The Second Rape of the West

Rumbling Along in my 1962 Dodge D-100, the last good truck Dodge ever made, I tossed my empty out the window and popped the top from another can of Schlitz, Littering the public highways? Of course I litter the public highways. Every chance I get. After all, it's not the beer cans that are ugly; it's the goddamned highway that is ugly. Beer cans are beautiful, and someday, when recycling becomes a serious enterprise, the Government can put 1,000,000 kids to work each summer picking up the cans that I and others have thoughtfully stored along the roadways.

Indian country. American country. Coming down out of the piny forests near Flagstaff, Arizona, headed north, you are led into one of the most exhilarating landscapes in the Southwest. On your left, the San Francisco Peaks, 12,660 feet above sea level; on your right and ahead, a group of dormant volcanoes and cinder cones. scattered over the tawny grasslands. One of those cinder cones, Sunset Crater, erupted only 910 years ago. We pray to God, my friends (continued on page 194) Second Rape Of The West (continued from page 138) and I, for a little precision vulcanism once again; nothing could do our South west more good.

From 7200 feet at the pass, the high way descends into the rangelands, bearing straight toward the valley of the Little Colorado and the Painted Desert. To the north, you can see the forested bulk of the Kaibab Plateau, through which the big Colorado has carved the Grand Canyon. To the northeast stand the red walls of the Echo Cliffs, the blue and sacred dome of Navaho Mountain, visible from 100 miles away. Indian ponies lounge along the highway, looking for something to eat--Kleenex, hot-dog buns, tumbleweed, anything more or less biodegradable, Out among the slabs of sunburned rock you can see the Navaho kids herding sheep; among the scattered junipers are the hogans of The People, as they call themselves, And why not? They've been there a long time. By each dome-shaped hogan is an old car, on its back, cannibalized to keep another running, and a pickup truck, on its wheels. All seems to be in order.

Not quite. Something alien and strange has invaded the Southwest, a gigantic and inhuman power from--in effect-- another world. You first notice the invaders as you approach the village of Cameron and the turnoff to Grand Canyon. They look like Martian monsters in this pastoral scene: skeleton towers of steel from 90 to 120 feet tall, posted across the landscape in military file from horizon to horizon. From the crossarms of the towers hang chains of insulators, bearing power-line cables buzzing with electricity, transmitting power from Glen Canyon Dam and the new coal-fired generators near the town of Page ("Shithead Capital of Northern Arizona") to the burgeoning cities of Las Vegas, Phoenix and Southern California. From the silence of the desert to the clamor of Glitter Gulch, the fool's treasure of one region is transported and transmuted into the nervous neon of another. Energy, they call it, energy for growth. And what is the growth for? Ask any cancer cell.

The power lines are merely the first, outward signs of this war between the worlds. Deep in the heart of Indian country, on a plateau called Black Mesa, you can see the chief current battleground, a huge strip mine where walking dragline excavators 300 feet high, weighing 2500 tons each, remove and overturn what the Peabody Coal Company calls "overburden." Blasters shatter the coal seam underneath; power shovels scoop the coal into trucks bigger than your house, trucks that look like Stego-sauruses on wheels. They haul it to processing plants nearby, from which it is then shipped by pipeline in slurry form to a power plant in Nevada or by conveyor belt and rail to the plant at Page.

Strip mining destroys the rangeland on which the Indians once grazed their sheep and horses, and it threatens the underground water supplies that feed their fews springs and wells. Strip-mined land has yet to be reclaimed successfully anywhere in the arid West. But from the point of view of the mine operators and the power companies, strip mining is cheap and profitable. A mine producing 1,000,000 tons of coal a year may require only 25 workers. The machines are expensive, but machines never complain, never go on strike, never make demands for safety standards, medical insurance, retirement pensions. As for the displaced Indians and the unemployed miners back in Appalachian Let them go on welfare; let them eat food stamps. Society at Large will pay those costs. And so the strip mining goes on at an ever-growing pace and now consumes about 4650 acres of American farm, forest and rangeland each week. Every week of the year. An area the size of Connecticut, some 5000 square miles, has already been strip-mined for coal alone. Can this land be reclaimed? According to the 1973 report from the National Academy of Sciences, "in the Western coal areas, complete restoration is rarely, if ever, possible." Even simple revegetation, in the West, "will require centuries."

In the case of the Black Mesa mine, what do the Indians get out of it? The Navaho tribal is paid an annual royalty of $3,000,000, or about $25 per Navaho. The Indians also get 300 jobs paying an average of $10,000 per year. The royalty and the jobs are good for about 35 years, the estimated life of mine and power-plant operation. Then what? No one knows for sure, but the fate of Appalachia provides a pretty good hint. Poverty, a blighted land, forced migration to the welfare slums: That has been the fate of Appalachians since King Coal moved into their homeland.

Meanwhile, the Indians and everyone else living 100 miles downwind of the present and projected power plants (Kaiparowits, Escalante, Caineville--all in south central Utah) will receive as a bonus a concentrated, steady treatment of fly ash, sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxide. Even if such air-pollution-control devices as electrostatic precipitators, wet scrubbers and beghouse filters, operating constantly at maximum theoretical efficiency, capture 99.5 percent of these pollutants at the plant smokestacks, the plants will still pump into the public air (which is all we have for breathing purposes) wastes on the order of 50,000 tons of particpates, 750,000 tons of SO2 and 600,000 tons of NOX per annum. These are magnitudes greater than those that now profane the Los Angeles Basin.

For those rare few who may not already be familiar with these forms of aerial garbage, a few words of explanation: Fly ash is fine black soot, the stuff that coats window sills and car tops and other horizontal surfaces in most industrial cities of the Western world; sulphur dioxide is a gaseous poison harmful to all varieties of plant and animal life, including the human--it reacts with moisture in the atmosphere to form sulphuric acid and comes back to earth mixed with rain or snow, often causing great damage to crops; nitrogen oxide is a noxious gas that combines with ozone and carbon in the air to form the eye-smarting, sunobscuring brown haze known as smog. All of these major pollutants, plus others, including trace elements of radon and mercury, are known to cause or aggravate such respiratory ailments as asthma and emphysema; all may be and probably are carcinogenic.

