Transcripts For CSPAN3 How Electricity Shaped The Southwest 20141206

Andrew and i were talking about the fact that academics spend many years writing good books. And are reluctant to celebrate. We publish our books and then we want to be criticized and even condemned by panels of smart people. Therell be some lively conversation and debate, but a touch of celebration. Which is why there is wine and cheese outside. Participate in the event fully. We like to do a lot of book launches here. The real reason we are here tonight is because, for the last several years ipks been doing a lot of programming and research on issues about climate and cities and sustainability. And so, this work, while historical, very much speaks to the most contemporary and emergent problems of our time. Were excited about the conversation tonight. So, to get things rolling, we have a journalist visiting at nyu, but also someone who has done a lot of work on environmental issues, contributed to npr and the atlantic. She will moderate the conversation and introduce the speakers. So, please join me in welcoming her. [applause] excited to be here. I think this is a fantastic book. I do a lot of work on cities and hinterlands and native American Lands as well. It pulls all of these issues together. Andrews going to talk about his book, its about electricity that came from navajo lands. And how this fueled the development of phoenix and the effect this had on the system. He is an associate professor at nyu, obviously. He specializes in u. S. History, focuses on the environment, native American Indian history, rural and suburban issues. He will be joined by carl jacoby, a professor of history at columbia. He is also at the center for the study of race and ethnicity. He specializes in the environment, borderlands, and native american issues. Andrew is going to talk for 25 minutes about his research and read from the book. He and carl will discuss and i will ask a couple of questions then we will open it up for q a. Thank you and welcome andrew. [applause] first of all, thank you all for coming. Think you for coming, jack. As annie said, im going to go through some of the document and the things i found in researching this book. Then ill read a bit from the epilogue because i worked on those words hard, and i would like to share some of them. But i would first like to take the chance to say a few public thanks which, along with public celebrations, are one of the things we do not get that much of a chance to do. They are related to the project. I would like to thank kim, jack, and ray. Jack and ray have been with this book as long as they have been alive. Kim has been related to this book as much a she is now related to me. I want to thank my colleagues from nyu who supported me in allowing me to take the time to write the book that i wanted to write and provided so many models of amazing scholarly accomplishment and visions of what you could do. Id like to thank the grad students from nyu who i talked ears off about this book. They have really helped me think through in their own work what kinds of questions i wanted to finally answer. Id like to thank ipk and eric and jessica. And carl and annie. Finally, i would like to thank my mom, dad, and brother. They were on the trip when i first saw something that looked like this, which is Four Corners Power Plant. This was the first this is the origin of this book. This happened long before i was in graduate school or thinking of being a historian. It happened on a car trip from albuquerque in southwest colorado. In many ways, the central question that has driven the book. Why is this power plant located on indian land hundreds of miles from the nearest metropolitan center . That question stayed with me as i started into graduate school and came to interact with probably the two books i have been in conversation with for most of my career. Those books are two of the best books about urban history. The first is origins of urban crisis, which is how the story of postworld war ii america, was how american politics, capitalism created inequality, racial inequality. The second book was natures metropolis, the story of how the 19th century city was constituted by the resources of the spaces that existed beyond it. Origins and most of the subsequent work that its inspired and urban history is not really thought about nature. Or looked beyond suburban borders. Natures metropolis is criticized for having a people in it. I think, one of the things that happens in the story is that the people who live in this land remain there. They are dispossessed but they remain residents of the navajo reservation. What did it mean as dispossession happened simultaneously with continued residence on this space . As i started to begin to research this, early on it came to a map. It was not this precise map, but it looks like it. A map that show the connection, the left corner where it says 350 megawatts. And a set of power lines leading from there down to phoenix. And when i saw this map, here was a map that potentially addressed those concerns about how is the contemporary city constituted by those resources that sit beyond it . It showed a connection. Which is the way i began, have continue to think about this. On the one hand, the consumer landscape of phoenix is postwar suburbs. Whereas these told consumers that Family Togetherness and marital bliss was to be found in the use of electrical appliances. I would advise against a strategy of trying to buy electric valentine. I dont know thats ever worked out for anyone. But these kinds of uses of electricity resulted in the way that electricity in every aspect of domestic and industrial life resulted in a per capita increased from 1400 kilowatt hours annually to over 10,000 annually between 1945 and 1970. In those 25 years, you see that kind of increase. At the same time, because of phoenixs growth, you see an increase of total domestic electrical use of 7500 . 