This essay, by Lily Smogor, is one of three winners of the 2024 Sustainability Writing Awards hosted by the Office of Sustainability. You can read more about Lily here.
The twin mesas rise together at the end of the road. They wear a skirt of juniper and yucca, the pinkish-orange rock peeking through only slightly until the mountains steepen. There is a perpetual stillness in the valley air, a dry heat so constant that the slight skittering of lizards and falling pebbles sounds like a chorus of whispers from a time beyond. This is Bears Ears, a national monument that protects the site of the mesas believed to be a shrine of protection for the Diné peoples of the Southwest. It is sacred land to not only the Diné, but the Ute, Hopi, and Zuni Nations as well. It lies just one mile away from a global supply of radioactive waste.
The White Mesa Uranium Mill, constructed in the 1970s as a processing mill for uranium ore, discreetly began accepting radioactive waste from sites across the United States not long after its inception. Now, its global customers include Japan and Estonia, with more likely to join in the benefits of cheap waste disposal as the mill continues to expand its site. The mill extracts what little usable uranium remains in this radioactive waste before disposing of the contents in concrete pools dug just above the Navajo Aquifer. These pools, with a thinner lining meant to hold powdered uranium castoffs, now suspend a sludge of waste over the main source of drinking water for southeastern Utah. The risk is currently unknown; it may take generations for the uranium to permeate the water table, or perhaps a crack in the rock will hasten the process. However long it takes, there is a risk.
When you were last thirsty, did you reach for a water fountain or a tap? Do you know the price of bottled water today? When you shower, do you worry that the water hitting your skin will bring heart and kidney disease to you and your children? Does your water smell of eggs as sulfur and nitrates leech into your home? For many Americans, these are not questions we consider. Even as the youth of America become more climate-conscious; as climate legislation gains popularity; as rising temperatures bring a renewed sense of urgency to many, the inequities of water sustainability are often ignored.
I grew up in an exurb of Chicago, caught between its rural past and its corporate-developed future. The cornfield next to my childhood home leeched nitrous oxide into the atmosphere through fertilizer, and the Fox River bisecting the town, once considered the 7th most endangered river in the nation, was undergoing phosphorus decontamination. I, like many others, barely thought of this. No, we think about rising temperatures and deforestation and sea levels and hurricanes and droughts and– aren’t we so lucky to be in the Midwest? The climate haven with fresh water for decades, the place that will become the Eden of our changed world, is an easy place to take for granted. While we focus on grand global issues of climate change, we neglect its impacts on our home communities and lay the groundwork for the negligent ignorance that lets us bury hundreds of millions of pounds of nuclear waste on sacred Indigenous land. “Out of sight, out of mind” for us is neither for the communities directly impacted by the notion of global progress. Our climate realities will forever be inequitable as long as we allow entire populations and places to be sacrificed in the name of profit.
We exist in more worlds than our own. It is in this whole world, this myriad of beliefs and experiences, that the truth of climate reality becomes clear: it is not “act now before it’s too late.” It is too late. The ecological ship can be righted, but it is too late to pretend we are all equally affected by climate change. Too late to believe individual action will save the planet. Too late to say we stand together. Martin Luther King Jr. said that “the American Dream reminds us that every man is heir to the legacy of worthiness.” When we allow profit to take precedence over progress, we are saying that a person’s worthiness is dependent on how exploitable the land they were born on is. To exist as equal participants of the global society is to recognize this. Each and every one of us has our personal experiences with climate change as well as global ones, but we cannot let this blindness to others’ personal experiences blind us to them. Every scale matters, because there is nothing not interconnected.
Between the White Mesa waste ponds and the deep Navajo Aquifer, there sits a shallow aquifer much less important to Utah’s water supply, but telling nonetheless. As nuclear waste seeps through the plastic lining of the ponds, this shallow aquifer has begun to register contamination from chloroform and nitrates. The natural springs nearby have been increasing in acidity as sulfur settles into the desert rocks. An uncovered waste pond emitted ten times the allowable amount of radon into the atmosphere, increasing health risks for the Navajo Nation and drawing condemnation from the EPA. Trucks carting the waste to White Mesa spread uranium dust, among other contaminants, into local communities. Yet the state of Utah, which gained oversight of the mill in 2004, continues to renew its license.
The White Mesa Uranium Mill is a ticking time bomb of ecological and societal devastation. It is a stark reminder of the colonialist attitudes that have allowed Indigenous lands to be compromised in the name of profit. It is the intersection of environmental racism and a growing push for the supposed saving grace of nuclear fuels. It will not be the last of its kind. As the global threats of climate change become more grave, we must not turn to fast solutions without considering their impacts. When carbon-zero threatens Indigenous communities, it is not a worthy endeavor. We live in a world of myriad climate realities, but no reality holds more value than another. Climate solutions must be equitable, or we become no better off than we are now. The American Dream of progress and prosperity for all was killed when the first load of waste was buried just one mile from sacred Indigenous land. Or perhaps that was the American Dream all along, a dream built on the backs of enslaved laborers and stolen land, a dream that exists today to spite those who wish for progress. However it is, one thing remains clear: White Mesa, and the other threats like it, are no solution for the climate crisis. If progress necessitates devastation, it is not progress at all.