Last week we covered a new exhibit on Canyon Road that showcases the work and life of Jack Loeffler. Here, Loeffler speaks about the Black Mesa Defense Fund, an activist group that he co founded in 1970. The group became an early model for radical environmentalists across the country.
I took a cue from the Hopi Indians. I'd been told by a good friend of mine who was then alive, Bill Brown, a Park Service historian who is highly regarded. Bill gave me scuttlebutt concerning what he'd heard through the Department of the Interior that there was to be an enormous coal strip mine located on Black Mesa that would provide coal for a power plant up near Page, Arizona. It would be one of the largest power plants in the world. At the same time, there was another power plant over near Laughlin, Nevada, and water would be pumped out of the Black Mesa Aquifer, which was a Pleistocene aquifer, to slurry coal from Black Mesa to Laughlin, Nevada. This is at the rate of 2,000 gallons a minute, pumped out of the earth. And this is the aquifer that served Hopi villages for a thousand years and Navajos who had windmills out there.
I had an old friend, a really good friend, a man named David Monongye. I think he was actually the Kikmongwi at Hotevilla, Kikmongwi being the spiritual leader. I went out to Hotevilla and I told David what I had learned about coal mining, pumping water out of the aquifer, and his mind was blown.
Now, here's something that's almost metaphysical. I've never understood how this happened. First of all, he asked me if I would stay overnight and talk to the Hopi elders, and I said yes. And he climbed up on the roof of the kiva at Hotevilla and started to yell in Hopi. And the next day, on Second Mesa, he had yelled from Third Mesa. Sixty-three Hopi elders congregated on Second Mesa. And I told them what I had learned, and they were enraged. After we all settled down, they had asked me if I would try to help them stop it and to get it out to the American public. So I went back to Santa Fe and we started the Black Mesa Defense Fund.
Greenpeace had just begun happening, but other than that, I didn't really know of any other hardcore radical environmentalism going on. Ed Abbey, who—he and I had met years before, but we started to get together right then and there. A lot of the so-called research that we did ended up in the Monkey Ranch Gang novel. It came out in 1975, and that kicked off the radical environmental movement on a much larger scale.
I was not an organization person by any stretch. There was no director. We were just a bunch of folks. We started off with three of us, and then there were four of us, and then there were five of us. It was very anarchistic. We would all come up with our own individual ideas and then give it our best shot. And each of us survived on $2,400 a year and all the deer meat you could eat.
We had taken on the Central Arizona Project, which, to me, that and the Glen Canyon Dam are the two pieces of infamy perpetrated on the American Southwest by United States government and corporate powers. And ironically, one of my best friends in this lifetime was a man named Stuart Udall, who had been born in Arizona and become the Secretary of the Interior throughout both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, just as this whole catastrophe was being designed. At the heart of it was the Central Arizona Project, which turned into a disaster.
Stuart remained a dear friend until he died in March 2010. And when he was on his deathbed, he asked his caregiver to call me so that I could come and say so long. Because we had been good friends, even though we had been on each side of this issue concerning the Central Arizona Project. When I got to his deathbed, he grabbed my hand and he shook it hard. Not the normal handshake, but sort of the revolutionary handshake. And he said, "Jack, you were right. The Central Arizona Project was a dreadful mistake." That totally blew my mind. I mean, except for saying adios y buenos suerte to each other, that's the last thing he said to me. It really corroborated what we had been working on starting in 1970.
Forty years later, what my buddy Ed Abbey said, looking at—we just got done camping in the Superstition Mountains of Southern Arizona. And we were standing there looking out over Southern Arizona. Ed put it so beautifully. He said, "The Central Arizona Project has resulted in the metastasis of Phoenix and Tucson."
The Central Arizona Project water diversion system remains operational today. The mines at Black Mesa have ceased their operations and are now in the process of reclamation.