75 times more electricity is used in 1970 the 1945. Than 1945. At the same time, there was a landscape that did not think about get thought about. That was this landscaper energy was produced. This was a photo that are companies that map from 1961. It is a photo of the Four Corners Power Plant which i was one generating station that later became four. And navajo mine in the foreground. A landscape where social transformations enabled suburban consumption. Later, i found this map. This is one of the single most important i found. This is a schematic map of powerlines lines that crisscross the southwest in 1970. Four corners is not the only power plan. You see four corners up in that but you also see a series of other power plants that ring the navajo reservation. Mojave generating station. Chola powerplant. And theres another power plant called san juan you see these power plants begin to ring navajo land with the cities relying on those power plants to supply their energy needs. These regional ties intensified used of the navajo reservation as a source of energy supply. And they positioned coal rather than the more famous dams. Hoover. As the solution to Regional Power needs. This is the roots of todays climate crisis, this turned to coal. As i will talk about it a little bit. Here is the same map shown differently. This is from the 1970 newspaper, which is a navajo language for voice of the people. This was very early, there he quickly perceived as a landscape of inequality. As it came to manifest itself on navajo land by People Living on the reservation. You had been hopes in the 1950s by navajo leaders that electricity produced on their land would lead to new kinds of reservation development. They dreamed of, one leader dreamed of two lightbulbs in every hogan, electrical by the early 1970s, many navajos came to understand power lines as symbols of subordination. The solution was Something Like this navajo power. And an attempt to use sovereignty rights to claim control over this, which we will talk about the successes and lack of successes. The thing i would like to highlight here is that navajos are some of the first critics of the American Carbon economy as it came to develop and came to rely on coal. So, the themes of the book are first that metropolitan inequality is not just a case of, as George Clinton famously said, chocolate cities and vanilla suburbs. But theres also inequalities, deep regional inequalities, that exist far beyond suburban borders. As distant environments, and societies are transformed to meet the metropolitan need for Inexpensive Energy and also Waste Disposal and other things that do not fit into, in a way, do not fit into urban space. The second and into related theme is that in the southwest, indian, urban development and indian under development went handinhand were connected. Third is that native peoples have been deeply connected to, and have been vital participants in T Construction of suburban modernity. They have argued whether that modernity should be a goal or anathema. The terms by which those connections the navajo tribe received a quarter for coal that was resold by Mining Companies for 3. 00. They saw limited benefits. From the transformation of their land. Finally, the roots of Climate Change exists not only in the machinations of Companies Like exxon and various energy companies, but also in the monday and aspects of our built environment. In the way that bountiful electricity became an expected condition of what weve called modernity and how that was literally built in. So, im going to grab some water and then im going to read from of a lot before i turn it over to carl. Jack neery, the author of an article that appeared in 1971, 6 days before earth day, opened with an appeal southwestern boosters have been making since the end of world war ii. When i first came out here from the east a dozen years ago, it was like having the bandages taken off after an eye operation. Folks back home who had never been here i realized grew up and died without ever really having seen. It told not of the power of the vision but of its death. Photos of smog hanging low over the mountains. He lamented the pollution that had introduced the nations environmental troubles to its last pristine region. This morning the mounds were just silhouettes and in ink wash. A somberness like the mountains in pennsylvania or west virginia. The same darkening of tone you can see looking from the atlantic towards long island in new york city. A smudgy cobweb of smog on the horizon. Once clear from coast to coast, now the dark miasma of soot and dirt and ash and smog streteched all the way from the atlantic to the pacific ashtrays of los angeles and san francisco. You know the last stretch of wideopen space we had left, the american southwestern skyscape, is gone, too. The articles title captured sentiments hello, energy. Goodbye, big sky. Two months earlier a different headline appeared. A journa lfor stockbrokers. Coal, the giant revived. The article explained that the coal industry, sensual to the early industrial economy, has recovered from postwar collapse. A single economics and accounted for this revival. Use of coal in railroads, home heating continued to decline. It had driven a 77 increase in Coal Production during the 1960s. Economic conditions, the journal reported, now favored coal as the primary source of energy for the nation. Read together, goodbye, big sky and the giant revived told the story. It how electrical utilities found coal to be an in expensive alternative. In the 1960s alone, utilities had built 328 coalfired power plants. In the southwest, the transformation was starker. In 1954, the year Utah International negotiated the middle expiration permit, utilities in the region generated no electricity by burning coal. By 1975, coal from the navajo and hopi reservations transported by truck load sent furnaces at four corners and chola power plants. Collectively, they generated 8000 megawatts of electricity, almost 65 of the electricity consumed in arizona, new mexico, and southern california. Goodbye, big sky, suggest the cost of coals new place as a dominant source of electricity. With four corners releasing 46,000 tons of nitrogen oxide and 35,000 tons of sulfur dioxide, the two chemical components of smog it suggested the southwests nature had come to an end. Coal, the giant revived, presented the resurgence of coal as a function of economic demand. It contains no mention of the politics. That made indian lands available for utilities. For its part, goodbye big sky looked upward. Avoiding the transformation of grazing lands into acidic ponds and of ram springs, the navajo name, into area four. Jack neery did not worry about the 16 million tons of Carbon Dioxide that issued from four corners annually. A Carbon Emissions equivalent those of 2. 