Navajo activist declares power plant project ‘dead’

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – Elouise Brown is on a speaking tour across the state, visiting a dozen communities to tell the story of her battle against a coal-burning power plant proposal near her home in Chaco Rio, N.M.

Photo courtesy Shadi Rahimi

Elouise Brown spoke at the Women’s Building in San Francisco March 20.

“I don’t care what anyone says – the project is dead. It’s not going to happen as long as I live.”

It’s been three years since Brown launched a stand off against her tribe, the Navajo Nation, to stop it from building a 1,500-megawatt project called Desert Rock on land allotted to her family by the tribal government. Last April, the Environmental Protection Agency withdrew the air quality permit it had issued, which its opponents declared a victory.

Navajo Nation President Joe Shirley Jr. said the decision doesn’t mean the project is cancelled. He said his government is continuing efforts to obtain permits.

Meanwhile, Brown is being celebrated in activist circles, particularly in California, where environmental and sacred site battles are at the forefront of Native activism.

Brown’s battle began Dec. 11, 2006 after her parents discovered a drilling site near her home. “There was a well head, trash and a rental generator down a little ditch. Our cattle gates were left open and south of the site we found orange survey flags.”

Two aging coal-burning plants, the Four Corners Power Plant and the San Juan Generating Station, were already operating within a 20-mile radius of Brown’s home. Together they belch more than half the state’s annual 57 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

Brown vowed, “Another plant will not be built here.”

She had no legal means to stop construction because there is no private land ownership in Navajoland. When a contractor returned, Brown argued with him until he left. She then built a fire. Her family helped set up a makeshift blockade with a white tent and Brown called on her community to help.

Some came, but she also found opposition from her people. The windows of her truck and solar-powered home were smashed and her resistance camp, “Dooda (No) Desert Rock,” was moved twice – once forcibly by tribal police and once by Brown after it was trashed and a table was burnt.

Her main adversaries are more powerful: The Navajo’s utility company proposed the power plant; Texas developers Sithe Global Power and Fluor Corporation plan to spend $3 billion to build and operate it; and Navajo legislators support a project that promises to bring 3,000 temporary and 400 permanent jobs to a reservation where half the population is unemployed.

The project is expected to bring $50 million a year in taxes, coal royalties and other payments to fund almost one-third of the Navajo Nation’s annual operating budget, Shirley said.

“Desert Rock remains the most important economic development project in our Nation’s history,” he said. “It is a key to our saving self, to ending our dependence on the federal government, and to regaining our independence.”

Energy is hotly debated in Navajoland, which extends across swaths of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Utah and has 20 billion tons of coal beneath it, one of the continent’s largest deposits. During his two terms, Shirley has welcomed outsiders eager to excavate the energy-rich land to lift his people out of poverty.

Even so, Desert Rock has been a hard sell in parts of the 26,600-square-mile reservation, where the history of tribal rule is rooted in federal meddling, and traditionalists have long pushed for a return to harmony with the terrain tended by goat and sheepherders, ranchers, farmers and grandmothers revered as matriarchs.

“There’s so much potential here yet we’re still grasping for the old post-industrial pollutants,” said Shonto Begay. “The old stories talk of monsters and obstacles coming to annihilate us. Now we’re back battling those monsters, rearing their ugly heads, making the whole area a toxic stew. In this way we can’t have ‘hozhó,’ which in Navajo means beauty, harmony, everything calm, serene and right.”

Desert Rock opponents often mention hozhó. It even appeared in a report by the nonprofit Environmental Council of the States, which outlined the likelihood of hazards and pollution from Desert Rock. The “environmental wounds and historical trauma incurred from extractive mining industry as a result of an imposed western energy paradigm,” must be counterbalanced with sustainable technologies.

Brown’s opposition has taken shape as editorials, petitions circulated among the 250,000 Navajo tribal members, and lobbying of the state legislature against an $85 million state tax break for Desert Rock.

She quit her job to lobby, sleeping in her car and visiting every legislator “until they were all tired of me.”

They began to recognize her Pendleton jacket, so she would stalk the hallways and wave. If they waved back, they understood her position. If they didn’t, she would approach them. When a chronic illness left her temporarily paralyzed before the vote, her elderly mother helped her walk so she could wave, she said.

“Only two people didn’t wave back.”

She emerged victorious: the tax break was defeated. Gov. Bill Richardson visited her camp and slammed Desert Rock, saying it would “adversely impact air quality, exacerbate existing environment problems, and negatively impact scarce surface and groundwater resources.” Opponents sent thousands of letters against the air quality permit the EPA would withdraw.

Assistant New Mexico Attorney General Seth Cohen has called the withdrawal a huge victory. At the same time, Cohen said the state will work with the Navajo Nation to redraft the permit in response to pollution concerns, environmental impacts and the lack of new emission control technologies.

But Brown isn’t worried. By the time the permit comes up again, she said, coal-burning power plants will be nearly obsolete.

“This story is not about me. This is about if you want to do anything, you can get it done. We killed this power plant with faith, persistence and resistance.”

Original story: http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/national/southwest/89789732.html