The GRAND PLAN (part 3 of 6)

An essay by Ray Wheeler

The Environmental Costs

Bullfrog Marina on Lake Powell. The little dots out in the water are houseboats. Photo © 1999 Ray Wheeler.

While the benefit of the Hoover dam went primarily to southern California, the environmental cost—the flooding of 115 miles of Colorado river bottomland—fell squarely upon the Colorado Plateau.

It was natural and logical for the industrial giants of the New West to export environmental impacts from urban areas to the uninhabited wildlands at the heart of the Plateau region. The coal-burning Navajo Power Plant, constructed near Page, Arizona in the mid-1960s, would include the strip mining of up to 65,000 acres of coal on Navajo and Hopi Indian lands on Black Mesa, and the pumping of 1,415 tons of fly ash and sulfur dioxide into the clear Four Corners atmosphere daily—an amount surpassing the daily emissions of New York City.

Keep out sign on public lands, site of an exploratory well, proposed Box-Death Hollow Wilderness Area, Utah. Photo © 1987 Ray Wheeler.

The 1950’s uranium mining boom on the Plateau provided economic benefits to the manufacturers of nuclear weapons and to the owners, operators, and clients of nuclear power plants clustered along the nation’s east and west coasts. The environmental costs—including extreme scarring of the land, radioactive poisoning of rivers and aquifers, and the premature death of hundreds of miners due to radiation poisoning—were born primarily by the Plateau.

Click here for a selection of photographs illustrating the environmental costs of industrial development on the Colorado Plateau.

Follow these links to:
A Scale to Fit the Landscape
Boom and Bust
Fragmented land—Fractured Politics
References