Wahleah Johns, 31, a Navajo from Black Mesa, has successfully rallied opposition to Peabody’s mining operation.

“This was a big victory for the grassroots,” Johns says. “To actually shut down a power plant, a coal mine and a slurry line – it’s historic. I don’t know of any other success story like it.”

Like other native organizers, Johns’ ultimate goal is the transition of the Navajo and Hopi economies away from its current reliance on coal and other fossil fuels and toward clean energy and other non-polluting industries.

It is an ambitious, even audacious, goal: In addition to Peabody’s Black Mesa strip-mining operation, the Navajo Nation is home to three coal-fired power plants and several other large coal mines, as well as an estimated 35,000 natural gas wells. But by building on past successes and training a new generation of tribal leaders committed to sustainable development, Johns believes the tribes can eventually become clean-energy powerhouses.

“We’re turning heads and changing history,” she says. “We have a lot of strength in this movement. And being young people, we feel like this needs to keep going.”

The tribal movement against coal has been bolstered by action on the national level to control greenhouse gas emissions, which most scientists believe will cause catastrophic climate change unless curbed.

President Obama pushed hard for action on climate change in his first few months in office, an effort that has already paid off with the passage of the first national bill to regulate carbon emissions, the American Clean Energy and Security Act. If approved by the Senate, the law would create a cap on carbon emissions that will gradually tighten over the coming decades, eventually reducing carbon emissions by 83 percent by 2050. Meeting such a target will require a massive reduction in the use of coal to generate electricity and a shift to renewable sources.

As acceptance of the threat of climate change grows, the impact of coal mining is no longer a local or even regional problem, but a global one, environmentalists argue. The 8 million tons of coal mined on Black Mesa and burned at the Navajo Generating Station, for instance, generates almost 20 million tons of carbon dioxide each year – fully one-fifth of Arizona’s overall carbon emissions for a year.

“In order to refrigerate Phoenix we’re cooking the planet,” says Roger Clark, air and water director for the Grand Canyon Trust, a conservation group based in Flagstaff. “It’s a horrible feedback system that’s not sustainable. It’s going to collapse whether we like it or not.”

Debates over energy policy and climate change can seem abstract at times, but the impact of coal mining has been anything but theoretical to Navajo families like the Benallys, who live within the Black Mesa leasehold and are surrounded on all sides by one of the largest strip mines in the Southwest.

Three generations live together under one roof – Mable Benally, 65, and her husband, two daughters, and two of her granddaughters. Like generations past, the family raises sheep, goats, horses and a few head of cattle, grazing them on the undulating hills of Black Mesa.

On a humid, overcast day in June, the family’s routine was unchanged in a reporter’s presence. They took the sheep and goats out to pasture, watered their horses and tended to a few sick or pregnant animals. The family’s small house and corral sit within the Black Mesa portion of the leasehold, only a few hundred yards from the industrial plant where the infamous coal slurry was manufactured. The plant once belched black smoke constantly and lit up the night sky with blinding lights, but the closure of the mine and the slurry line has silenced it.

Mable Benally offers to drive me up to a ridge overlooking the Kayenta mine, where strip mining continues day and night. To reach the ridge we veer off one of Black Mesa’s many wide, red-dirt mining roads onto a deeply rutted, narrow track that climbs a steep hill. After a series of precarious switchbacks, we crest the ridge and the gnarled stands of juniper and piñon pine fall away, revealing an almost endless vista of bald, ash-colored slag piles and pavement-flat valleys tinged with orange and red. Here and there stand the draglines, the towering cranes steadily scraping away the topsoil to uncover the thick seams of coal beneath.

Mable Benally, 65, a Navajo born on Black Mesa, gathers flowers on a ridge overlooking Peabody Energy’s Kayenta mine. Benally raises sheep, goats and horses with her children on land Peabody has targeted for future strip mining.

As I look over the blighted landscape, Mable Benally gathers a bouquet of wildflowers and sets them in the bed of the truck. Then we leave. Later, she says that somewhere amid the rubble was the place she was born.

“I don’t come up here much anymore,” she says, as we drive back down. “It’s too sad.”

It is a profound understatement but somehow fitting. Coal has poisoned the air and water around her, sickened her children and killed her horses and dogs and hundreds of her livestock. It has buried her birthplace and the burial grounds of her ancestors under tons of broken rock. But the red-hot anger she felt toward those who profit from coal has cooled into grief and resignation.

She used to argue with the Navajo politicians who championed mining for the cash and jobs it brought to the tribe, but they have learned not to come asking for her vote. She has clashed with Peabody again and again over the poisons that spill into the streams. And she has described all she has lost to a steady procession of activists, filmmakers and reporters who have beaten a path to her door over the years. But she has lost faith that her words will change anyone’s mind about the evils of coal. 

“I’ve talked about it so many times,” she says. “If they don’t understand it by now, I don’t think they’ll understand it ever.”

