Save Black Mesa!

IT WAS, by any reasonable account, a crucial chapter in the history of the modern environmental movement: In the late 1960s a small group in Santa Fe, N.M., launched a campaign to stop the Peabody Western Coal Co. from strip-mining Black Mesa, Ariz., starkly beautiful land where the Hopi and Navajo tribes had lived for thousands of years. Although the Black Mesa Defense Fund never managed to stop the mining, the efforts of founder Jack Loeffler and others built the first connections between the fledgling environmental movement and the Native American rights movement, and inspired a generation of activists.

Now, more than three decades later, the issue will be played out in a San Francisco hearing room of the California Public Utilities Commission, which has the ability to end the Black Mesa disaster for good.

As Shadi Rahimi reports on page 20, the whole deal was scandalous from the start: the law firm that represented the Hopi Tribal Council also represented Peabody, and the coal company got a long-term mining lease on extremely favorable terms. Worse, Peabody sucked 3.9 million gallons of water a day from the aquifer below Black Mesa to turn the coal into a slurry that could be pumped 270 miles to a power plant in southern Nevada.

Since 1967, the power plant, owned by Southern California Edison Co., has burned the coal to feed power-hungry southern California, in the process polluting the air so badly that visibility at the Grand Canyon, downwind, dropped by 30 to 50 percent. The slurry pipe has so badly damaged the Black Mesa aquifer that the Navajo and Hopi residents now have to travel as much as 30 minutes for fresh water, and their livestock are dying of thirst.

But the plant has run up against new air-quality regulations, and in order to stay in operation, SCE must spend some $58 million on a retrofit. If the CPUC refuses to approve that retrofit, the plant will have to shut down – and with it, the slurry pipeline, and most likely, the Black Mesa mine.

Some environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, are wrongly supporting the retrofit, saying that the $3 million a year that Peabody pays the Navajo Tribal Council offsets the damage to the environment. We're with the tribal traditionalists: No amount of money is adequate compensation for the destruction of the Black Mesa aquifer. Peabody ought to pay the tribes many, many more millions in compensation for the damage that has already been done. But for now, the CPUC should vote to shut down the plant.

Comments on the pending decision can be sent to the CPUC at 505 Van Ness Avenue, S.F. 94102-3298, or by e-mail: public.advisor@cpuc.ca.gov.