Four Corners States Under Stress

Daniel Webster addressed the U.S. Senate in the early 1800s about the Rocky Mountain West: "What do we want with this worthless area, this region . . . of shifting sands and whirlwinds of dust, of cactus and prairie dogs? To what use could we ever hope to put these great deserts and these endless mountain ranges?"

For a long time, Webster's question seemed justified. However much naturalists have extolled the land, the inhospitality of its physical features to human habitation explains why much of its development was left until so recently. The land is a series of deserts or semi-deserts separated by mountain ranges. The Rocky Mountains are a sharp escarpment that cuts Colorado into an eastern and western slope. Similarly, the Wasatch Range traverses Utah from its northern border to the central part of the state. The Sangre de Cristos in New Mexico and the San Francisco Peaks in Arizona are the mountainous northern reaches of the two southernmost states. Aridity is pervasive. Without fresh water the land is dusty and barren. Even when Pacific storms dump their moisture, it is on the wrong side of the mountains to help cultivation. Eastern New Mexico and Colorado are dry grasslands within the "rain shadow" of the Rocky Mountains. Southern Arizona and New Mexico are mainly deserts, and western Utah holds salt beds dominated by the Great Salt Lake, remnant of a primeval sea that once filled the Great Basin. What surface water exists is meager in relation to the large land area. The Colorado River begins high in the mountains of Colorado and Wyoming and is a major source for southern California as well as the Four Corners states. A few other drainage basins exist: the Rio Grande, the South Platte, the Arkansas, and the Great Basin.

The American Southwest is an interior frontier, still in the process of becoming, its ultimate destiny as yet unknown. The challenges which beset this region today are largely the result of overabundance, not under-abundance as Webster thought. In his day, growth in the West was delayed because the region was needed too little. Today its integrity is threatened because it is needed too much as an energy colony for the nation. The Four Corners states—Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah—are rich in energy resources at a time when such resources are scarce. Large formations of coal underlie northwest New Mexico, at Black Mesa on the Navajo and Hopi reservations in northeast Arizona, at the Kaiparowits Plateau in Utah, and throughout western Colorado. Coal development could take a variety of shapes. Strip-mined coal could be burned on or near the mine site. An electric power complex already exists in the area where the four states' boundaries come together and large transmission lines radiate to urban centers in the region and to southern California. Utility companies plan to site in the area a number of additional electric power plants. Alternatively, stripped coal can be sent in railway cars or through slurry lines to generating stations outside the region. Further, there are plans to gasify the region's coal to replace the dwindling supplies of natural gas in Texas, Oklahoma, and eastern New Mexico. The highest grade oil shale deposits in the United States are located in northwest Colorado. Government geologists estimate that two trillion barrels of oil may be recovered from these deposits and others in nearby Utah and Wyoming, assuming, of course, economic feasibility and tolerance of environmental and social costs. This potential is six times greater than all the proven reserves of crude petroleum on earth, enough to supply the oil needs of the United States for several centuries. Uranium occurs in the region in large quantities, as evidenced by the landscape studded with prospectors' excavations.

Resource exploitation, while never of the magnitude of that contemplated in future energy development, is a thoroughly ingrained practice in the West. While the principal pressure upon the Four Corners states to serve as an energy resource colony comes from outside, it is abetted within by an established development orientation. Mining is a principal economic activity in all four states, and various localities scattered throughout the region are oriented toward and dependent upon extractive industries. Water resources have been developed on a grand scale and at a frenzied pace. A score of huge multi-purpose projects along the Colorado River and its tributaries produce water for irrigation, hydroelectric power, and reservoir-based recreation. Deserts have been converted to farmlands. Large scale diversion projects pierce the wall of the Rockies to supply water to Denver and Colorado's eastern slope. A similar transmountain diversion brings water to Salt Lake City and the Wasatch Front. The San Juan Project diverts water to Albuquerque. And the Central Arizona Project, which will bring Colorado River water to Tucson and Phoenix, is under construction.