8 million passenger cars. Neery ignore the debates ongoing among navajos about coal mining. Those debates illustrate the deep connections, connections that were political and environmental that Coal Fired Energy production had forged in the southwest. These articles would have surprised americans earlier in the 20th century. Coal was not supposed to be that fuel of modernity. Hoover dam was built and coal was described as an unwelcome artifact. For mumford, coal representative upthrust into barbarism. It required the expectation of labor and nature. Majors exhaustion for mumfo wasr evident ind abandoned mine shaft and the power of smoke that hung in the air. Human exhaustion late evident in the foul cities created by coal congestion. It was electricity that would bury the corpse of the paleo technique era. He wrote, with electricity, the clear sky and clean waters come back again. Electricity would serve as the engine of a neotechnique era, characterized by garden cities and flowing energy. Allowing people to work in more salubrious seats of living. Those visions were partially realized. Industry decentralized. Americans decamped in great numbers. The mediterranean climate of southern california. The dry air of the Desert Southwest and the temperate winters of the american south. And electricity became part of every facet. Homebuilders competed to compete to create gold Star Electric homes. And utilities told consumers of the ability to live better electricity. Portions of the vision freed from the spoils of the Natural World appeared to exist in phoenix and other southwestern cities, a consumers paradise. By the early 1960s, however, that consumers paradise had come to rely on the very fuel that mumford announced. Mumfords vision of liberation from coal was underlined by the increasing demand for electric power. By the 1960s, that demand drove coals return. The electrical generation that occurred on the colorado plan to recapitulated any of the maladies mumford have highlighted. Strip mining disrupted unstable environments, leaving displaced earth. Mercury, chromium and sulfur contaminated water and seeped slowly into deep aquifers. The Navajo Nation experience political and economic maladies from Coal Production as well. A long term and flex will contracts are characterize Energy Development in the 1960s most of the profits from coal mines and power plants were realized in places distant from the reservation. Those contracts meant that as court cases confirmed tribal sovereignty and indian selfdetermination, in the late 1960s and 1970s, the Navajo Nation possessed a limited authority over the most valuable resources within its borders. Despite hopes in the 1950s that four corners and other projects with lead to two lightbulbs in every hogan, 40 remained without electricity in 2010. Instead, electrical power, like postwar societies other benefits, was developed in a manner on even and unequal. Inequalities that were brought up in new deal policies. The experience of postwar metropolitan growth has made the inequalities that exist beyond borders difficult to appreciate. Michael harrington worried about the increasing isolation of suburbanites from urban poverty. He admitted that middleclass women coming in from suburbia on a trip may catch a glance of the other america on their way to the theater. Urban inequality remained a specialized presence in the life of middleclass residents of the metropolis. A constant counterpoint and an imagined threat to their security. Nonurban inequality has been different. With metropolitan america imagined as the engine of economic growth, it became easy to imagine that the economic struggles of those People Living beyond metropolitan borders arose from the lack of integration. Diagnosed as missing out on maternity, such understandings of under development missed the connections. These connections have been difficult to appreciate when they involved indian people. Long represented as the antithesis of modernity, indian peoples continue to play a role in modernity. Even as electricity began streaming from Four Corners Power Plant to phoenix, arizona highways magazine was advising people to turn from the great. Slick, speedy arteries of travel and go forth 100 miles into navajo land and you will find the people as they were a decade, two decades, a halfcentury ago. The primitive imagination contained in navajo land rated difficult to appreciate the industrialization of the Navajo Nation. So, too, did the product beamed into homes. Electricity allow the freedom to surmount the desert heat, and to call entire electronic worlds to life. Produced in locations the vast majority of consumers never experienced, it was easy to assume that electricity was not produced. That it existed naturally and that its costs were minimal. Staring at the lights of phoenix from Camelback Mountain night after night, such assumptions were and are easy to make both in phoenix and elsewhere in metropolitan america. Such a subject have proven a boon to the nations coal economy. Even as the American Economy became postindustrial, as the federally funded Hightech Industries of Silicon Valley and consumers of metropolitan American Combined to create the information age, coal fired electrical production in the u. S. Tripled. In the late 2000s, 1. 9 trillion kilowatt hours of electricity were generated from burning coal. Since 1970, 594 new coal fired power plants have been built. Coal generates 40 of the nations electric power. On land made available by local governments eager for jobs and tax revenues, these plants generate electricity that becomes the expectation of modern life. The plants are evidence of the power of magic halting growth but the economic demand and the Political Forces that placed it at the, center of postwar Economic Policy to reshape the colleges of people and places far from metropolitan centers. They indicated the new regional inequalities that accompanied postwar metropolitan growth. And the devils bargains that faced navajos and other People Living on the periphery as demand for the resources that made metropolitan growth possible revalued the places they call home. When i was writing this epilogue, at this point i turned to a plan that was developed by a group, an environmental group, that proposed an alternative Energy System that would displace powerplants. I had an upward, a surprisingly upward sloping ending. Then i sent the manuscript off. Four days later i am looking at the navajo times, and the headline reads that that the commission purchases navajo mine. The navajo tribe had bought navajo mine in a moment where the company had owned it had threatened to close it because of the decline of prospects of coal going into the future. As one writer put it, navajos, coals future is uncertain, but navajos are betting on it. That the Navajo Nations wager on coal represents the presentday manifestation of any qualities in the development of the modern southwest. Decisions by utilities and Mining Executives state and local officials and federal bureaucrats, navajo officials, and millions of metropolitan consumers combined to develop phoenix and other metropolitan spaces at the expense of the land and people of the Navajo Nation. There is another story embedded in a decision by the tribe to purchase navajo mine. In the pages of the navajo times, in newsletters and l