Only we dumb locals may suffer physically from the power plants; but all Americans who enjoy--actually or potentially--the Grand Canyon, Lake Powell, Monument Valley, Shiprock, Canyon de Chelly, Zion, Bryce Canyon, Capitol Reef, Arches and Canyonlands national parks will be forced to accept the drastic degradation of the national heritage. The strip mines will tear up only a few hundred square miles; the accompanying power lines, railways, truck roads, dams, waste-disposal sites, industrial sites and trailer-house towns will cover only a few hundred more square miles; but the filth spewed out by the power plants will smog the air for hundreds of miles in all directions, reducing visibility from the customary 50-100 miles to an average of something like 15. That's what you have to look forward to, tourists, next time you come West to enjoy what is, after all, Your property.

Try to keep cool, calm and objective, I tell myself, driving the familiar road up from Flagstaff through my favorite towns of Cameron, Tuba City, Cow Springs and Kayenta. Don't get overagitated, Abbey, and try to keep a steady bead on the ceramic insulators that carry the lines that conduct the 50,000 volts of blue juice above the tracks of the Black Mesa & Lake Powell Railroad. Anger is bad for the aim, hard on the stomach and makes for a nervous trigger finger. Rage is self-defeating, say all the wisest philosophers (all of whom are dead).

So much for ulcerdom. We have barely begun to discuss the difficulties that will follow mining and coal-fired power plants in the American Southwest, if the ambitious plans of the Federal Government and the power combines are carried to completion. We have said little, for example, of the impact on water supplies in an arid land. Every river in the Southwest(continued on page 230) Second Rape Of The West (continued from page 194) is already overcommitted to agricultural and local municipal use; it was, in fact, for this purpose that the Glen Canyon Dam was built, together with secondary dams in Utah, Colorado and New Mexico. The proposed power plants will require enormous quantities of water, primarily for cooling purposes. Since no surplus water is available, the water will have to come from sources presently allocated to agriculture. That means, of course, smaller food supplies and still higher food prices. This touches on the problem; but the dislocation of ground-water supplies by mining may have more serious long-term effects, drying up some wells and streams, polluting others, on which the Indians, the farmers and the cattle growers of the Southwest now depend.

•

The Four Corners Power Plant near Shiprock, New Mexico, may be the worst single industrial polluter in the world. The smog from the Four Corners plant drifts on the prevailing winds as far as Durango, Colorado, and down the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico to obscure the skies above the historic towns of Taos, Santa Fe and Albuquerque. Despite years of protest, the utility company has done almost nothing to abate this public nuisance and menace to health. Yet several of the same people who built and operate the Four Corners monster are now involved in the building of the Navaho Generating Station at Page, almost on the shore of Lake Powell, one of the most scenic and popular recreational areas in the Southwest.

With the help and/or interest of the Bureau of Reclamation, the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power, Pacific Gas and Electric and other utilities, another combine--consisting of Arizona Public Service Company, Southern California Edison Company and San Diego Gas & Electric Company--proposes a third power plant in the area of the Kaiparowits Plateau, a presently uninhabited wilderness of forest and canyons within visual range of Page and Lake Powell. The exact site has not yet been chosen, but either of the two plants presently under consideration will degrade the quality of the air in what is a relatively unpolluted region. As planned, this Kaiparowits plant will produce more thousands of tons of soot and acids daily, adding to those already coming out of the 800-foot-tall stacks (the design engineers call them beauty tubes) of the present Navaho plant.

All of these Southwest power projects, actual or potential, violate the law of the land. According to the provisions of the Clean Air Act of 1971, passed by Congress and signed by the President, not only must the air of industrial regions be cleaned up to meet Federal standards but also, and equally important--perhaps more important--the air of nonindustrial regions, such as the Southwest, the intermountain West and the Northern plains, must be kept as is: clean. The intent of the act was to prevent utilities and industrial concerns from building new plants in rural areas where the air is still reasonably clean.

Yet this violation of the act is exactly what the power companies, the mining corporations and the public utilities hope to get away with. Although almost all of the energy produced will be consumed in Tucson, Phoenix, Las Vegas and Southern California, the mining and burning of the coal will take place in northern Arizona and southern Utah, where a small and docile population is being cajoled into giving up its birthright of fresh air, clear skies and open space in exchange for a few thousand temporary jobs.

The coal could be mined and shipped by rail and truck to Southern California and the big cities and burned there, at the place of need. Such a policy, while still damaging to the canyonlands and the Indian country, would at least assure the nondegradation of one of America's last large reservoirs of pure air. Local citizens who want the jobs that coal mining would create but who are opposed to the air pollution resulting from power plants have proposed this alternative to present policy. Their pleas go unheeded, despite the fact that the law reinforces their argument. The reason is simple: The public utilities, the oil-and-coal power combines, want minesite burning of the coal so that they can escape air-quality standards imposed on the cities.

From the energy industry's point of view, it is more profitable to transport electricity long distances, via power lines, than to transport the raw coal and pay for the sophisticated technology required to clean up their urban-area power plants.

The economics of the matter are more complicated than this summary indicates, involving such things as the manner in which public utility rates are set and the relative ease with which certain costs can or cannot be passed on to the consumer (fuels and power transmission are relatively easy to pass along, while other costs, such as improvements in pollution technology and the recovery of large-scale investments and mineral leases, are considerably more difficult--if not sometimes impossible). But the essence of the case is monetary profit: With profit margins fixed by state regulation at a percentage of total investment, it is more profitable for the utilities and their stockholders to develop their business to the largest scale and volume possible, no matter what the cost to the environment and the health of the citizenry.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is mandated by act of Congress to oppose exactly such degradation of air quality as the power combines are bringing into the Southwest. The EPA, however, blandly ignores the law and refuses to perform its clearly defined duty on the curious ground that enforcement of the law, in this case, would "retard or prevent industrial development" in presently nonindustrial areas. This may well be true; and it might well be a wise national policy to restrict or ban industrial development in areas that have a higher value for other uses, such as agriculture and human recreation.

Whether or not true, and whether or not wise, industrial development is not the concern of the EPA. The EPA's job is to protect the environment, not to assist in promoting its further industrialization. Apparently, the EPA is obeying in this instance not its congressional mandate but orders from higher up--from the Federal Energy Administration, the Federal Power Commission, the Department of the Interior and the White House--that conglomerate of Federal agencies and administrative powers that acts, in Ralph Nader's words, as the "indentured servant" of corporate industrialism.

