What San Juan’s Coal Power Plant Closure Means for The Future of Energy & The Navajo Nation

Episode Notes

Transcript

Dr. Andrew Curley:

When you have a community dependent primarily on one thing, especially with extractive industries, it creates a vulnerability of if that industry disappears and what’s going to happen afterwards.

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Welcome to the award-winning podcast, Lawyer 2 Lawyer with J. Craig Williams, bringing you the latest legal news and observations with the leading experts in the legal profession. You are listening to Legal Talk Network.

J. Craig Williams:

Welcome to Lawyer 2 Lawyer on the Legal Talk Network. I’m Craig Williams coming to you from Southern California. I occasionally write a blog called May It Please the court and have three books out titled How To Get Sued the Sled and My newest book. How would You Decide 10 Famous Trials That Changed History? You can find all three on Amazon. In addition, our new podcast miniseries in Dispute, 10 famous trials that changed history is currently featured here on the Legal Talk Network and on your favorite podcasting app. Please listen and subscribe. For almost 50 years, Coal dominated the Navajo economy. In April of 2017, the public service company of New Mexico announced they plan to close the San Juan generating station, a coal-fired plant in New Mexico and replace it with other energy sources including wind and solar. In 2022, the San Juan generating station in New Mexico closed and on August 24th, 2024, the station was demolished with a cleanup expected next year in 2025, the demolition of the station received mixed reviews from the Navajo or Diné nation.

While some supportive the demolition, others were tied to the history of the industry and how it provided for their families. Today on Lawyer 2 Lawyer, we will discuss coal its history and use the impact it has had on the Navajo Nation, the labor force and the environment, and what the future holds. And to help us better understand today’s topic, we’re joined by guest Dr. Andrew Curley. He’s the assistant professor at the School of Geography Development and Environment at the University of Arizona. Andrew’s research focuses on the everyday incorporation of indigenous nations into colonial economies, building on ethnographic research. His publications speak to how indigenous communities understand coal energy, land, water infrastructure and development in an era of energy transition and climate change. Andrew also has a book out from the University of Arizona Press titled Carbon Sovereignty Coal Development and Energy Transition in the Navajo Nation. Welcome to the show, Andrew.

Dr. Andrew Curley:

Thanks for having me.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, tell us a little bit about your role as a professor of the School of Geography Development and Environment at the University of Arizona.

Dr. Andrew Curley:

I’m in a geography program, which means that we can talk a lot about people’s perception of the landscape, the environment, and actually the physical environment, how we measure water, how we think about air quality. All of those environmental questions are kind of contained within the discipline of geography. And so my research here is focused more on the social and human dimensions of that, which include coworkers perception of their jobs and the economy that are part of their work and extraction. And more recently I’ve been working on water rights and water contestation between tribes in the state of Arizona, within the Colorado River Basin. So those are the things I’ve been focused on here at the U of a.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, the discussion this morning is based on the Navajo nation’s rejection and embrace of coal. Can you kind of describe what the major issues are here?

Dr. Andrew Curley:

Well, the extractive economy has been in the reservation for decades. It goes back to oil and gas more than a hundred years ago and was amplified through uranium mining between the fifties and the seventies, and then also the finding of coal on Black Mesa really pushed extraction even further in the reservation. And that was during the initial surveys were conducted in the 1950s, and mine started opening in the seventies at Black Mesa Navajo Mine Chat, which has to do with San Juan generating station and the four Corners generating station. That one was opened earlier in the late fifties, early sixties. So for many decades, coal and other kinds of extractive industries have been present within the reservation. And they’ve done two things to benefit the tribal people, which is to provide hundreds of jobs, high paying jobs. Often these jobs are coming with healthcare and other kinds of benefits that service working employment doesn’t always have. And then they’ve also provided revenues to the tribal government, and so the tribal government can extend its services or extend. Its what it does for the Navajo people, for fixing roads, providing social services for elderly people, sometimes even firewood. Basic needs like that can be funded through the revenues generated from coal, from oil gas in previous to that rate uranium. Is

J. Craig Williams:

That how the Navajo nation became so invested in coal that it kind of transformed the nation in terms of its poverty level?