like this one, navajos debated the american nations future. They had been doing so for 40 years. At the Energy Future is hotly debated in places far from metropolitan centers should not be surprising. If it is, it is because navajos and other indians have too easily member out of is isolated from the political and economic changes occurring in the world around them. Instead, they have long explored, debated, and experienced in their daily lives the broadscale transformations that metropolitans demand for energy has wrought. If there is an isolation it is the residents of metropolitan america, where the experience lives divorced from the creation of the energy. This embedded the practice of utilities that drove illegible demand ever higher, and intensifying demand for resources far from the point of consumption. He created a style of modernity reliant on ready and Inexpensive Energy, a style that developing nations around the world began to replicate. In an era of unprecedented global Climate Change, that style, and the ignorance that has accompanied it, must become an artifact of history. Thank you. [applause] you have the podium or should we all sit up here . Lets sit. That we you has to get water without [applause] thats a good idea. So, good evening, everyone. I agree with the opening comments that we had that actually, historians are very bad at celebrating our achievements and the rare production of a new piece of scholarship and i am really delighted to be here to actually participate in the celebration with all of you this evening. Especially to celebrate a book as impressive as this one. Power lines is one of those rare books that brings into focus all of those half formed thoughts you long had lingering at the edge of your consciousness but never quite made sense of. After you read power lines, the world never looks the same again, which is a way of saying it is a transformative piece of scholarship. It certainly made me rethink my personal history. As a child, i would visit my cousins in phoenix. Even as a youngster, it was obvious to me that phoenix was a very segregated city and that phoenix was a very sprawling city. What looms largest in my mind was the icon of the swimming pool, which was something that was very rare to enjoy in my hometown in massachusetts. Certainly no one that i knew in massachusetts had a pool in their backyard as some of my cousins did or in the apartment complex down the street. I was pressed into enough to ask myself, in the middle of the desert, where does this water come from to make the swimming pools possible . I am embarrassed to say that i never thought about where the electricity came from the powered the soundtrack of our visit, the constant hum of the air conditioner. I am especially embarrassed because one of my cousins lived right next to an electric substation. In fact, the house was almost directly underneath one of the highvoltage power lines coming down from the Navajo Nation. It is a truism that we historians often say that history is the study of power. I think that andrew shows how elemental this insight is. Tracing the highvoltage power lines across the landscape, lines like the ones my cousin lived under, back to their source to help us to grasp eight wealth of important relationships. Between the city and countryside, between navajos and nonnative peoples, and even within the Navajo Community itself as different tribal members grappled with the challenges that coal mining raised. Above all, what did the presence of coal mining mean to the primitive issue in indian country, which is that of sovereignty . Does selling coal further sovereignty by holding out a process of industrialization on the reservation or does it undermine this attempt at sovereignty by sacrificing environmental and Public Health of the navajo people for the benefit of outsiders. Today is andrews show, and i want to quickly get to the question and answer session, so i will gesture quickly at two arenas where i think that power lines is suggestive of new areas for historians to explore. The first of these, and he has alluded to this, is how the historians can contribute to the discussion of the environmental challenge of our time, global Climate Change. Historians have been largely absent from this conversation so far. Our current rising rates are not growth of the high carbon society, whose creation andrew so eloquently describes through his phoenix case study. One of the terrifying points to contemplate after Reading Power lines is that the infrastructure of this highenergy society, once the infrastructure of this highenergy society has been created, how hard it can be to alter the pattern. Phoenix, by most logix, should not be the sixth largest city in the United States. It is in the desert and dependent on scarce water and energy to transport the water and people across a dispersed residential pattern. Even if everyone in phoenix switched from driving gasoline powered cars to electric powered vehicles, we still would need to get the energy from someplace. As andrew shows, that someplace right now would predominately be coal from navajo country. Power lines helps us to understand how was it the americans made such a series of reckless environmental decisions. How it was that the promise of clean power, hydropower, transformed into dirty power, coal. And coal powered plants are now known to be the single largest contributor to carbon in the atmosphere. Recent events have forced us to become aware of the cost of global warming, that they are disproportionately borne by some people and that coastal people are vulnerable. Power lines also reminds us of the costs of producing carbon, the costs of our highenergy society, and they are also disproportionately borne by some people. Those in low coastal areas, or lowlying nations like the maldives are particularly vulnerable. Ofalso reminds us the cost producing carbon. Power lines also reminds us of the costs of producing carbon, the costs of our highenergy society, and they are also disproportionately borne by some people. The navajo live with sulfur dioxide so those in phoenix get to enjoy cheap power. It also explores the contours of indigenous history. Indigenous history has enjoyed a Remarkable Growth of late but i would argue it has yet to achieve the prominence of some other fields like africanAmerican History which, thanks to generations of scholars, has made it almost impossible, i think, to speak about many central issues of American Life slavery, freedom, citizenship, voting rights, the drug war, the agonies of the civil war without putting the africanamerican experience at the heart of the story. Native history has yet to make this claim as forcefully and certainly across