How high energy consumption transformed postwar Phoenix and deepened
inequalities in the American Southwest
In 1940, Phoenix was a small, agricultural city of sixty-five thousand,
and the Navajo Reservation was an open landscape of scattered
sheepherders. Forty years later, Phoenix had blossomed into a metropolis
of 1.5 million people and the territory of the Navajo Nation was home to
two of the largest strip mines in the world. Five coal-burning power
plants surrounded the reservation, generating electricity for export to
Phoenix, Los Angeles, and other cities. Exploring the postwar
developments of these two very different landscapes, Power Lines tells
the story of the far-reaching environmental and social inequalities of
metropolitan growth, and the roots of the contemporary coal-fueled
climate change crisis.
Andrew Needham explains how inexpensive electricity became a requirement
for modern life in Phoenix-driving assembly lines and cooling the
oppressive heat. Navajo officials initially hoped energy development
would improve their lands too, but as ash piles marked their landscape,
air pollution filled the skies, and almost half of Navajo households
remained without electricity, many Navajos came to view power lines as a
sign of their subordination in the Southwest. Drawing together urban,
environmental, and American Indian history, Needham demonstrates how
power lines created unequal connections between distant landscapes and
how environmental changes associated with suburbanization reached far
beyond the metropolitan frontier. Needham also offers a new account of
postwar inequality, arguing that residents of the metropolitan periphery
suffered similar patterns of marginalization as those faced in America's
inner cities.
Telling how coal from Indian lands became the fuel of modernity in the
Southwest, Power Lines explores the dramatic effects that this energy
system has had on the people and environment of the region.