Dr. Andrew Curley:

Yeah, I mean, it was a strategic decision taken in the 1960s for coal in particular to try to create an industry within the reservation that would bring a lot of Diné workers into a labor regime, into wage labor relationship. And that seemed to be what people wanted at the time. And it was also something that was part of an energy expansion across the western states. Phoenix was growing rapidly at that time. It still is, but it was growing particularly fast and there was new energy needs. The utilities across the western states were building power plants. They were building transmission lines, connecting all of these places to sites of power production. So anywhere that had coal was seen as a place where there’s a potential source of energy. So the Navajo Nation decided to take advantage of the fact that it had coal within reservation lands and allow external multinational corporations to come in and extract and do strip mining throughout the reservation and access that coal.

J. Craig Williams:

And the Navajo Nation, or as you said, Diné Nation became identified with coal, right? The workers for generations toiled in these two coal powered plants, and it became a big identity for the Navajo Nation, right?

Dr. Andrew Curley:

Yes. And this is really where my research takes up coal as an identity. It really became part of the way that workers primarily male, I mean, it was a gendered labor and it was one that was unfamiliar with our matrilineal society where we had these big patriarchal attitudes towards labor and work and home winning and who is in charge of the household. And there’s all sorts of gender dynamics to this transformation that we need to think about. But also it created this identity, this relationship between the worker and their side of work where they were seeing themselves as a provider for not only their families but for the nation, and that merged that identity, merged with their indigenous identities as Diné people, as members of the Navajo nation. They were seeing themselves as not only taking care of themselves but contributing to a greater good within the tribe. So that identity was really pronounced among workers in the industry. And that’s true for many of us, who the jobs that we do are part of our identity and it’s no different for Diné coworkers.

J. Craig Williams:

And that led to some problems, some controversy within the tribe because strip mining and the kind of extraction that occurred is against some people’s beliefs, right?

Dr. Andrew Curley:

Exactly. And so the strip mining encroached on people’s lands, it doesn’t come from nothing. And the people who were living in the areas that were designed to be mine sites, they were compensated, but they were moved. And compensation only goes so far, especially if it’s monetary and only short term. So those types of issues persist where people’s lands are being destroyed through the strip mining process. You can’t do traditional subsistence economies on that, meaning you can’t grow traditional crops or more importantly, herd sheep or cattle across those lands without the risk of them eating contaminated vegetation or soil that is left over from the mining, which makes that land or even the water that it comes into contact with. Toxic. So survivability for animal life, for people working and living off the land became immediately threatened by the coal work. And so people who identities were tied into those activities found this to be opposite of what they believed Diné people should be doing, and they started to organize and work against the continuation of the mining or even the expansion of the mine sites.

And so those oppositional forces were pronounced against each other and often included members of the same family, some people who worked at the mine site, some people who worked against it either formally with environmental organizations or just informally voicing opposition to it in community meetings and elsewhere. And so it became a very embittered situation, especially for the people there on Black Mesa that were dealing with this. And I think that tied in with the Navajo Hopi Land Settlement Act, the removal of Diné families off of their ancestral lands that were suddenly in the 1970s considered a Hopi reservation that was tied into narratives of coal and access to that land for coal mining that saw all of these transformations, this uprooting of people as tied to this extractive economy. So people who were voicing opposition, it were coming from those perspectives from violence, either the form of BIA police coming in and pushing people out or suddenly being fenced out of their traditional lands while big shovels unearth and permanently transformed the landscape and how it looks.

J. Craig Williams:

Right. Well, Andrew, at this time, we’re going to take a quick break to hear a word from our sponsors. We’ll be right back and welcome back to Lawyer 2 Lawyer. I’m joined by Dr. Andrew Curley. He’s the assistant professor at the School of Geography Development Environment at the University of Arizona. Well, Andrew, we’ve been talking about the push pull between both sides of the Diné people for those working at the coal plants and able to support not only themselves, also family members in a large community, which led to the kind of, I would say, support that the Navajo Nation has always tried to provide its people. And it also led to a controversy with those people that fought against the kind of contamination. These two coal plants, both the Four Corners Plant and the San Juan generating plant were the largest point source pollution in the United States, right.

