Exciting and celebratory occasion. Andrew and i were talking about fact that we were writing on our own. We published the books and want to be criticized and condemned by panels of really smart people. There will be lively conversation and debate tonight. But also a touch of celebration, theres wine and cheese and food outside. So participate in the event fully. We like do a lot of book launches here at ipk. But the real reason that were here tonight is because for the ipk is doing years, a lot of programming and research on issues about climate cities and sustainability while this work historical very much speaks to the most kind of contemporary emergent problems of our time. Were excited about the conversation tonight. Things rolling, we have eddie murphy, whos a nyu this visiting at year. But also someone whos done a environmental issues. Ontributed to npr and the atlantic and harpers. So please join me in welcoming her. Thanks. Here. Ed to be i think its a fantastic book. I do a lot of work in cities and hinterlands and native american issues as well. T pulls all of these issues together in a really interesting way. Andrew is going to talk about is book, about how its about electricity that came from navajo lands and how this fueled and evelopment of phoenix kind of the effect this had on this system. He is the associate professor nyu, specializes in u. S. History. Focuses on the environment. Indian history, rural by rban issues and joined carl jacoby, a professor of history also, hes at columbia. Center of the study f race and ethnicity, hes at borderlands and native american issues. In history. Going to talk for 20 or 25 minutes about his research and book as well. Carl will discuss, ill toss it questions and welcome him in. So please welcome him in. All,ll right, well first of thank you for coming. Thank you for coming, jack. Im going to go through some of the documents and some of the researching d in this book and how they shaped my thinking about it. A little bit read from the epilogue because i words. On those id like to share some of them of first take the chance saying a public thanks along with public celebrations we a chance that much of do. The thanks are related to the project too. Like to thank d kim, jack, and ray who have as ve been with this book long as theyve been alive and been related to this book as much as she is now related to me. Nyu here and who really andorted me supported me allowed me to take the time to write the book that i wanted to write. Models of d so many amazing kind of scholarly accomplishment and visions of what you could do. Students of nyu who i book ears off about this and theyve helped me think through in their own work what i wanted to tions finally answer. Like to thank ipk and eric and up. Ica for setting this thank carl and annie for agreeing to be here. Brother whodad, and are here and in the way are the people who have the longest this book p with because they were on the trip something that looked like this Four Corners Power Plant as seen from the highway. This is the first this is the origin point of this book. Before i was in graduate school or thinking of historian. Happen in the san juan mountains. In many ways, the central the ion thats driving book. What is this doing here . Why is this power plant located indian land located hundreds of miles from the nearest metropolitan center. History of how this power plant came to be here . O that question stayed with me as i started into graduate interact withe to entered in s that i the conversation with for most of my career. Best books are two of the books about urban history that 30e been written in the last years. Story of of how the post world war ii america is the capitalism and the environment created an exacerbated inequality, inequality. Racial atures metropolis has no people in it. I dont think thats true. But one of the things that appens in the story is the people who live on this land remain there. They are in many ways dispossessed but they are of the navajo what did it mean, possession happened discontinued residents in this space. I came to a map that looked like this. It was not this precise map, but one that looked like it which as a map that showed the connection of what you see up there with the four corners, it this is in awatts, 1961. You see a power line leading from there down to phoenix. When i saw this map. This is a map that potentially concerns about how is the contemporary city resources. By those advise against a strategy that bought a valentine. Electricity substantiated itself in every suburban in twar electric and industrial life resulted in per capita increase electrical use from 1400 hours annually to 10,000 kilowatt hours in the 1970s. 25 years, you can see that kind of increase. Of he same time because phoenixs growth, you can see an ncrease in total domestic electrical use of 750 7500 . Times over electricity is used in 1970 than its used in 1945. At the same time there was a didnt get at thought about. His landscape where it was produced to serve the consumers. This is a photo that accompanies earlier that i showed from 1961. Photo of generating was you know, one generating became four and navajo mine in the foreground. Ecological andre social transformations in a way enabled suburban consumption. Later i found this map. And this, i think, is probably most the single one of the single most important sources that i found in my research. This is a schematic map of the power lines that kris crossed 0. Southwest in 19 so four corners is not the only power plant thats built. Corners up in r you can see the navajo power plant, 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 met