all time periods. In the colonial period, when Indigenous People were militarily and demographically significant, we are now aware because of Richard White and other work on the enslavement of native americans, that native history really matters in the colonial period, connected to the salem witch hysteria. If we turn to the Early National period, the new american identity in the United States in many ways is formed by incorporating and incorporating symbols of indigeneity. Beyond this point, native history tends to drop off except for a mention of the Red Power Movement in the 60s as an offshoot relationship to the Civil Rights Movement of that period. What power lines demonstrates so powerfully and provocatively is that many of the subjects considered central to recent American History, from suburbanization to deindustrialization and the rise of conservative politics, Barry Goldwater being from phoenix, all of these are deeply and fundamentally connected to native history. I would go further and assert that one of the most exciting features i see power lines pointing towards is how we might renarrate the history of american capitalism. There has been a lot of work on this by ed baptist, walter johnson, and others, on how slavery was fundamental to the rise of american capitalism. But far more scholarship news to be done on how the appropriation of native resources provided another great motor of american capitalism. Phoenix and the sunbelt as a whole has been held up as a model of a low tax and low regulation market economy, but phoenix is a city created on land taken from the indian peoples. It uses water seized from the apache people. And cheap energy from the Navajo Nation. All of these stories need to be told and they all need to be told together. Power lines provides a model of how we can begin to do so. So please run with me in celebrating andrews remarkable achievement here. We will all get a chance to ask questions but since i am the commentator i am sort of seizing the opportunity to asked the first question here. Ask the first question here. In part, thinking about future opportunities, one of the things that intrigued me is that this is presented as the National Story of the u. S. , although i would argue that when you are doing native history that makes it international because there is a Navajo Nation and the United States. But it falls within the geographic limits of what we call the United States. How could we expand this frame to think about international flows of commodities and the ways in which certain risks are exported behind the United States to other communities as well . First of all, thank you, carl, for those really generous comments. That is something that i found myself thinking about a lot as i was revising the book, was about what starts to happen to our maps of the world when we start to connect consumption and production of not only energy but other commodities. The remapping that goes on is an international remapping and it is a remapping where nations still matter, National Policy still matters, but so does the freedom of companies to kind of locate. One of the interesting and that kind of freedom to locate matters a lot. Natural resources matter a lot in that story. One of the stories i tell at the end of the book is the story of fairchild semi conductor, which is basically the company that invents the modern silicon semiconductor. It locates a plant on it is a single victory of navajo industrialization attempts. Fairchild locates the plant on navajo land in 1965, i think. The bia sells that location as in a world of rootless suburbanites who move on a whim and change jobs, heres here is a population of potential workers that are tied to place, that will not leave and can be trained. And so they located there, open the plant using energy from a Four Corners Power Plant. A decade later, there are a series of occupations that occur in the Navajo Nation. First of all, the occupation of the black mesa mine, which is a coal mine that exists at the place were the nations come together, making a series of demands about protecting and compensating local peoples for damage to waters and making Water Supplies available. The freedom to hire a higher rate of return to those areas. The occupation is successful and most of the demands are met because they are relatively inexpensive for peabody, the coal company, to meet them. Shortly after that, seeing the success, there is an occupation of the fairchild plant based on a similarly a failure to promote navajo workers, a series of abuses of lowlevel navajo workers. That occupation failed almost entirely because a year later, fairchild pulls out. They are a form of capital that is mobile and the terms by which they were lured and drawn to the Navajo Nation included something to the effect that they would only have to pay two years of lease payments beyond vacating their plant, which were a relatively minimal choice for a multinational corporation. So i think that these kinds of maps of how capital flows and doesnt flow in relation to kind of Natural Resources that sit in place is an important thing that we can start to think about and expand. What was really chilling to me about reading the book is that i can really see the International Scope of the story. You see this repeated all over the americas and all over the world where you have a local community, like amazon. People come in and take out oil in their Promise Development and they do not even have light. How do you guys think, the word modernity and what it means to be modern, does it need to change and how does it change to make a shift . I use that word a lot in my book and i struggled as to whether to use it because it is such a fraught word in the American Academy and the global academy. The reason i use it is that people, at the time, who use it, they were imagining and talking about what it meant to be modern. But i do really think that the way, the underlying aspect of modern, of the way that modern was conceived, had to do with the use of energy. The use of Energy Without bound or limit, limited only by ability to pay, is something that serves to exacerbate these kinds of things. Your point about kind of the way when i started looking after starting to do this, it was this began my first iteration, when i was coming up with a dissertation prospectus, was a three part case study that would examine a similar manifestations of this pattern across the American West having to do with native people and energy. My advisor very widely sent me down and said a three part case study, are you crazy . Three case studies . It will be hard enough to do one. This is a pattern of the expropriation of resources from Indigenous Peoples