Harnessed with the pressures for energy development in the region are pressures for other types of economic development as well. The region has an underdeveloped, lopsided economy. It has been a supplier of raw materials and agricultural products, but rarely a processor of the materials. As a result, the big factory payrolls occur somewhere else, and the Four Corners state consumer sends his or her money outside the region when products are purchased. While manufacturing is increasing in the Four Corners states, and now contributes more than either mining or agriculture to the region's economy, industrialization is far less advanced than in other regions. There is a great deal of outside ownership of western resources, and many of the fortunes made in the region are spent elsewhere. Western labor has historically been in a weak position, and wages have lagged behind the rest of the country.

The economies of the Four Corners states are extraordinarily dependent upon the federal government. Partly because no one wanted it at the time Uncle Sam was giving it away, only a small part of the land in the Four Corners states is privately owned. Nearly two-thirds of the surface area in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, or Arizona is under the jurisdiction of federal, state, or Indian sovereigns. Besides affecting the tax base of these states, extensive governmental ownership of lands destined for energy development has important implications for who makes the decisions.

Beginning with military weapons development and training centers in World War II, such as Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory where the atom bomb was developed, the Four Corners region has become a center for federal government military and space technology facilities. Government is a major source of employment in the region, and electronics industries, associated with government installations and living off government contracts, are a major manufacturing activity. The Four Corners region is a shrine to the military-industrial complex, with continuing dependence upon the defense establishment for its economic well being.

Farming, ranching, and mining were the mainstay of the Four Corners economy prior to World War II and, although now often superseded by other activities, they continue to affect the vitality of the region's economy. Mining tends to be a boom or bust enterprise, depending on prevailing price and geology. Though experience is varied, farming and ranching are in a general decline, which heightens the pressure for economic development. Colorado, for instance, has been losing close to 1,000 farmers a year for most of the postwar era; the family farm has given way to agribusiness. In New Mexico and Arizona, irrigated agricultural lands are being retired to provide space and water for urban growth and resource development.

Particularly in nonurban areas, the Four Corners states include numbers of poor persons. Many of them are members of the Southwest's large minority groups. Over 184,000 Indians lived in the Four Corners states in 1970. Disease and infant mortality are much higher and levels of education and income are much lower for this group than for whites. Unemployment and alcoholism are very common among Indians, and there are few bright career opportunities for young Indians on reservations. Among the pressures for the development of coal resources in places like the Navajo reservation is the promise of new jobs in mines and power plants. Spanish and Mexican Americans, concentrated in rural towns and villages in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, have always been poor and are becoming poorer as small family farms have grown uneconomic. Rural Mormons, the region's important religious minority, are in a similar situation. Young people have tended to gravitate toward urban areas, leaving behind the elderly to live in depressed economic conditions and to become fearful about the future maintenance of their distinctive lifestyle. The economic activity associated with energy development would seem to promise greater opportunity and vitality in the hinterland.

While much of the impact of energy and economic development has not yet occurred, the Four Corners states today are in the throes of population expansion. Between 1940 and 1970, the population increased 124 percent, about double the national increase during that same time. This is due partly to the return of military personnel who liked their experience in the Southwest during wartime training, partly to growing employment in white collar, science-oriented industries, and partly to retirees and others in search of better climate. While the proportion of the U.S. population in the Four Corners states is small—less than 3 percent in 1970 as compared with nearly 12 percent of the total surface area of the fifty states—rapid increase in population has dramatically affected the character of the region. In every state but Utah. which retains a heavily Mormon population reared within its borders, nearly half or more residents came from other states.

Population increase in the Four Corners states has been uneven; Colorado and Arizona have grown more rapidly than Utah and New Mexico. More important, growth is concentrated in metropolitan centers. A series of cities sprawls along the front range of the Rocky Mountains, centering in Denver but extending from Fort Collins in the north to Pueblo in the south. More than half of Utah's population is in Salt Lake City. Albuquerque dominates the rest of New Mexico. Arizona has two population centers, Phoenix and Tucson, accounting for 75 percent of that state's residents. While cities grow, much of the countryside is stable or actually loses population. The result is that the population in these states, contrary to the prevailing image, is substantially urban. In all of the states except New Mexico, the percentage of residents living in urban areas is higher than in the nation as a whole.

