Follow The Money Deep Underground
By Shadi Rahimi

December 2, 2008

News: New Mexico Dispatch: For Navajo activist Elouise Brown, there's no such thing as "clean coal."

The morning after a prayer vigil at Elouise Brown's desert camp, I was awakened by the shaking of my tent. "Get up," one of her supporters whispered. "They're blasting again." Goat stew bubbled by the campfire as billowy gray clouds rose from a dynamited pit at a nearby surface mine. Trucks roared past the camp, disappearing down a road dividing the desolate landscape. Groggy activists hopped in a pickup and followed. Their report back: Multinational company Sithe Global Power was drilling again to test for water sources deep beneath Navajo land, on a site where they hope to erect a controversial clean coal" power plant, called Desert Rock.

"Clean coal" sounds promising, but to Brown, a 46-year-old Navajo woman some call "El Gore," there's no such thing, especially on the remote stretch of New Mexico land allotted to her family by the Navajo Nation. Two aging coal-fired power plants—the Four Corners Power Plant and the San Juan Generating Station—already operate within a 50-mile radius of her home. Three years ago, discreet drilling for Desert Rock began as well. The Navajo government later announced contracts awarded to Texas powerhouses Sithe and Fluor Corp, arguing that power plants would bring jobs to a reservation where half the population is unemployed. In an area where nearly half the population lives below the poverty level, money is no small discussion.

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