Dr. Andrew Curley:

Currently, it seems to be the way. For many years, the former Navajo generating station was the largest, and then that was demolished just a couple of years ago,

J. Craig Williams:

So it’s been a big challenge. What was the reaction of the Navajo Diné people when these plants were demolished?

Dr. Andrew Curley:

It’s a somber moment for many people, those who worked in the industry. You can imagine a place that you dedicated many years of your life being demolished and permanently removed from the landscape. So those kinds of things, the feelings, the kind of feeling of loss that accompanies the physical destruction of a site of work is entwined with feelings. Where do we go from here? Maybe some feelings of uncertainty and pessimism for the future of the Navajo economy. Those people who work and define themselves through that labor are having a hard moment through the closure of many generating units or the implosion of former power plants where they worked that were for decades features on the landscape. I think those who have been opposed to these plants find that there is finally some relief that they are maybe optimistic that the air will clean up. I’ve been working on this issue for many years, and I remember doing a focus group in, I want to say 2008, between the San Juan generating station, the four Corners generating station in a town called Shiprock, New Mexico.

It’s a heavily populated Diné reserv town. We were primarily talking to young people at the time and asking them how they felt about the coal economy, and they were saying, yes, our parents work in it. They’ve been able to provide for us through their jobs, either at the plant or at the mine site. But at the same time, they were worried about the climate. They were worried about the environment, the public health, how that relates with the environment, like asthma rates, ability to breathe. They’re worried about decades of pollution, not just from carbon emissions, but other kinds of noxious gases that come out of coal combustion. So there was this sense that there was this fog, there was this pollution in the air from decades of coal burning near Shiprock that was causing health impacts on people, and it was understudied by public health researchers.

And so they were feeling that this was something that might be a greater threat to the community despite its tremendous benefit to those who worked in it in the industries. And so I think there’s a mixed feeling about it when it comes to how the community thinks about it. They definitely recognize the environmental costs. I mean, you can see it. It’s physically there, it’s visible. At the same time, it really did help a lot of people in terms of jobs, in terms of providing for their families. It might even have been a catalyst for upward mobility for many people coming out of high school, coming out of maybe even just military service and then looking for work around the area. And then these were the kinds of jobs that they were skilled for. It’s a skill building activity. You can learn how to do things at the mine site or at the plant that’s transmissible. Like if you become an electrician or a truck driver, you can do that kind of work elsewhere after working at the mine. So that kind of skill building activity was an added benefit of this kind of industrial work that’s going to be lost.

J. Craig Williams:

And now that we’ve lost those, they’ve started to put in solar, is there an equivalency in terms of the job production?

Dr. Andrew Curley:

No, it’s a short answer. There’s been an effort to try to make solar wind as beneficial to communities or to the people aspiring for work, those seeking employment in industry, it just doesn’t have the same numbers. It doesn’t require the same amount of people working at these places. And that’s true with oil and gas too. So it’s not just a clean energy, dirty energy thing. It’s a unique legacy of coal. I think that it was able to employ hundreds of people. Now, all these other energies, whether you’re talking about fracking or solar and wind, do not have the same kind of labor benefit as coal did. And that’s just the fact of the matter. And then, so how you address that need may not even come out of energy, but that’s something that you’re not able to replace in terms of the labor and the revenues going to the tribe. You’re not able to replace what coal was doing with solar and wind. Maybe you can replace the energy produce, but the social benefit will not be the same.

J. Craig Williams:

And what is that doing to the economy of the Tenay Navajo nation?

Dr. Andrew Curley:

It’s hard to say because a lot of, there’s been decades of out migration anyway. People have become more educated and it is hard to find the kind of work that they’re looking for at the mine site. So before San Juan generating closed, we were asking people like, okay, especially young people, would you go, you understand the benefit of coal? Would you work there? Is this a place where you see yourself working? Most people were saying, no, they didn’t want to work there. The labor force was aging. These were people that had graduated high school in the sixties and seventies and immediately went into work at the mine. And then over the course of the next decades, it’s not to say that new people didn’t go into that work, but more and more people ended up getting work in the cities doing other kinds of things.