With urbanization have come the usual problems of crime, congestion, and pollution. In addition, the number of newcomers concentrated in cities and employed outside the traditional farming, ranching, and mining sectors are having a profound but subtle impact upon the character of the region, which was once so distinctive from the rest of the nation. Before World War II, New Mexico, for instance, had such a strong Hispanic-Indian flavor that visitors felt they had crossed an international border. Today, a street in one of Albuquerque's new residential "heights" could be suburbia anywhere. Such changes do not come without accompanying class and ethnic conflict.

Growth creates demand for more growth. A large residential construction industry, such as that which has grown up in Phoenix and Denver, must continue to build more houses for more new residents or fall into a slump. Newcomers must have new jobs or unemployment increases. Schools, hospitals, police and fire services, water supply, and sewers must expand or the quality of life is damaged. Change in the Four Corners is prompting further change.

Both the developments to come and the changes which have already occurred are magnified in the open, robust physical environment that hides nothing. The area is renowned for its natural beauty. Six national parks, twenty-eight national monuments, two national recreation areas, and many state parks and national forests are concentrated here. Millions enjoy the Grand Canyon, Zion and Bryce canyons, Carlsbad Caverns, and the Petrified Forest every year. Rocky Mountain National Park offers spectacular alpine views. Mesa Verde, Bandelier, and other parks preserve the archeological history of ancient Indian tribes. Much of the beauty of the Southwest cannot be preserved in parks; it adheres in endless stretches of unfettered land; open, clear blue skies; breathtaking mountain vistas; and sparkling, clean, clear air. The visual magic of the area motivates tourists to visit and migrants to settle. Without question, just this aesthetic quality of the Four Corners physical environment is being threatened.

Phoenix, Tucson, Denver, Salt Lake City, and Albuquerque all have air pollution problems. Even outside urban areas, the region's pristine air is becoming less clear. The Southwest electric energy complex has taken its toll. While scrubbers have since improved things, the dense black smoke from the Four Corners Power Plant was once tracked by plane 215 miles. Once-wide vistas now are interrupted by heavy duty transmission lines and the piled up over-burden of stripped land. The arid land of the Southwest erodes quickly and vegetation recovers slowly. Land reclamation following coal development is very difficult, boding ill for the future character of the land. While the aesthetic values being lost are not quantifiable, there are substantial economic impacts. Tourism is ranked as the second or third most important industry in each of the Four Corners states. Presumably that value might eventually be threatened by environmental degradation.

The saga of water resource development in the West illustrates the stress imposed by the limits of natural systems and the difficult tradeoffs now presented to the region. The flurry of dam building has resulted in the use of virtually every feasible site outside national parks and monuments. The Colorado is the most engineered river in the world, and even the flow of small streams in the area is managed. By the end of the 1970s, practically every drop of surface water available to the region was either in use or committed to future use. Ground water resources are being mined, in Arizona and elsewhere, at rates far exceeding replenishment. Salinity is occurring in the lower reaches of the Colorado. Lower flows are insufficient to dilute natural salts picked up from soils and return flows from irrigation. Intensive use of all available water resources has aggravated the impact of periodic droughts, which occur inevitably in arid lands. Other adverse environmental consequences flow from water use in excess of natural hydrologic supply. Lovely canyons such as the Glen, now buried under the Lake Powell reservoir in Southern Utah, are forever sacrificed. Natural riparian habitats are destroyed. Springs and oases in the desert dry up because of lowered water tables.

Every recipe for energy development in the West instructs "add water." Coal-fired generating stations, slurry lines, coal gasification, oil shale development, and nuclear power all require water in large quantities. With practically every drop of water currently committed, the implications of further demand are very grave. Supply problems are made worse by Indian claims of treaty rights to water, which have not yet been fully recognized or quantified. It would seem that water in the basin must somehow be augmented, which would probably require a large federal investment, or present patterns of water allocation must be changed, most likely by transferring use away from irrigated agriculture. Vested property rights to water and the established political influence of agricultural interests guarantee that change will not come without conflict. The old struggles over water in the West are bound to continue.