Mable Benally has reasons to be pessimistic. The mine in her backyard may be closed for now, but late last year, in the waning days of George W. Bush’s administration, the federal Office of Surface Mining approved a revision to Peabody’s life-of-mine permit. The new permit consolidates the company’s two mining areas – Black Mesa and Kayenta – into a single mining complex.

The decision also transfers 6,000 acres of unmined coal reserves from the dormant Black Mesa portion of the mine into the larger, active mining complex.

After the closure of the slurry line and the Mohave Generating Station, these 6,000 acres of coal reserves – which are likely worth several billion dollars – were basically stranded underground; the new permit removes the reserves from regulatory limbo and essentially creates a “supermine” that could feed Phoenix.

The decision outraged tribal activists and environmental groups, who declared it a last-minute favor from the industry-friendly Bush administration to Peabody and have appealed the decision through the Department of the Interior.

“All of this was timed to get out the door before Bush left,” says Andy Bessler, Southwest representative for the Sierra Club. “Peabody got exactly what they wanted.”

Representatives from both the Office of Surface Mining and Peabody, however, describe the permit revision as a largely administrative step that will have little real impact on the company’s mining operations on Black Mesa. They also point out the fact that Peabody must go through additional regulatory steps before it can resume mining on the now-dormant area. 

“In order for them to change their plan for mining they’d have to come to us and request a revision to their permit,” says Richard Holbrook, Southwest branch chief for the Office of Surface Mining. “There are future approvals that would be needed.”

The Office of Surface Mining’s own documents, however, clearly spell out the impact of the permit revision on the 6,000 acres of stranded coal reserves. “If no action were taken on the life-of-mine revision, these unmined coal-resource areas could not be mined,” Office of Surface Mining officials wrote in a 2008 report.

Peabody will not say what it intends to do with the 6,000 acres of coal reserves, which are potentially worth billions of dollars. As yet, the company has not identified a user for the coal.

“We really have no details to offer at this time,” says Beth Sutton, a Peabody spokeswoman. “It’s fair to say that we continue to be interested in pursuing long-term coal-related development opportunities with the tribes.”

Environmental groups speculate that the coal is destined for use in the Navajo Generating Station, which is already connected to Black Mesa via the Lake Powell Railroad. The coal reserves from the Kayenta mine now fueling the plant will be exhausted within 15 years.

“By consolidating the two mines, the Office of Surface Mining is in effect extending the life of the Navajo Generating Station,” says the Grand Canyon Trust’s Roger Clark.

Vernon Masayesva, 70, a former Hopi tribal chairman, has been an active critic of Peabody’s mining practices and their financial dealings with the tribes.

Peabody’s push to regain control of its lost coal reserves on Black Mesa is just a small illustration of the corporation’s political heft. Like other coal companies and utilities, Peabody has spent lavishly in Washington to secure influence over legislators and regulatory bodies. In just the past three years, the company’s political action committees and its employees have donated more than $600,000 to federal Senate and House campaigns. In the same three-year period, the company spent $18.1 million lobbying Congress on energy, mining and climate change. Included in this total was $1 million to former Democratic majority leader Richard Gephardt’s lobbying shop.  

A single day of Peabody’s lobbying expenses would fund volunteer-run tribal organizations like the Black Mesa Water Coalition for an entire year. 

“The fossil fuel industry has tons of money and lobbyists,” Wahleah Johns says. “We don’t have the financial backing we need. We’re broke.”

If Peabody prevails in reopening the now-dormant Black Mesa mine, it will deal a significant setback to the tribal and environmental groups who viewed the mine closure as a significant victory for their cause.

It may also signify, in miniature, the huge challenges facing opponents of coal power as they attempt to force the American economy to transition from fossil fuels to renewable, low-emission energy sources like wind and solar to power sprawling cities like Phoenix.

But life has improved on the Benally homestead, which directly overlooks the idled coal-slurry plant. The once-constant noise from hammering and blasting is gone, as are the huge trucks that used to rumble up and down the roads at all hours of the night. The lights on the slurry plant still burn through the night, but they are no longer bright enough to obscure the stars in the sky. And while the air is far from clear – an oily odor lingers over the area – wind-whipped coal dust no longer turns the sky from blue to black.

Fern Benally, Mable Benally’s daughter, is doubtful whether the peace can last. Just over the hill are the low-sulfur coal reserves that Peabody covets, identified on a map of the leasehold with technical names like J-12 and J-11. She understands that the fact that these “coal-resource areas” coincide with land where the Benallys have grazed their livestock for generations will not bother Peabody.

“I know they’re hungry for the coal under here,” she says. “Supposedly it’s premium quality.”

Still, Fern Benally wonders when, if ever, those who profit from her loss – Peabody, the tribes, the utility companies, the cities addicted to cheap power – will realize they have taken enough from the land and move on.

“They just take and take and never give back,” she says. “It’s time they left us alone.”