Diné grassroots sow precedent in clean energy history

Some 30 years ago, when Navajo Nation member Nicole Horseherder returned to her Native land after college, her hopes of building a home like her grandmother’s near here were dampened because wells had dried up with massive coal strip mining and power plant development that drained the underground water tables while polluting Diné and Hopi communities.

Horseherder found herself shifting in the saddle. Instead of teaching school as planned, she began campaigning for restoration of clean water, land, and air in this Navajo-Hopi ancestral indigenous territory, which is known as the Four Corners area because the boundaries of Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico states meet here.