and promises held up that are not met that repeated itself across the americas. I really appreciate that. If i can just jump in for one second, i think that the other thing that the book highlights wonderfully is so often native people, the native history, is seen as existing across another temporal divide. The native people are antimodern, sort of outside of modernity, traditional. With this book does nicely is connect, put everybody on the same temporal plain where they belong and that modernity looks very different on the navajo reservation than in phoenix but they are all intimately connected and sharing in this modernity and the question is why are the benefits and the costs of this modernity bourne so disproportionately . I think one of the things that i was really interested in also was and you mentioned this in your talk as well the isolation of cities in regard to Climate Change. That kind of plays into this system we have about talking about world space as opposed to cities. The rural is where people are backwards. The city is more sophisticated modern life happens. I just think that is really interesting in the kingdom of these resources in general and Climate Change because it seems like that is going to be the next part of the debate is starting to not necessarily do the split between this is a modern cities though i think that concept of cities is being isolated and i am starting to see. I am wondering how you got your head around the of cities is isolated in that way . One thing that really helped me was all of the work that has been done in metropolitan history over the past decade which really has shown how intensively kind of cities and suburbs are developed and underdeveloped, you know, by there is a phrase i use, metropolitan preference in federal policymaking, which is all the federal policies that we think of. There is a certain political trend that thinks of Rural America as intensely dependent on the federal government, which it is. Look at the farm bill and you see all the ways that there is money flowing to people who have the land in Rural America. But most of those people do not live in Rural America. What we see in larger numbers is money that goes to underwrite the construction of suburbs that underwrite the construction of particular kinds of houses. One thing that i found that was really fha underwriting guidelines and what it took. This was exciting stuff. What it took to build a house that would be guaranteed by the federal Housing Administration which is the entity that basically in the postwar years will underwrite if you have fha approval, they will guarantee 80 of the bank loan. So if there is a foreclosure, the federal government will basically ensure that the bank is protected. One of the things, one of the main components in there, is houses that have multiple electric circuits. One for lighting and another for major appliances. The fha, the federal government, is of a way guaranteeing the houses will consume ever higher rates of electricity in order to receive this insurance. So i think that that is one of those ways, like carl was saying. I think the central dilemma of resolving Climate Change right now is the way that, at least in the United States, the way that the american built environment set in place is so deeply dependent on heavy and extensive uses of electricity. And that finding and so dependent on coal as the fuel that creates that electricity. Can i ask you a question in the back . I am trying to figure out if the real thing here is developing phoenix and other cities, whether in the United States or other parts of the world, can we build desert cities . Once we start to build a desert city, it inevitably will consume and generate energy. Or was the sin going for coal and not some other energy . I asked up for historical reasons and also because moving forward we know that the global population is growing and the cities are growing and that we can expect to see a lot more desert cities. There is a debate as to whether in fact the desert cities that need all the airconditioning are more dangerous for the environment than cities like the one we are in here in new york which require lots of heat. How do we think about this . I think that there are multiple sins. There are two interesting tracks. One is the track where, like carl was saying, why was phoenix built . It has a lot to do with how the United States develops after world war ii. The incentives for building kind of suburbs, the incentives for building subdivisions, the incentives for relocating industry away from kind of existing industrial areas. That, to me, is an issue that is fundamentally unresolvable right now in the built environment as it currently exists. It is really hard to imagine a way that you undevelop phoenix. Other than 2008. 2008 did a good job of undeveloping areas of phoenix that were under development. You turn back to coal, the other moment of historical change is Historical Energy and searching for new alternatives. The optimistic ending that i had for the book before the tribe bought the coal mine and i had to go back to my familiar pessimistic ending, i was joking with someone, someone was telling me, how can you be so uncomfortable with change . You study change for a living. I study change for the worse. But i think in the optimistic ending, there is the possibility for kinds of Energy Development built into the existing grid. What is really promising about this plant was that it was not something where we need to build an entire new smart grid and remake the way that Electrical Systems in the southwest works. What it said is that actually the Transmission Technology exists out here anyway. What we need to do is locate solar and wind power on this land. And, you know, we can, because it will be built by the navajo tribe, the sovereignty problem will not be an issue. We can control the revenues and we can get the jobs. We can build that into this system of capital that is already set in place. Working with the structure that exists is vital for thinking about how do you move away from coal as the primary driver of the intensification of carbon in the atmosphere. I just want to jump on and bring in what you said about the fha, a lot of that is changing the concept of need. We in the northeast do not need to heat our homes in the way we do if we build our homes differently and the same is true in desert cities, that hinges on places like the fha changing what they would back. You cannot build a home that is very well insulated the way that you could get the funding for a pop it up and cheapest method. A lot of it is changing the mindset that we need to heat our homes and air conditioner homes so heavily and a lot of that