Environmental Justice is a relatively new field for environmental advocacy. One the many attributes that is illustrative of environmental injustice is proximity to pollution. Developments in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and the gathering of spatial data have furthered the implications of environmental justice. The GIS technical expertise is not always available to grassroots organizations and thus the spatial nexus is sometimes missing in the struggle for justice. This project was designed to assist the Navajo grassroots organization “The Forgotten People” with an interactive online map that shows identified areas of concern for relevant communities. A main concern of “The Forgotten People” is access to safe drinking water. Be it pollution from uranium tailings piles, coal mining or the reduction of the aquifer for energy production, the water available for human and livestock consumption has been impaired.
The Forgotten People “is a non-profit community based organization dedicated to improve the well-being of the Dine’ people who live on the Navajo Nation in Arizona.” The Navajo Nation has approximately 270,000 citizens and covers a land area slightly bigger than West Virginia in the Four Corners’ region of the Southwest United States. The proximity to uranium pollution contamination has resulted in the Navajo facing several environmental injustices. The United States Environmental Protection Agency defines Environmental Justice as:
“the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies… …it will be achieved when everyone enjoys the same degree of protection from environmental and health hazards and equal access to the decision-making process to have a healthy environment in which to live, learn, and work.”
The reliance on mineral extraction that challenges the Navajo Nation can trace its roots to the middle 1800s when American General Carleton stated about the Navajo land, “a magnificent pastoral and mineral country” (Brown 1970). Beginning in 1948, when the Atomic Energy Commission guaranteed a price for uranium ore mined in the United States, the four corners area of the United States experienced a mining boom. The job drought welcomed the uranium mining industry because for the Navajo, this was an opportunity to connect with the US economy (Brugge 2002). Of the approximately 10,000 workers employed in the mines, 25% were Navajo.
A cold war legacy of uranium mining on and near the Navajo nation in northern Arizona has resulted in abandoned and radioactive mining waste piles (tailings) in proximity to homes, farm fields, river basins, and drinking water aquifers (Brugge and Goble, 2002; Diep, 2010; and Pasternak, 2010). Brugge and Lemos (2005) recommended that more research is needed on natural uranium exposures derived from the mining, milling, and processing of uranium ore, as well as from ingestion of groundwater that is naturally contaminated with uranium. Moreover, the uranium riskscape for the Navajo Nation includes 602 abandoned mines and 227 unregulated water sources. According to Pasternak (2010),
“In 2008, nearly one-third of Navajo households were still unconnected to a public water system. EPA and the Centers for Disease Control tested 149 wells and springs; twenty-two of them contained hazardous levels of radionuclides. These served seven hundred families: some four thousand people were dousing their thirst with a tide of harmful particles.”