controls Peabody Western Coal Company.

Many homes in the leasehold still lack running water and electricity, but Peabody provides free water from a communal pump and free coal for heating in the winter to locals. According to Sutton, the company is developing other projects to improve life for the Navajo and Hopi who live in areas affected by mining.

“We work very closely with the four surrounding [tribal] chapters to assist with local needs,” she says. “There are a number of quality-of-life projects that we are working on that will improve the lives of the people.”

Yet, despite Peabody’s contributions to the tribes and its efforts to reclaim lands damaged by mining, it has nevertheless long faced bitter opposition to its activities on Black Mesa, both on and off the reservation. And not surprisingly, some of Peabody’s fiercest opponents are the Navajo whose homes lie near or within the leasehold and who decry the damage mining has done to the land and its inhabitants.

“If you take a flight over Black Mesa you can see how much scarring has been done. It’s devastating,” says Wahleah Johns, 31, a Navajo from Black Mesa and a community organizer who has rallied opposition to Peabody’s mining operation. “They are damaging the land and our people’s health.”

Her Navajo heritage compels her to act as a caretaker to the land, Johns adds. 

“We’re trying to defend our homeland,” she says. “Black Mesa to me is my mother, and my role in life is to protect my mother so my children can have her to live on.”  

Indigenous organizers like Johns are breaking new ground in their struggle against coal, oil and natural gas development on the Navajo Nation. In 2001, Johns co-founded the Black Mesa Water Coalition, which helped lead a successful grassroots effort to halt Peabody’s pumping of hundreds of millions of gallons of groundwater from an ancient aquifer beneath Black Mesa.

For more than 30 years, the company had used the groundwater to transport 5 million tons of pulverized coal every year to a power plant in southern Nevada through a controversial coal-slurry pipeline. Hopi and Navajo activists argued that the pumping was harming the long-term health of the aquifer and reducing the flow from sacred springs and streams on Black Mesa, a charge that Peabody vehemently denied.

Despite Peabody’s protests, and against the wishes of President Shirley, the Navajo Nation tribal council voted overwhelmingly in 2003 to cancel the contract allowing the company to pump water from the aquifer. The decision proved fateful. Several years earlier, a coalition of national environmental groups had successfully sued the owners of the Mohave Generating Station – the power plant in Nevada where the coal slurry was dried and burned – for repeated violations of the Clean Air Act. A federal judge ordered the power plant’s owners to install new pollution controls at an estimated cost exceeding $1 billion.

Peabody ultimately found a new source of water for the pipeline, but it was too late. In late 2005, citing the high costs of retrofitting the plant, and uncertainty over the long-term reliability of its coal supply, Mohave’s owners shut down the power plant. As a result, Peabody was forced to close the Black Mesa mine, one of its two strip mines on the mesa, which had been exclusively permitted to supply coal to the Mohave Generating Station. The mine closure meant the loss of 40 percent of the company’s coal production in Arizona.