is the government. Absolutely. If i can add another layer, i think the other sin of the desert cities is water. The whole southwest is in the middle of a historic drought solely to meet in all of the sources of water for phoenix and las vegas is at historic lows. How that is going to be resolved i really dont know yet. It is almost easier for me to imagine in a place where there is a lot of sun to get solar energy, but i do not know what you do in terms of water. So, i want to stay engulfed in the international a little bit and then move back to the reservation. Since i spent a good part of last year in nyu shanghai, there was a city where people experiencing the result of pollution from coal burning every day. And it is not a desert city, that is for sure, too. And when we think about the future, it is very hard to think there of a positive outcome. Now, the political situation is extraordinarily different from the one that you described. There are no problems of Property Rights. The state owns the resources. And there are no, not really, private companies. And there is no navajo problem in the sense that the state claims rights over everybodys property. Lets move back to your situation and the question about sovereignty and not just coal but resources generally. I would like to hear more about discussions on the reservation about the sovereignty issue and Property Rights and what to do. I cannot imagine that there is a united position on this. No, that was one of the real things that was super that was fascinating. One of the first things i did in my research was i sat down and i read about 30 years of the navajo times, which is fortunately a weekly newspaper. [laughter] otherwise it couldnt be done. What that quickly revealed was the variety of political positions that are, that people take in relation to Energy Development. And those have only continued. There was a very solid reason to think about buying navajo mine. Those are the 800 best paying jobs, or 800 of the best paying jobs, on the reservation working in that mine. The associated power plant is about half navajo employees. So the divisions between kind of tribal policymakers, workers in energy industries, people who live near where Energy Development would happen, people who live off the reservation and go back on the weekend, and how changes to the land threatened to disrupt the way they use the stories on the Navajo Nation are, you know, very complex and multisided. And what sovereignty means. This was one of the central what it means to be navajo is one of the things that was and is centrally debated in these debates. To be navajo, does it mean to do things to the tribe so it can be a strong state . There were people in the 70s of imagining an indian opec. If we can get the tribes together, control the Energy Resources on their land, then there can really be an exertion of state power by these domestic dependent nations to reshape the way that the nation they are supposedly dependent on works. There were tribal officials that came down to one of the tribal communities where there was a proposal to build a series of coal plans in the 70s and said, look, black mesa, they have a mine up in ram springs. They have done their job. Now it is your turn to do what we need to do to be a strong people. On the other hand, there are people who say, no. To be navajo is to kind of have this particular connection to the land. And it is not a traditional connection. What it means to have a certain kind of perspective on, you know, remaining independent and searching for ways to remain independent from those societies that surround you. The debates really come to center around what does it mean to be, you know, what does it mean to be navajo, to be sovereign . What should the aims of sovereignty be . And how long can those be realized in a political system that does not always recognize, you know, that that sovereignty very well. I was going to say, one thing i appreciate about the book is that it is evenhanded and treating a wide range of opinions on the reservation. You get the impression that people are grappling in good faith with a variety of questions and the underlying issue for me is to try and pick about whether the choice to have to grapple with this such a bad choice . Theyre trying to make the best of a number of bad choices, basically. I think power lines underscored that reality for me. None of the answers has a particularly great outcome. Question . On the same issue, i think that a lot of within the Environmental Justice movement, there is something that native groups are really protoenvironmentalists and that they are setting an example from the litter 70s and onwards environment groups. 19 70s and onwards environment groups. Do you think that the story setting an example for the late 70s and onwards environmental groups. Given the range of opinions that i found, i think it challenges that notion that the ecological indian is something that implicitly exists, right . There are, kind of, and a lot of people in the 70s that look at these tribal officials and say, that guy is an apple. He is red on the outside and white on the inside. This is what carl is talking about. I think when we look at those people and say that he is proposing, he wants to seek out industrial development, therefore he is less indian than the student from the university of new mexico west come back and has begun a tribal newspaper. All of these people, what they are all grappling with, is what it means to have this particular connection between identity and the landscape under development. And how do you manage that . I think that, you know, if there is an ecological indian, it is because indians have had to think about kind of land and development and how unequal things happen. Much more than other americans. Andrew, i was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the actual negotiations that take place between the Power Companies and the navajo . Talk about the details and in particular how the Power Companies get a great deal for them and in particular the u. S. State, local, municipal, state level, how they favor Power Companies. That is a terrific question. [laughter] it is really important. And it is, like all good stories in history, it depends on the point in time. Right . In the 1940s, basically after world war ii, there is a really deep kind of material crisis on the navajo reservation. Extending the reduction in the 30s whereby the federal government came in, saw a degraded range, the bia thinking the way to protect and preserve navajos in the future meant that you had to dramatically reduce the number of sheep, goat, and horses grazing on the range. And did it in a particularly violent way, many