The social vulnerability of the Four Corners states is nearly as great as the physical. The region contains several indigenous cultures which are important to the value of national diversity, but which can be severely hurt by development. Once the Southwest was so unimportant as to be the refuge and reservation of peoples America did not want or wished to forget. Much of the territory which is now the Four Corners states—all of Utah, most of Arizona, and parts of New Mexico and Colorado—was, in the 19th century, the provisional State of Deseret established by Mormon pioneers. Driven from their last home in Illinois, the Mormons established a pure theocracy at Salt Lake, in what was then Mexican territory. The signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 transferred land to the U.S. government and necessitated the establishment of a civic government. Mormons hoped to enter the Union immediately, but conflict between Mormons and "Gentiles" in the territory and national revulsion at the Mormon practice of polygamy defeated five attempts to join. Finally, in 1896, after polygamy was forbidden by the church, the state of Utah, whittled to half the size of Deseret, was admitted.

Because Mormon values of hard work, a close family, and steady progress are so congenial to the American mainstream, Mormon culture thrives today, and the percentage of Mormons in Utah's population remains high, around 70 percent. However, the small-town Mormon traditions of self-denial and self-sufficiency are clearly vulnerable. Energy development in the rural areas in southern Utah may create new jobs, but may also bring large numbers of outsiders who do not share Mormon values. Independence will then be sacrificed to the politics and economics of national energy development.

More than 29.5 million acres have been reserved to the various Indian tribes in the Four Corners states. The tribes include the Uintah and Ouray in Utah, Apaches in Arizona and New Mexico, the Colorado River and Papago in Arizona, and the Utes in southwest Colorado. The largest among the reservations is that of the Navajo nation, with 15,132,143 acres in northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southeastern Utah. The Navajos were permitted to return to the stark, inhospitable region after the federal government's 1864 attempt to herd them together and civilize them in eastern New Mexico failed miserably. No white man at the time dreamed that the barren reservation land could possibly be put to productive use.

Today we recognize that many of the Indian lands are rich in oil and gas, coal, and other mineral resources. Indian tribes are so ethnically and culturally diverse that it is difficult to generalize about impact. However, focusing again upon the Navajo, while development may provide needed jobs, it may also displace the traditional Indian lifestyle and interfere with the celebration of ancient rituals. While it is unjustifiable for people to be kept in poverty to preserve a cultural museum, economic change has risks for the Navajo. It is at least possible that half a century hence both their natural resources and culture will have been ravaged without their having established a more viable economy and improved living conditions.

Many of these same problems of cultural integrity face the Spanish and Mexican Americans in the Four Corners region. While the ancestry of Spanish-speaking peoples in the region is diverse, and many are fairly recent immigrants from Mexico, a large contingent concentrated mainly in New Mexico and southern Colorado are descended from Spanish explorers and settlers who came to the region centuries ago. While poor by Anglo standards, Spanish Americans have maintained strong community and Church ties and ethnic pride. The depopulation of rural areas, the decline of agriculture, and the anticipated invasion of rural areas by energy development all place stress upon Spanish American culture.

The boom towns which are likely to be created in rural areas undergoing natural resource and energy development have social implications which transcend the impact upon the culture of insular minorities. Enormous pressures for services—roads, schools, hospitals, police, and so on—are apt to be placed on rural governments, without the requisite fiscal and decision-making capability. If and when the community finally provides the needed services, the construction phase of a resource project may be over, the boom population may have moved away, and the community may be left with high taxes and unused facilities.

The Four Corners states are the most rapidly changing region in the country, creating stimuli for government action. Diverse stresses affecting an extremely vulnerable social and physical environment are acute and occurring simultaneously. There are strong pressures for the development of the region's energy resources for users living mainly outside the region. A population that has been increasing at twice the national average is continuing to grow. What policies government chooses to pursue will, to a large extent, determine the future character of the nation's internal frontier. The Four Corners may become increasingly prosperous and independent, maintaining their natural beauty and cultural diversity. Alternatively, steady export of raw materials and energy resources, without the construction of a sound economy with a diversified industrial base and without sensitivity to environmental and social impacts, may leave the states ravaged and depressed. The choices the region makes will affect its place in the nation. Further, there are implications for the distribution of benefits and costs among diverse groups within the Four Corners. Farmers, miners, manufacturers, workers, urban residents, rural residents, environmentalists, developers, Mormons, Indians, Spanish Americans, and others are likely to profit and suffer very differently according to the governmental policies pursued.