The EPA has been taken to court by citizens' conservation organizations in an effort to compel it to obey the law and live up to its obligations. The Federal courts have ordered the EPA to enforce the policy of nondegradation of air quality. Appealed by the EPA to the highest court, the orders of the lower courts were sustained by the Supreme Court of the United States, which ruled that the EPA may not allow "significant deterioration" of air quality anywhere.

No matter; the EPA continues to avoid, evade and defy the law through various ruses, the latest of which is the drawing up of a complicated national map of airquality "zones" and turning the problems of selection and enforcement over to state governments. In Utah, Arizona, Wyoming, New Mexico and Nevada, we know well what that means: domination and exploitation by the extractive industries--the coal, oil and power combines.

Not only do our state politicians fail to resist these alien forces, they bid against one another to invite them in. Our good old boys would sell their mothers' graves if they could make a quick buck out of the deal; crooked as a dog's hind leg, tricky as car dealers, greedy as hogs at the trough, these men will sell out the West to big industry as fast as they can, without the faintest stirrings of conscience. Governors, U. S. Senators, Congressmen and our chamber-of-commerce presidents don't give a hoot in hell for future losses; they figure, rightly, that they personally will all be dead by the time the extent of the disaster becomes clear; and, as for posterity, they say, what has posterity ever done for them?

So much for the canyonlands of Utah and Arizona: nothing but a barren wasteland, anyway, as any local Jaycee will tell you, nothing but sand and dust and heat and emptiness, red rock baking under the sun and hungry vultures soaring on the air. Quite so, men, quite so: nothing but canyon and desert, mountain and mesa, all too good for the likes of us. Let us roll on northeasterly, into Wyoming and Montana, for a look at the next big rape on the schedule.

•

I drove north and east into historic South Pass, through which the pioneers had made their way on foot, on horse and in wagon trains to Oregon and California, guided by legendary mountain men like Jedediah Smith. At the summit of the pass, I crossed the continental divide, leaving my trail of empty Schlitz cans by the roadside (to be recovered later). Bunches of pronghorn antelope watched my progress; I'd seen at least 30 small herds of those elegant beasts since entering Wyoming, all within sight of the paved highway.

In the high, cold mountain town of Lander (population 7500), I stopped for a few hours to visit the people who write, edit and produce the only newspaper in the entire Rocky Mountain West concerned primarily with environmental issues. The High Country News, founded six years ago and published by native Landerian Tom Bell, is a biweekly of small circulation but widespread coverage, dealing with the whole range of developments that threaten the people of the West: strip mining, power plants, air pollution, water diversion, urbanization, overgrazing, clear-cutting, land speculation and other issues.

In the cubbyhole office of the News, I found Joan Nice, Bruce Hamilton and Marjane Ambler. These young people, none of them looking over 30, make up the entire editorial staff of the newspaper. They pay themselves a monthly salary of $300 each--enough for rent and beans and shoes. Though many of the feature articles published in the paper come from contributors, the staff writes the bulk of it, 16 pages every two weeks.

Armed with names and addresses, I went on north to Billings, Montana. In my room at the General Custer hotel, I watched a TV commercial sponsored by the Montana Power Company promoting the attractions of strip mining, power-plant construction and extra-high-voltage (EHV) transmission lines.

Next morning, I paid a call on Roger Rice, senior geologist for the Western Energy Company, a subsidiary of Montana Power. With him was Mike Grende, reclamation manager for the same outfit. Patiently and courteously, they explained to me why Montana Power wanted more strip mines, more power plants and two new EHV lines across the length of Montana--some 410 miles at 500 kilovolts. Why? To meet anticipated growth in industry and population. E.g., Montana's Big Sky resort town, founded by the late Chet Huntley, is an all-electric community and, by itself, if all goes according to plan, will require more electricity than any city now existing in the state. The transmission lines, by tying in the power complex in eastern Montana with the Northwest power grid of Oregon and Washington, would enable Montana Power to transfer energy to the urban centers of Seattle, Puget Sound and Portland, where the need is greatest. Why there? Aluminum manufacture, they said; population growth; the aerospace industry; the new methods of irrigation; a 12 percent annual increase in power demands in the Northwest as a whole. Why not ship the coal by rail, truck or slurry line to Seattle, I asked, and let the power companies burn it there, pollute their skies? Because, they told me, it is more economical to transmit the power by high-voltage cable than to ship it in the form of coal. So Montana is to be sacrificed, I said, to the energy needs of the Northwest--and of the Midwest, where much of the electrical energy will also be transferred. Rice replied that we've got to think of the greatest good for the greatest number. The few (Montana's presently small and until now lucky population) cannot be allowed to obstruct the needs of the many (the teeming millions of Washington, Oregon, California, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Ohio, etc.). Besides, said Rice, the energy industry will give the Montana economy a much-needed shot in the arm.

I didn't argue; you don't argue with engineers--you have to derail them. Why the TV-advertising campaign? I asked; if this deal is good for the people of Montana, why do you have to spend so much (tax-deductible) advertising money in selling it to them? We're spending only $100,000, said Rice, and the program has been well received by the public. But why is it necessary? Because there are some well-meaning and concerned people in this state, he said tactfully, who are not familiar with all the facts and have been misleading the public. Who are they? A small group of ranchers in eastern Montana (site of the strip mining) called the Northern Plains Resource Council. Later the same day, I would learn that the staff members of this ad hoc resource council are paid, like my friends down in Lander, $300 per month each. Three hundred dollars per month seems to be the prevailing salary of conservation activists. This suggested my final, unfair, irrelevant argumentum ad hominem question: Exactly how much, I asked Mr. Rice and Mr. Grende, did Western Energy pay them for the use of their talents?

None of your business, they explained.