times killing livestock in front of people who had known those animals since their birth and had particular relationships with them. And so after world war ii there is really a sense of, you know, of navajos are living on, i think, the average diet is Something Like 1200 calories a day when people in germany have a diet of 1500 a day. The annual per capita income is 47 a year. There is really an effort at that point to say by the bia that there needs to be a new Economic Future for this place. One thing that happens in that moment is a mineral study that says, hey, look, there is actually a fair amount of coal here. This happens at the historic nadir of coal prices, coal is being used less and less and there is a belief that there will soon be Atomic Energy that is too cheap to meter. If we can get the perspective, any contest we can get is a good one. They largely closed any kind of tribal voice out of the decisionmaking. The contracts are negotiated between the companies and the federal government and then brought to the Tribal Council for ratification. And the navajo Tribal Council is created in the 1920s purely as a body to sign off. So this goes back to a kind of long history of how Energy Development has worked. By the 1960s and 1970s you have trouble leaders demanding a piece of what they call a piece of the action, demanding, kind of, halfandhalf arrangements with they will receive half ownership stakes with the companies that come in and what they are putting up is the material resources. They are putting up the coal and the company can put up the capital and that will be the way the agreement happens. One of the long effects of the initial agreements made was that those contracts had very easy kind of reupping the lawyers in the crowd will know the word for this. Basically, as long as the mine was producing coal, it could be renewed, so they stay in place for a long time, producing a low revenue even as the price goes up in the 60s and 70s. Here in the front. [laughter] you cant cut her off. My question has to do with other forms of indian development. I am relatively new to this except for being a citizen of the northeast. Indian Gaming Development is a different form of metropolitan relation to indian resources. And so this is pushing outside of the book a little bit but i am wondering if you might deal to compare those strategies in a way to what is happening in our region today. That is a great question. I think that in some ways the debate over coal and energy are a first stage in a testing of what does sovereignty allow us, allow tribes to do . And one of the things that comes out of those debates is, well, tribes, because of the way the american political economy works, cant nationalize. They cant nationalize these industries within the american legal structure. What they can do is tax them. A series of tribal taxes are placed on the companies. It ends new the beginning of the imagination of what does it mean to kind of have indian owned development . No longer going off. And the search for joint ventures. My understanding of the casinos is that they are mostly joint ventures between tribes and gaming companies. And the things that are proposed, the joint venture between exxon and the navajo tribe to develop uranium. Though that model, i think would be interesting to chart the development of this overtime. But that joint venture becomes the way that Tribal Gaming is really kind of becomes articulated in the northeast. And i think in the northeast is also key because there is a kind of spatial proximity going on of where the casinos are that make it not quite as available in the other parts of the country. But in phoenix there is certainly, on the i forget which. Fort mcdowell. The exact numbers are eluding me but my recollection is that there are a small number of casinos that make the vast majority of the money. And it is almost the inverse of the navajo being far away from phoenix and that becomes almost what is enabling about that relationship with gambling, proximity. There are small numbers that are close to large areas of population. Is almost better off to have a small reservation. If you are a distant reservation navajo or apache, they might have a casino but it actually does not generate much income. And i think that sort of the thing that i am not a big fan of gambling and if people want to gamble i am happy that the reservations are able to participate. There was an episode of this there was an episode of this American Life about how it can create problems within the tribe. That was a great episode. It seems like not exactly the best situation when there are industries that can create those issues. If gambling money paid off on a per capita basis, there is suddenly an incentive, the more people you can eject from tribal membership people literally said in this episode i felt bad about seeing him go but my check went up 200 next month. Even when they are getting money up not exactly are there any more questions . I will be honest and say that sometimes i go to book panels to save time because after an hour and a half you do not need to read the book anymore. [laughter] in that respect, this has been a tremendously expensive panel for me because i now have to read the book and spend even more time. Not tremendously expensive. It is reasonably priced. [laughter] for history book, not bad. Well done. The reason people do not celebrate history books is that they are so big. This is very friendly and readable. And so you can properly celebrate it we have them for sale right outside of this room and andrew would be happy to sign them. It is your first book, right . It is my first book. The celebration is well earned. Thank you for making this such a deep conversation and andrew, i know that a lot of us in the room are excited to read the book and we hope that there are many occasions to deal with these issues again. Congratulations and please come join the celebration in the next room. [applause] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2014] the cspan cities to or takes book tv in American History tv on the road, traveling to u. S. Cities to learn about their histories and literary life. We partner with Time Warner Cable for a visit to waco, texas. As we began to receive the vinyl to be digitized and saved, we began turning over the b sides of the 45s we received. Gospel music was not widely heard in the white community. When it was, it would only be the hits. The flipside would be heard even less. What we discovered quickly was how many of the besides bs ides were related to the Civil Rights Movement. There was no complete database of civil rights music. We didnt know that. We didnt know the sheer number of songs, lik