Energy and Environment Solar Self-Reliance
(Page 6 of 6)
Peabody employs about 15 Hopis, and provides about $7.7
million in annual royalties to the tribe, a huge chunk of
the budget for a relatively impoverished tribal treasury.
But the company’s coal slurry pipeline to the Mohave
Generating Station, some 250 miles away in Laughlin, Nev.,
annually sucks more than a billion gallons of water from
under the Hopi and Navajo Reservations. The fact that the
Mohave electric plant helps keep the lights bright in Las
Vegas and hair dryers blowing in Los Angeles even as
thousands of people on the Navajo and Hopi Reservations are
without electricity illustrates the unfortunate reality
that energy mined from Native American lands is often not
used for Native American communities.
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Vernon Masayesva, a past Hopi Tribal chairman and now
director of the grass roots group Black Mesa Trust, says,
“One billion gallons of our ancient, sacred water
evaporates each year in Nevada’s desert skies. One
billion gallons of living water, enough to provide for Hopi
for 100 years, dies on a dry wind.”
Today, water levels in some Black Mesa wells have dropped
more than 100 feet, and many of the springs are dry.
Projections are that by the year 2011, the Hopi village of
Moenkopi will be without water. Complex issues are
involved, including the jobs and royalties Peabody Coal
supplies to both the Navajo and the Hopi, but for
Masayesva, the problems with mining and burning coal only
reinforce the need for renewable energy. He advocates
building two large-scale solar power plants to generate
jobs and revenue, one on the Hopi Reservation and one on
the Navajo Reservation. — Winona LaDuke
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