In the afternoon, I took a flight over the Powder River Basin, the area in southeast Montana and northeast Wyoming where most of the strip mining, power generation, coal gasification and coal liquefaction is taking place or is scheduled to take place--if permitted. My guide was a young man from the Northern Plains Resource Council. Due east from the city of Billings, we flew over the Sarpy Creek strip mine, operated by Westmoreland Resources (a partnership consisting of Westmoreland Coal Company, Penn Virginia Corporation, Kewanee Industries, Inc., and Morrison-Knudsen Company, Inc., one of the world's largest construction companies), and saw the black gash already cut in the grassy hills. Down in the open pit stood a GEM--Giant Earth Mover--with its 60-cubic-yard bucket, big enough to lift two Greyhound buses into the air. Surrounding the strip mine were wheat fields, subirrigated hayfields along the watercourse and endless rolling plains covered with the sere brown, short, tough native grasses that make, according to Montana ranchers, the best cattle feed in the world. Where the land is too arid for conventional farming, it will still support a beef-growing industry; this is, after all, part of the region where the American bison once roamed in herds of thousands.

We turned southeast, across the Crow and Northern Cheyenne Indian reservations (also facing strip mining and industrialization), toward the towns of Decker, Acme, Sheridan and Buffalo, the last three in Wyoming. More strip mines, more GEM machinery, new roads and railways, new trailer slums. If the Ford Administration and the energy combines have their way, some 10 to 15 coal-burning power plants will be erected in this region between Billings, Montana, and Gillette, Wyoming. Never mind the opposition of the people who make their living here now. I recalled something that senior geologist Rice had remarked during our interview: "Public attitudes will change," he said, "after they've had a few power blackouts."

We flew north, across the state line again and over Birney and Colstrip, passing the strip mines of Peabody Coal (soon to be far bigger than the one at Black Mesa) and the conglomerate of Montana Power, Puget Sound Power & Light, Washington Water Power, Portland General Electric and Pacific Power amp; Light, which is developing the Colstrip mines. Off to the southwest, beyond the smog and dust of all this fresh activity, the snow-covered Bighorn range loomed against the sky, still visible 50 miles away. If the proposed power plants are actually built, those mountains will no longer be seen from so great a distance.

We passed over the Bull Mountains, north of Billings, one more prosperous ranching area under the cloud of King Coal, then returned to the Billings airport. What had I seen in this brief aerial survey? Mountains, forested foothills, tawny grasslands stretching for hundreds of miles, silver rivers, winding streams lined with willow and cottonwood trees, green hayfields, ranches, homes, small towns--the traditional American version of the good life. And the strip mines.

What is most difficult to grasp is the scale, the magnitude of the planned assault. Including the lignite deposits of the western Dakotas, the coal-development proposals take in some 250,000 square miles. Beneath that surface lie an estimated one and a half trillion tons of coal, about 40 percent of total U. S. reserves (most of the nation's coal, the remaining 60 percent, is in the East--Appalachia--and the Midwest). Though lower in B.T.U. (heat) content than Eastern coal, these Northern plains deposits are also lower in sulphur content, which makes them attractive to an energy industry under pressure to lessen air pollution in urban centers. To develop this energy resource, the U. S. Bureau of Reclamation and a participating group of 35 public utilities propose not only vast strip mining in Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota but also the construction of 42 mine-mouth power plants to convert the coal to electricity, together with additional plants for coal gasification and liquefaction--synthetic fuels. The power would be sent East and West through thousands of miles of 765-kilovolt transmission lines. A single projected 10,000-megawatt power plant would be five times bigger than New Mexico's Four Corners Plant. The water needed for these planned developments would total 2,600,000 acre-feet per year. Where will all this water, an amount exceeding by 80 percent the present municipal and industrial needs of New York City's 8,000,000 residents, come from? From the Yellowstone River, on which the agricultural economy of the region now depends. Through an elaborate system of dams, storage reservoirs, pump stations and aqueducts--to be built, of course, by the Bureau of Reclamation--this water project would divert from the Yellowstone one third of its flow in good (wet) years and one half in bad (dry) years.

Coal requirements for the 1980 goal of 50,000 megawatts would be 210,000,000 tons per year, stripping 10 to 30 square miles of range- and farmland annually, or a total of 350 to 1050 square miles during the projected 35-year life of the power plants. At the 200,000-megawatt level, the strip mines would consume from 50,000 to 175,000 square miles of surface during the same 35-year period. The transmission lines would take up over 8000 miles of right of way, or (with mile-wide utility corridors) a total of 4800 square miles. The ozone zone. Power losses from the lines would approximate 3000 megawatts, equal to the present average peak-demand requirements of Manhattan.

If carried out, this plan will create a population influx of up to 1,000,000 people in the Northern plains, a number almost as great as the current population of Wyoming and Montana combined (1,094,000). A dozen new industrial towns would revolutionize the style, not to say the quality, of life in the region. The new power plants would generate pollution greater than that of Los Angeles or New York, with an estimated annual production (assuming pollution-control efficiency at 99.5 percent) of 100,000 tons of particulate matter--fly ash--per year, 2,100,000 tons of sulphur dioxide (including sulphuric acids) and 1,879,000 tons of nitrogen oxides, plus trace elements of selenium, arsenic and mercury.

Who's to blame?

I asked that question of Boyd Charter, a crusty old rancher from the Bull Mountains north of Billings. Charter is one of the supporters of the Northern Plains Resource Council. He was also, he told me, once a fellow rider with the present junior Senator from Wyoming, Clifford Hansen, and Hansen, he said, is "one of the worst."

May we quote you on that? I asked.

"You can write it in Playboy in capital letters," said Charter. "When it comes to who's to blame for tearing up the Northern plains and the West in general, my old buddy Cliff is the biggest son of a bitch in Washington."

Why pick on Hansen? I asked. Is he any worse than Stan Hathaway (briefly President Ford's Secretary of the Interior after a Senate fight for confirmation)? Or look at Senators Garn and Moss of Utah, Senators Goldwater and Fannin of Arizona, Governor Rampton of Utah, Congressman Steiger of Arizona and about half a dozen others in our Western Dirty Dozen. Don't they qualify, from the conservationist point of view, as sons of bitches, too? Charter and I had a bit of discussion about this, each of us maintaining, out of regional loyalty, that his own politicians were the worst.