Like me, I’m an example of that. I got a secondary education and my side of employment is in Tucson. So that kind of narrative is common, more common than we think. And so it’s not just about having those jobs there, it’s also the kind of jobs that you’re creating in the reservation. And that’s a generational issue, and that’s one that we don’t really have the numbers on, quite frankly. But from the interviews from the focus groups that we were able to conduct not only myself as a researcher, but when I worked at Diné College, at the Diné Policy Institute, prior to that, this was the sense that we were getting from people.

J. Craig Williams:

Now we use the word Diné , Diné as an equivalency to the Navajo nation. Can you explain that?

Dr. Andrew Curley:

Yeah. Well, so the way I define it is the Navajo Nation refers to the political apparatus, the government in Window Rock, it is their tribal government and its land base. The political geography that it encompasses that is referred to as a Navajo nation. If you pick up a map, you’ll see it called the Navajo Nation. Diné is our identity as a people, and it’s informal. It’s not defined by the tribal government. And it’s something that we define ourselves as a indigenous community. And so Diné is our own language, it’s our own word for ourselves. Navajo is not even our language. And it comes from the Spanish from many centuries ago. And it just over time became the official name of the tribal government. And so that’s why there’s that confusion and that distinction between those two words.

J. Craig Williams:

Right. Well, Andrew, it’s time to take another break to hear a word from our sponsors. We’ll be right back and welcome back to Lawyer 2 Lawyer. I’m back with Dr. Andrew Curley, assistant professor at the School of Geography Development and Environment at the University of Arizona. Well, as a native Diné yourself, what was the reaction when the coal plant came down? Were there a lot of people celebrating because now the earth is returned to or should be return to what it is, and we’re not interfering with it anymore?

Dr. Andrew Curley:

I can’t speak comprehensively as this was a recent thing and I wasn’t there. I meant to be there. I was stuck here in Tucson at the time when it was finally demolished. But in just the conversations that happenstance conversations I have with community members, it’s the same kind of division as I was talking about before, where people were feeling a sense of loss somberness about the industry and its disappearance, it’s fading away from the Navajo landscape. And then there’s also a sense of relief that this site of pollution will not be impacting community members anymore. That it won’t be a continued source of air pollution for the Shiprock area and its surrounding communities. So I think it’s mixed. It’s both perspectives are present with the closure and the demol of the San Juan generating station. And that reflects what happened previously with the Navajo generating station just a couple of years ago.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, we’ve seen a number of tribes, especially in California, bring in casinos to replace or to bring in income. Solar hasn’t done it. Wind hasn’t done it for the Diné people. Is there any source of income that can replace coal?

Dr. Andrew Curley:

I mean, Shiprock is really interesting because they’ve done everything. There’s big agriculture there. The nappy Navajo agricultural products industry, that goes back to the 1950s. So it was a BIA project, bureau of Indian Affairs sponsored project, diverts lots of the water from the San Juan River and gives it to these big fields, plantation like agriculture, monoculture for export. So big ag export is something that the tribe has tried there. There are two casinos in the area. One Han, it’s a smaller casino. And then what is the other one called something river? Forgetting the name of the casino. But yeah, there are two casinos in the immediate area in Upper Fruitland in Han Chapter right outside of Shiprock. So we have two casinos. We have big Ag. There was a uranium mine there before. We’ve had parts manufacturing. The Fairchild manufacturing plant was located there as a semiconductor manufacturer, and then it closed and moved to Taiwan in the 1980s.

And then of course, we had coal and coal mining. So we’ve had all of these kinds of approaches to development in the Shiprock area. And the main communities that tend to benefit are Farmington nearby. They capture a lot of revenues where we don’t. And it seems like there’s a political difference involved there where the authorities of the tribal government, the ability to hold onto those monies, maybe the way that land can be utilized for different kinds of multiplier industries, people who service these larger industries is not clear enough or is not allowing for these new kinds of businesses to take up. So I don’t know what the problem is, but we’ve tried everything in that area

J. Craig Williams:

And it hasn’t worked

Dr. Andrew Curley:

Well. I mean, it depends on what you mean by it might have, for some people, per capita income is definitely improved for those who worked in the coal industry. But these industries don’t stay there for a long time. And are we suffering a bus cycle? Will Farmington itself suffer a bus cycle when oil and gas prices start to decline? So if they’d start to decline, I mean, it’s not to say that I’m predicting that, but when you have a community dependent primarily on one thing, especially with extractive industries, it creates a vulnerability of if that industry disappears and what’s going to happen afterwards. So yeah, there is that risk. And if we’re saying work like have we approached Phoenix like conditions or Tucson like conditions? No, we haven’t. But compared to other parts of the reservation, maybe they have improved through their participation in those industries.

