A warning sign placed by the Puerco River by the New Mexico Environmental Improvement Division after the Church Rock uranium mill spill on July 16, 1979. Photo: EPA.

A Native anti-uranium mining activist once told me how she felt sometimes at the conferences she attended around the country and beyond. Occasionally, she said, she felt surrounded by “well-educated old white men.”  I got the sense from something in her tone that she meant important environmentalists of narrow, legalistic focus who were committed to a clean environment without thought or care for the people like hers who had mined uranium and lived in the damage those mines caused to their land, how their environment had been polluted with radioactive waste from now abandoned mines, and how the federal government, the only buyer of uranium during the boom, had never told her people about the dangers of radioactivity. And so, nuclear power did not seem as clean to her as it did to the learned authorities she met at conferences.

I didn’t really know why, in the last several years, I had gotten involved in the struggle against resuming uranium mining and had read a dozen books and talked to many people about the uranium boom between the 40s and the 70s. I had learned about the cancer, diabetes, asthma, kidney and other diseases among miners and nearby residents, about the radioactive waste lying in such abundance on the Navajo Reservation and near it, about polluted groundwater,  and about the horror of the Church Rock Spill, worse than Three Mile Island yet ignored to this day by the information sources that........

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