Take Moss, Garn and Rampton, I said. All three are backing the Kaiparowits project to the hilt. All three are doing their best for the power industry, the mining industry, the oil-shale industry, not to mention such incidentals as commercial tourism and building freeways through the canyon-country wilderness. Utah, I pointed out, is the only state in the mountain West without a single acre in the Wilderness Preservation System, and Rampton and Moss, together with Garn's predecessor Wallace Bennett, must be given full credit for that accomplishment. They even oppose wilderness in the national parks. Our man Garn, I said with pride, though he's been in office for less than a year, has already made his name by openly advocating that public lands be transferred to private ownership.

He knew about that, Charter admitted, but you still can't beat old Cliff Hansen. Old Cliff, he votes for the Highway Trust Fund every time. Against the Land-Use Planning bill. For the Alaskan Pipeline. Against the Strip Mining Control bill, which would protect the surface rights of ranchers and farmers from the coal companies. Against requiring environmental-impact statements in coal and natural-gas leasing. Against the Clean Air Act. Against the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. For converting and extending a small airstrip in Grand Teton National Park to handle jet traffic. Against the Freedom of Information Act. According to a score sheet compiled by the League of Conservation Voters, Hansen voted wrong 92 percent of the time on environmental issues. According to the same kind of score sheet tallied by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Hansen voted right 95 percent of the time. That shows you who he works for.

Not bad, I agreed, not bad. But take my own Congressman, Sam Steiger of Arizona: He has voted the same way on every issue as your friend Hansen and, besides that, still wants to build a dam in the Grand Canyon, led the fight in the House against the Land-Use Planning bill, against mass-transit bills and against wilderness preservation. He's the one who helped the Bureau of Land Management get control of the Kofa wildlife reserve, which was a move for mining and against bighorn sheep. Our Sam, he's something special.

OK, said Charter, but our Cliff is the oilman's oilman. When everybody else wanted to eliminate the depletion allowance for the oil industry, our Cliff wanted to raise it. He wanted to raise it for the coal industry, too. Hansen is doing everything he can to encourage the energy industry in the West. A magazine called World Oil, which speaks for the industry, named Hansen "Oil's Champion." That's our Senator.

The debate could have gone on forever. Charter and I finally reached agreement by agreeing that almost all of them in political office, Republicans and Democrats, from Phoenix, Arizona, up North to Billings, Montana, are in general working for the mining and energy industries and against farming, ranching and the conservationist cause.

Boyd Charter is among the many landowners in the region who have been harassed, threatened and cajoled by representatives from the coal and power industries trying to buy them out or, failing that, to condemn their land, for strip mining. "We're being raped and we're being lied to," he says. "Show me one acre that's been reclaimed after strip mining. There isn't any. The businessmen who from the Economic Development Association of Eastern Montana want to strip-mine the high plains and then use the pits for a national garbage dump."

"My patriotism is wearing thin," says Charter. "They wanted to sell Montana coal to Japan. Some Japanese aluminum company had the deal all set up--they'd even bought loading docks in Oregon. We heard about it and got it stopped. But what's all this other coal development for? Well, for one thing, to help make more aluminum beer cans in the state of Washington. They'd tear up the best cattle range in the world to make beer cans. These native grasses we got here can't be restored. Sure, they can plant something like crested wheat on what they call reclaimed land; but cattle don't like crested wheat. Or sweet clover; sweet clover is a weed out here! You can't raise beef cattle on it. Why do you think the Texas cattlemen brought their herds up here a century ago? Because of the native grass--the little bluestem, the blue-bunch grass, the western wheat grass, the needle and thread, the Indian rice grass--that's why. This high-plains grass is the next best thing to grain--and grain is too precious to feed to cattle any more. We're gonna need range-fed beef from now on. That's all you're gonna get. When you come right down to it, it's a choice between food and more electricity. Which would you rather have? How many vitamins in a kilowatt?"

I asked Charter if he could maintain his cattle business if gasoline were severely rationed or priced much higher, or if electricity became more expensive. "We can get along without gasoline entirely. " he said. "We can convert in a few days to the same kind of operation we had forty years ago." And he added that he and some neighboring ranchers were already switching from Rural Electrification Administration (REA) power back to the old reliable windmills for pumping water from range wells. That, he said, was his first step toward Project Independence.

•

Time for a visit to another strip mine and power plant. I drove east from Billings to the little town of Colstrip, soon to become a hive of industry if the planners fulfill their plans. On the way, I paused for an hour of meditation at a monument on a ridge above the Little Bighorn River, in the heart of the Crow Indian Reservation. Here Custer made his Last Stand. On the memorial stone is a bronze plaque that reads, in part, to the officers and Soldiers killed ... In the Territory of Montana, White Clearing the District of the Yellowstone of hostile Indians.... All is quiet and peaceful, at the moment. The sun beams down on the green fields along the river, on the lion-colored hills above, on the gleaming Bighorn Mountains far to the south.

If you think the Indians would resent this memorial to Custer set up in their own back yard, you have forgotten that the Crows fought with the U. S. Cavalry, not against it. It was the Sioux and the Cheyenne tribes, traditional sporting enemies of the Crow, who shot down Custer and 261 of his men, together with a few of his Crow scouts.

Divide and conquer: It worked for the Romans, it worked for Cortes in Mexico, it worked (generally) in the U. S. A. against the Indians. The same technique is now employed by the Bureau of Reclamation and the power combine against the farmers and ranchers (including the surviving Indians) of the contemporary American West. If Continental Oil, Montana Power or Peabody Coal can buy out one rancher, then that rancher's neighbors come under greater pressure to sell out. You can't raise hay and cattle next to a strip mine, downwind from a power plant belching So2into the air, amid the factories and furnaces of the petrochemical industry. Today, as a century ago, it is the Crow tribe that is willing to accommodate itself to the advance of power--although bargaining for a stiff price--while its old enemies and neighbors on the adjacent Cheyenne reservation are resisting the strip miners and the air polluters to the end, just as they did the pony soldiers, the bluecoats, the gold seekers and the sodbusters. The Crows had a big reservation and a relatively high per-capita income (for Indians); all that the Cheyennes have is their sense of honor.

Through the Cheyenne capital, called Lame Deer, and north. Approaching the strip mine I saw, as usual, the iron rigs of giant draglines looming over the landscape, digging into the earth beneath a pall of dust. On the skyline were the long gray ridges of spoil banks, the overturned soil. Beyond the mined area, the original landscape remains, hills covered with ponderosa pine standing on the rolling plain.