J. Craig Williams:

There seems to be some significant disagreement within the Navajo nation between those folks who want extractive industries and those who don’t. Let’s talk about the politics.

Dr. Andrew Curley:

Yeah, the politics are really tricky. Part of what I write about in some of my research and in my book is not just about coal as an identity, but coal as a politics, right? Coal was able to mobilize workers in support of certain candidates for tribal office donations were made to public officials during their campaign. United Mine Workers affiliates Kaya or in Shiprock area, would donate to the presidential campaign of the candidate who they thought would favor the continuation of the industry. So they did have an impact on the political landscape, and that’s why I thought those voices were important. It was shaping the political reality there. And so even if community members were voicing disagreement about it, even if environmental groups were working against the continuation of coal mining, real power existed in the mobilization of coal workers to persuade council delegates, to persuade presidents to continue to support these industries.

And you saw that in 2013 when there was a real risk of Navajo mine, the feeder mine for the four corners generating station closing, and the council delegate from Upper Fruitland, who was speaker of the Navajo Nation Council. Lorenzo Bates was instrumental in mobilizing the Navajo Nation Council to purchase the mine, so that instead of letting it close, the tribe bought it to keep it open. That was the political machinery, the political mechanisms of the tribal government working to keep that coal economy going. And that was in direct response to what coworkers were asking for. They wanted that mine to stay open so they can continue working. And to a certain extent, that succeeded because so many people still have their jobs because the Navajo Nation bought that coal mine and kept it in operation.

J. Craig Williams:

And it’s still running.

Dr. Andrew Curley:

It’s still running.

J. Craig Williams:

Wow. Well, Andrew, we’ve just about reached the end of our programs. It’s time to wrap up and get your final thoughts as well as the information about your book.

Dr. Andrew Curley:

My final thoughts is I am sorry I can’t come that decisively one way or other. I mean, that’s my job as an academic really, and it can be frustrating for people, but to try to give you kind of the larger sociocultural context of these questions. So that’s exactly what my book tries to do in so many words, maybe more words than needed, but to think about how the history of this industry has shaped not only our politics, which I was just referring to, but helps us to understand where we’re going with questions of energy transition, which we’ve talked about. What are the possibilities of wind and solar when people’s memories run deep with coal? Those are the important things to consider. It’s not just about the technology, but the social context. And that’s what I’m really trying to convey in my work and over the course of this interview.

J. Craig Williams:

Wonderful. Well, thank you, Andrew. It’s been a pleasure having you on the show today, and we look forward to reading your book, carbon Sovereignty Coal Development and Energy Transition in the Navajo Nation. Thank you.

Dr. Andrew Curley:

Thank you very much.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, here are a few of my thoughts about today’s subject. When I was traveling across the country this summer, I saw trains full of coal cars coming out of the southwest, which was really the genesis for this story because it seemed odd that there would be so much coal being produced when coal fired plants are being shut down, and it is such a pollution source. Well, it seems like the Navajo Nation has got their act together, closed some of the stations, and although they’re still mining and the extraction technology, as Dr. Curley mentioned, there are still people employed in the Navajo Nation and will be for some time until all the coal gets out of the ground. We’re using wind and solar to supplement it, but we’re still polluting, and the use of coal at some point in time has got to stop, and I hope it does soon. If you like what you heard today, please rate us on Apple Podcasts, your favorite podcasting app. You can also visit us at the legal talk network.com, where you can sign up for our newsletter. I’m Craig Williams. Thanks for listening. Please join us next time for another great legal topic. Remember, when you want legal think Lawyer 2 Lawyer.

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