Last night I attended a standing-room only talk in Albuquerque at Bookworks to hear author-journalist Judy Pasternak, on tour from Bethesda, MD,  next stop tonight, Shiprock, NM, discussing her new book Yellow Dirt: an American story of a poisoned land and a people betrayed. While on staff with the Los Angeles Times, Pasternak  wrote a prize-winning series on uranium contamination on the Navajo reservation which resulted in Congressman Henry Waxman from Los Angeles, CA leading the charge, along with Sen. Tom Udall (NM), in hearings that legislated, finally, the cleaning up of some of the sites and homes that were built on radioactive tailings. Today, Sept. 29, 2010, she will be in Shiprock talking at two schools, and then tonight she will give a talk there at the Phil Thomas Auditorium.

                This is not an academic tome about the past – it is a lively book about people who are very much alive and kicking. On hand at Bookworks were many Navajos and New Mexicans who have anxiously awaited the book’s publication. The timing could not be better –an egregious ruling by the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver this April gave a green light to the uranium company Hydro Resources Inc., HRI, that allows them to circumvent a Navajo ban on uranium mining on the reservation in New Mexico, because of a zoning variance, despite the fact that it will poison the underground aquifer there, the only source of water, for thousands of residents for thousands of years.

                YELLOW DIRT is already receiving national attention even though it has only been out a few days. That can only help to aid the efforts by the New Mexico Environmental Law Center's Eric Jantz ( www.nmenvirolaw.org ), who has just filed a petition on September 15th with the U.S. Supreme Court to appeal the 10thCircuit Court’s ruling. It’s another move in the slow chess game of the decades-long effort by his clients, the Southwest Research and Information Center (www.SRIC.org) and Eastern Navajo Diné Against Uranium Mining (ENDAUM) to stop HRI (NYSE:URRE) from starting solution-mining at Churchrock and Crownpoint, New Mexico. Filing a petition is one thing, getting it heard by the U.S. Supreme Court is another; the stakes are high, but with this book, the odds may be getting a little better.

                YELLOW DIRT is notable for so many reasons – it weaves together a daunting and devastating portrait of American greed - the story of how uranium mining continues to kill American citizens living on the Navajo reservation.  It is also one of the few books being published this season with extraordinary and exhaustive investigative research; even reading the footnotes is fun. Pasternak was able to do much travel and research and get assistance from their legal office involved in freedom of information requests while still a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Pasternak said that the book’s advance, while generous, would never have covered all the costs. With a prestigious work-in-progress award, The  Lukas Prize,  other grants and four years of additional hard work, and with over 200 interviews and additional primary source materials, it is a fascinating read and exceptionally well written.

My favorite chapter, which is as far as I’ve gotten reading since getting an autographed copy of the book a few hours ago – (Bookworks has more autographed copies on hand, call 505-344-8139 right away to reserve your copy, or go to www.bkwrks.com and they’ll ship too, and tell them you heard it here) – is chapter three, which reprises how in 1943 Luke Yazzie showed Harry Goulding and uranium prospectors where to find the ore on Navajo land. The story is brought to life with interviews deep in Navajo country with surviving relatives and with unusual source materials dug out of dusty libraries, and the story becomes chillingly clear – Yazzie’s father Adakai had warned him “never show this to the white man.” Nevertheless, a young just-married Yazzie, advised by his town-educated relatives that it was the smart thing to do, went ahead, and was promised a permanent good job with the mine and a share of the profits.
 

“Adakai was furious. Everyone in Cane Valley heard about it. He actually raised his voice. “What have you done? He shouted at his favorite son. ‘I told you not to do that!’ [footnoted: Anna Benally interview].

It was August of 1942.”

Pasternak follows the story to its inevitable conclusions; Yazzie never received the promised job or profits, and, retelling a firsthand account, describes how his wife rushed through a storm to his hospital bedside in Tuba City moments before his death, prematurely, from lung cancer.

                Lung cancer is the most common of the cancers caused by the disturbance of the earth whenever uranium is mined. Stomach cancer, kidney failure, and ‘Navajo neuropathy’ a crippling condition that affects babies whose pregnant mothers were exposed to radioactivity, but which government and industry doctors for years dismissed as ‘hereditary,' a particular focus which  Pasternak's LA Times series exposed, are others. Where Yazzie lived, uranium poisoned the land and the water and the homes built on tailings, the left-over ore. The government never warned the people, and to this day they continue to be poisoned by contaminated wells and high levels of radon.

                There is something singularly rewarding when the truth is told; New Mexico is ground-zero for uranium contamination – a new bill for an expanded RECA bill that would help more surface workers, downwinders and Trinity site area families (site of the first atomic bomb explosion) is being sponsored by U.S. Sen. Tom Udall, and yet state-elected officials look the other way throughout the four corner states as uranium mining permits are being handed out. It’s not as if we need any more uranium, it’s just that the price is going up and being kept artificially high – Pasternak related in her talk how the U.S. government was talked out of selling any of its stockpile in order to keep it so – I suspect her next reports will be revealing.

As any student of the industry will tell you, any new uranium that may be mined now can simply be sold on the international market to the highest bidder. The New York securities trading arm of Lehman, shortly before it went bankrupt, ended up with just about enough to build a nuclear bomb when one commodities futures contract expired on them, so they had it put on ice in Canada (Bloomberg news). U.S. stockpiles are full and more than meet any national security needs. Power plants have no place to store their spent rods.

The book, with its undeniable facts and journalist pedigree, is also a welcome antidote to a scurrilous New Yorker “Letter from Colorado” in their September 13, 2010 issue, by Peter Hessler, “The Uranium Widows, a bid to revive a controversial industry,”  that profiled Uruvan, a deadzone site in southwestern Colorado that is fenced and bulldozed over, and the reporter trumpeted how safe uranium mining really is, by interviewing Uranium mining outfits, die-hard widows of miners, and scientific studies by private firms. Oddly, too, that this is the second time this year the New Yorker has inched their way into preparing the minds of Americans for more nuclear power plants to feed our ravenous hunger for energy (previously, “Nuclear Spring” was their first foray in a Talk of the Town column by Hendrik Hertzberg earlier this year) and our desire to delude ourselves into thinking there is a clean, cheap solution – uranium, YELLOW DIRT, is a deadly, rare, nonrenewal natural resource, very expensive, and never clean.

Thank you, Judy Pasternak, your example of journalistic integrity is a light and an inspiration to others.