I interviewed Martin White in his Colstrip office. White, who looks almost as young as the $300-per-month staff members of the Northern Plains Resource Council but wears a more harassed expression on his face, is project manager for the Western Energy Company at Colstrip. He told me a little about the mine: 6,800,000 tons of coal per year, current production, with 833,000,000 tons in reserve, still under the ground. Two units of the power plant already are under construction, two more proposed; if the proposed units are built, the power will be sent to the Northwest throught the projected 410-mile 500-kilovolt transmission line. White scoffs at the notion that ozone from the line will damage vegetation in the line's vicinity; denies charges that it will take hundreds of square miles of land out of agricultural production. As for the town of Colstrip itself, it will be, he says, a "planned community," with bicycle paths, playgrounds and parks, a new library, quality homes and spacious, landscaped mobile-home courts. Colstrip, he says, will be a net asset to the people of eastern Montana, providing hundreds of new jobs and supporting public facilities through its contributions to the tax base. State and Federal pollution-control standards will be met, and even though the quality of air and quality of life may suffer a bit in the region, the national interest demands that Montana do its share. He showed me the tables and charts, the graphs, plans and statistics. A good, competent man, White; he earns his salary. I asked him what Western Energy pays him; he said it was none of my business. I asked for a tour of the strip mine; that was granted.

My guide was a young woman from the front office, newly arrived from California. As we drove over the wastelands and down into the black hole. I asked her how she liked living in Colstrip. Not much, she admitted; she and her husband, a construction engineer, would be moving on when the power plant was finished; both looked forward to that day. We watched hauler trucks, each with a capacity of 120 tons, rumble into the pit and line up under the bucket of a power shovel. I looked closely at the front of the steel bucket: Some wise-guy welder back in Euclid, Ohio, where the machine was manufactured, had spot-welded on the front of the bucket the motto of his profession: Fuck.

We drove on to another part of the mine, where a giant dragline excavator sat inactive, awaiting repairs. I climbed into the empty cab of the machine and fiddled with the controls. Splendid machine, I thought; think what one could do with this thing on the main street of Billings or Denver or Salt Lake or Phoemix or Laramie, where all those glittering new skyscraper banks stand cheek by glassy cheek. Everywere you go out West, in every town and city, the biggest, newest, most expensive and pretentious buildings are the banks: sure sign of social decay. The people live in plasterboard boxes, in fiberboard apartments, in mobile homes of tin, aluminum and plastic; but the banks rise up in gleaming stone and glass and steel, dominating the surrounding mass of huddled hovels precisely as the medieval lord's castle brooded above his vassal village.

As we drove back to the office, my guide showed me the official Western Energy Company reclamation plot, almost 500 acres of formerly strip-mined grassland where the spoil banks had been recon-toured, fertilized and reseeded three years before. A number of knee-high ponderosa hold out there, still alive, and a thin, dried-up growth of sweet clover, struggling for survival in the midst of the thickest thicket of Russian thistle I've ever seen.

The tumbleweeds are doing nicely, I commented, picking the stickers out of my shines, and my guide smiled and shrugged. She didn't give a damn one way or the other. What happened to that tree? I asked, pointing to a tall snag in the middle of the plot that might have been, years ago, a yellow pine. The company planted that dead tree there, she explained, to make a perch for hawks; hawks keep down the rodent population.

That evening, I visited Duke McRae, a rancher who lives a few miles south of Colstrip. His ranch, established by his grandfather in 1886, lies directly in the path of coal and industrial development. It has been home, livelihood and a way of life for three generations of the McRae family, including two of Duke McRae's brothers and their families. Now the coal companies are pressuring them to sell out, the Department of the Interior is threatening to lease the coal beneath the surface of the land (although the McRaes own the land, they do not own the mineral rights, which belong to the Federal Government) and their children are already suffering the effects of overcrowded schools, rapid pupil and teacher turnover, the social impact of living near a boom-town community plagued with the usual boom-town problems. They already have two power plants under construction, he said. They've applied for a permit to build two more with four more on the drawing boards--all to be built right there in Colstrip. Plus a coal-gasification plant, which will take most of the water out of the ground, dry up the wells and streams. You can't raise cows or kids, said McRae, in the kind of place the power company wants to make here. It's going to be a planned community, I reminded him. Sure, he said, it's planned, all right--like they plan an invasion.

I mentioned the reclamation plot I had seen--the tumbleweed farm. Oh, yeah, he said, and did they tell you about the dead tree they stuck into the ground for the hawks? Yes, I said. McRae laughed. That dead pine has been there for 50 years, he said; the power company was afraid people might get a bad impression, seeing a dead tree in the middle of their reclamation plot, so somebody made up that dumb story about a roost for hawks. The power company lies about everything, he said; it's so used to lying it can't tell the truth, even when the truth might do it a little good.

•

Time for me to go home, where I belonged. On my way south, driving toward Birney, I paused at the Peabody Coal strip-mine turnoff to take a leak, open another can of beer and study my map. Two cars emerged from the mine area and stopped; their occupants looked me over, suspiciously. Maybe it was my wrinkled truck with the red-paper rose on the hood: maybe it was the smell of my thermal underwear. No matter, they looked suspicious to me, too. Four middle-aged men in business suits and hard hats in the front car, four more in the second car--and two of those wore the green business suits with brass-and-silver regalia, the badges, ribboins, collar runes of colonels in the U. S. Army. What were two colonels doing with company officials in a Peabody (Kennecott Copper) strip mine? There is something in the juxtaposition of big business, big military and big technology that always rouses my most paranoid nightmares, visions of the technological superstate, the Pentagon's latent fascism, IBM's laboratory torture chambers, the absolute computerized fusion-powered global tyranny of the 21st Century. But before I could open my mouth and ask any questions, they were all gone, flashing off down the highway.

I stopped to see one more rancher, a widow named Ellen Cotton. She is a beautiful woman, about 50, I suppose, with silver-gray hair and the wind-burned face and clear eyes (undimmed by too much print) of one who has spent most of her life in the out-of-doors. She raises cattle and race horses on her Four Mile Ranch at Four Mile Creek, near the hamlet of Decker, Montana, just north of the Wyoming line. after spending half the previous day in the coal dust and megadecibel clamor of the strip mines, it was a keen pleasure to hear rumbling water again, to smell the honest smell of fresh horseshit, sagebrush and hay, to hear the wind soughing through the trees.

