Arizona Needs to MIne Black Mesa :: Counter Argument

To the northeastern part of Arizona lay a debacle between the Native American citizens and a coal mining company known as Peabody Coal. In the seemingly unending conflict between the two groups, the problem began in 1968 when the Hopi and Navajo tribes both signed leases to Peabody Coal for mining. The contract included paying both tribes more than $1000 per acre-foot of natural aquifer water each year (Peabody Energy Online par 4). As time drew on, many indigenous people were alarmed that the water was carelessly being depleted from their land. Mining on Black Mesa should still be kept in progress because Peabody Coal helps support the fight against high-cost electricity, recent findings have stipulated that mining on Black Mesa is not as potentially harmful as many would like to think it is, and it offers jobs to the local economy. If a group of people give certain privileges to another, and the affects of it prove to help the economic society surrounded by it, there r eally is not a problem. Black Mesa, a natural resource for water is still being occupied by Peabody Coal, the world’s largest coal company. Located on the Navajo and Hopi Reservations of Northern Arizona, the mining company pumps water out of the Navajo Aquifer (N-Aquifer) which is mixed with grated coal known as slurry. The slurry is then pumped through a pipeline to Nevada’s Mohave Generating Station where it is converted into low-cost electricity (Peabody Energy Online par 3). Peabody has two mines on Black Mesa which includes the Peabody Coal Mine as well as the Kayenta Mine, both help to produce enough coal that supports 1.5 million people in the Southwest including Arizona, Nevada, and California (Peabody Energy Online par 8). The low-cost electricity is quite affordable for the people who live in the area. Peabody Coal has many coal mines around the world which help fight to keep the cost of energy down. Peabody Coal had stated that they do respect the values and beliefs of the native people that occupy the reservations. In that sense, the coal company consoled the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Office of Surface Mining for concerned questions about the usage of the groundwater. According to the OMS 2004 annual report, the N-Aquifer is in a stable condition, the quality is still excellent, and streams that were presumed to be in an unstable condition due to the mining, is not the cause: