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When students understand how environmental topics intersect with social justice topics, they are better prepared to appreciate the complexity of systems and social structures that support inequality and oppression, and that deem some lives more valuable than others.
SITUATED ON THE COLORADO PLATEAU in northern Arizona, the land of the western Navajo Nation, with its sweeping sandstone cliffs, majestic canyons, and seemingly unending blue sky, is a place of great natural beauty. For many of the tribal people who live in the region, though, it is also a place characterized by economic hardship. According to a report compiled by the Arizona Rural Policy Institute (n.d.), the median household income for the Navajo Nation in 2010 was $27,389, and more than a third (38%) of tribal members were classified as "severely poor" (p. 38). Apart from jobs in smaller communities, such as Tuba City and Kayenta, the western Navajo Nation's local economy is, for the most part, dependent on subsistence farming and sheep and cattle grazing, although some people work in local mines.
Since the late 1960s, Peabody Energy (formerly Peabody Western Coal Company) has owned and operated two strip mines on Black Mesa, a land formation so named because of its rich coal deposits. One of the mines relied on train cars to transport extracted coal to other parts of the United States, but the other, which closed in 2005, transported coal over more than 270 miles via a slurry pipeline that stretched from Black Mesa to a power plant in southern Nevada, where the coal was burned to generate electricity for parts of southern Arizona, California, and Nevada (but notably, not the Navajo Nation). To facilitate this process, each year Peabody Energy pumped approximately 1.3 billion gallons of pristine water, estimated to be between 10,000 and 35,000 years old, from the N-Aquifer (Glennon, 2002, p. 157). In his book Water Follies: Groundwater Pumping and the Fate of America's Fresh Waters, Glennon (2002) described how this practice has lowered the water table in the region over time, causing once-reliable springs to run dry and threatening people's access to potable water. In addition to depleting the local water supply and scarring the land, the strip-mining operations at Black Mesa are also thought to have contributed...