Mrs. Cotton lives in a land of almost painful beauty, of clear streams and grassy meadows, of red-and-yellow outcrops of sandstone, the hills and ridges topped with ponderosa pine. The dirt road to her place follows the contours of the land, winding from ridge to ridge under a sky still as blue as the Virgin's cloak; from high points on the road, you can see the snowy Bighorn range 70 miles to the southwest. The bureaucrats of the Interior Department call this place the Decker-Birney Resource Study Area, proposing to lease it out to the coal-and-energy combine. Mrs. Cotton and her neighbors think it should be called (if development plans are carried out) a National Sacrifice Area.

How could such a thing happen to so beautiful a land? We talked. Mrs. Cotton and her sons have lived here for 20 years, having come from Sheridan, Wyoming. Consolidation Coal (Continental Oil) has already sent its agents around to buy her out. She refuses to sell; and if they come creeping around again, she says, she's going to run them off with guns. A neighbor was offered $13,000,000 and turned it down. Mrs. Cotton says he did right; the land here is worth more than any possible sum of money, the grass more valuable than all the coal beneath it. Like old Boyd Charter up near Billings, she says that this is the best rangeland and the highest quality of grass in the country. And even if it were not, she loves the land as it is, wants to live out her life here, will not sell out, will not be driven out, refuses to move.

"We cannot keep moving on," says Mrs. Cotton. "No matter what the price, where could we find another place to go? This is our home. It's time we stop exploiting the land, tearing it up. We always used to think it didn't matter, that when you mined out one area, or farmed it out, or overgrazed it, you could move on to new country beyond the hills, keep moving West. But there are no new places to go anymore. The land is full. We have to stay where we are, take care of what we have. There isn't going to be anything else."

Mrs. Cotton has been to Appalachia, she told me, and has seen what happened there. She and her neighbors do not intend to let it happen in their corner of the Big Sky Country. She showed me a sign she had made for display along the highway. The sign is a whole cowhide, on which the following words have been inscribed with a branding iron:

National Sacrifice Area

The U. S. Govt. recommends strip mining the divide north of here. We landowners are opposed. Ellen Cotton. Mrs. Dan Wilson. Jim & Ruth Benedict. Canyon creek cattle co. Ruth Jordan. Charles E. Jordan. Bob & Eula Ebeling.

Let future generations judge.

•

Behold how rich and powerful I am.... Would you destroy this glorious incarnation of your own heroic self?

--Thomas Wolfe, You Can't go Home Again

All very well, the reader thinks, for a few thousand farmers and ranchers to want to save their homes and livelihoods, to preserve a charming but outmoded way of life. And it would be nice if we could keep the pure air, the wide-open spaces, the canyons and rivers and mountains free from pollution from a rash of new power plants. But America needs the energy. Our political and industrial leaders assure us that the very survival of America as a great world power may be at stake. We cannot let our future be dictated by a cartel of Arab potentates. "We have more coal than the Arabs have oil. Let's dig it." The assumption is that we must continue down the road of never-ending economic expansion, toward an ever-grosser gross national product, driven by that mania for Growth with a capital G that entails, among other things, a doubling of the nation's energy production every ten years. "Expand or expire" is the essence of this attitude, exemplified in the words of President Ford in a statement to an Expo '74 audience: "Man is not built to vegetate or stagnate--we like to progress ... zero-growth enviromental policies fly in the face of human nature...."

But a child can perceive that on our finite planet there must be, sooner or later, a limit to quantitative growth. Any high school math student can prove that if our production of electrical energy continued to grow at the exponential rate of 100 percent every ten years, the result would be, within less than a century, a United States of America in which every square foot of surface was completely preempted by power plants, leaving no room at all for homes, cities, farms, living space or even graveyards.

Obviously, the time has come to begin planning and preparing for what economists call a steady-state economy, or ecologists an equilibrium society, one living in a condition of balance with the natural environment that is our only source of food, shelter, air, water and sunlight. If we do not make appropriate plans, we may see a breakdown of the food-supply system, followed by mass starvation, with bands of hungry barbarians prowling the ruins of city and countryside in search not only of food but of human victims. Or we might see the creation of a technocratic totalitarianism that will make the quaint dictatorships of Stalin, Hitler and Chairman Mao look like humane and rational models of the social order. Another Dark Age would not, in fact, be anything so very new.

We can avert either pole of catastrophe by the exercise now of a little common sense. Far ahead of their so-called leaders, as usual, the American people have already begun to put into practice the simple concept of zero population growth. Within the past few years, the birth rate has dropped to an all-time low; if the trend continues, the annual rate of population growth would reach zero by the mid-21st Century, with the population leveling off at about 300,000,000--probably far too many people for a free society but better, at any rate, than the desperate overcrowding characteristic of Oriental nations.

With the leveling off of population growth already in sight, the next obvious step is a stabilization of the energy growth rate. This will be forced upon us, in any case; as some economists (though still a minority in their dismally obtuse profession) and most ecologists have pointed out, it takes energy to get energy; the law of diminishing returns is now in operation. When oil could be pumped from a 69-1/2-foot well in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859, it was a cheap commodity; when it has to be piped through an 800-mile pipeline across Alaska from Prudhoe Bay, or extracted from the ocean floor in the stormy waters of the Atlantic, or shipped in supertankers all the way from the Persian Gulf, oil becomes an expensive luxury. If we are driven to manufacture synthetic fuels from coal or to squeeze oil from shale rock (a silly proposition on the face of it), we shall find ourselves expending almost as much energy in the processing as we gain in gross production. Nor will nuclear energy solve the problem: Uranium is even harder to find than oil; breeder reactors produce not only energy but also plutonium, the deadliest of all poisons, with a half life of thousands of years, posing an intolerable threat to human health and safety and to all forms of life; while nuclear fusion, the last best hope of the technophiles, remains at least a generation away, perhaps much farther, perhaps forever out of reach. Even if it can be developed someday, fusion will doubtless prove to have all the unforeseen disadvantages and hazards that have attended most other technological innovations.

The way to zero energy growth has been outlined for us by the report of the recent Energy Policy Project sponsored by the Ford Foundation. Two years in the making, A Time to Choose: America's Energy Future is the work of a professional staff of economists, ecologists, physicists, engineers and research specialists, with a panel of supporting consultants including such distinguished names as Barry Commoner, René Dubos, Harrison Brown, Kenneth E. Boulding, Daniel Bell, Alan Poole, Ben J. Wattenberg and Robert H. Socolow and an advisory board consisting of leaders from the world of science, conservation, law and industry. A Time to Choose presents various scenarios for the future, including the option of zero energy growth, which can be accomplished, according to this study, without lowering the American standard of living; indeed, providing for continuing economic growth by assigning first priority to the fields of medicine, education, the arts and sciences, to basic human needs such as decent housing, adequate nutrition, livable cities, a clean, attractive, healthy environment.

Predictably, the strongest objections to the report come from project representatives of energy-intensive industries--William P. Tavoulareas, president of Mobil Oil; D. C. Burnham, chairman of Westinghouse Electric; the late J. Harris Ward, director of Commonwealth Edison; and John D. Harper, chairman of Alcoa. Understandably, these men get very nervous when the focus of debate is shifted away from their territory--what energy supplies should be developed--and onto that of the conservationists (how we can prosper with less waste). Reduced production and consumption of wasteful products is the key to the whole matter. We do not have to stripmine the farms, rangelands and wild lands of the American West, we do not have to pollute the skies and poison the waters and dam the last of our rivers if we are willing to give up certain of what conventional economists call goods but what most of us recognize as being, quite simply, junk. Draw up your own list. Think of all the many things we make and buy but do not need. My own preliminary list begins with Detroit, Michigan: Who needs Detroit's bloated, ramshackle, inefficient and overpriced rolling ironware? Who is not weary of supporting that army of crooked car dealers and incompetent, gouging mechanics that has been preying on us all for the past 55 years?

It is no accident that Detroit should be the first major industrial victim of inflation and recession. When times are hard, we all know one thing we can get along without--a new metallic mastodon from Chrysler, G.M. or Ford. It is time to begin the phasing out of the auto industry, which long ago outgrew its usefulness and no longer even entertains. Put those men to work making things we need: passenger trains; small, lightweight, efficient buses; bicycles that will last for a lifetime; simple refrigerators that work for more than two years; can openers that actually open cans.

Junk, trash, rubbish--our lives are debauched, our natural resources squandered, our native land ravaged in this mad production of metal, plastic, glass and paper garbage. Who needs throwaway beer cans? Bottle my beer (and let's go back to making real beer, by the way; no more of this watery green angel piss) in solid, substantial, amber-colored jugs that fit a man's hand, that rest solidly on a table and can be washed out and used over and over again, for Christ's sake, like they do it in Bavaria and Austria, where beer began. Who needs color television? It's bad enough in black and white and wavy stripes! Who needs empty parking lots lit up all night by mercury-vapor security lamps? Who needs trail bikes, snowmobiles, electric razors, Winnebagos, power lawn mowers, Styrofoam packaging, bulk-rate mail, ballpoint pens, glass office buildings with windows that can't be opened, tract homes made of green lumber and plasterboard, condominiums with cardboard walls, polyurethane geodesic igloos, automatic washers that are always breaking down, plumbing that doesn't work, blenders, dishwashers, driers, plastic picnic plates, electric guitars and Moog synthesizers, Vinylite upholstery, synthetic textiles made from ersatz fibers, sour green oranges and acid-injected tomatoes and hormone-polluted beef shipped from 3000 miles away, frozen grape juice, incomprehensible income-tax forms, short-life light bulbs, high-powered cabin cruisers on every pond and stream, spray deodorants, nondairy dairy products, plywood ski hutches in the mountain valleys of Colorado and Utah, four-wheel-drive "recreation" vehicles, snow-making machines, Astrodomes, Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, aluminum pie plates, Teflon frypans, artificial fruit "drinks," electric typewriters, all-electric homes, gas chambers, electric chairs, neon billboards, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Los Alamos ... ? The list goes on and on, nearly ad infinitum, and anyone who wants to can easily make up a list ten times longer than mine.

While real needs go unsatisfied: good beer; good, fresh, healthy food for all; homes and apartments for all that are well made, well designed, comfortable, durable and handsome; quick, easy urbantransit systems; good continental passenger-train service; air that's fit to breathe, water that's fit to drink, food that's fit to eat; and now and then, when we want it, some space and solitude and silence. Is that too much to ask of a sane and rational political economy? God only knows, it's too much to ask of the one we've got now. Like my old man always says, capitalism sounds good in theory, but it just doesn't work; look around you and see what it has done to our country. And what it is going to do to our country--if we let it.

Not that socialism is any better. Socialism is worse. Then what is the answer? Some mixture of the two? Something in between? Or something entirely different?

That's what I thought about, something different, grumbling south to Arizona in my final Dodge, past the golden hills of Wyoming, through Spotted Horse, Gillette and Reno Junction, past Thunder Basin National Grassland, past the Laramie Mountains and the Medicine Bow Mountains, through the Red Desert down to Rangely, Colorado, and Moab, Utah--that grand symphony of names on the American land!--and on to Bluff, Mexican Hat, Monument Valley, Kayenta, Kaibito, Bitter Springs, Echo Cliffs, House Rock Valley, up the Kaibab Monocline and across the plateau and down the other side toward Moccasin, Kanab, Shivwits, Mount Bangs, Pakoon Spring, Wolf Hole: home. Thinking, where they won't find you, yet, for a while. (It's ten six-packs from Custer's Battlefield to Abbey's Last Stand.) Pausing only three times during the whole 800-mile journey: once near Recluse, Wyoming, to doctor up a pair of bulldozers belonging to the U. S. Bureau of Reclamation; once near Cisco, Utah, to cut down a billboard erected by the Utah Chamber of Commerce; and once near Black Mesa Junction, Arizona, to shoot some insulators off the power line of the Black Mesa & Lake Powell Railroad. And my conclusion, when I finally reached the Hole, was that what we need in our perishing republic is something different.

Something entirely different.