BURY MY HEART AT FOUR CORNERS

The two plants could be supplying the gas and eliminating the shortage by the winter of 1977/78 if the environmentalists let them. But the latter are about to apply their usual obstructionist tactics.

The proposed plants will lie on the eastern edge of the Navajo Indian Reservation, near the "Four Corn.ers" (Colorado, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico). It was in this area that some years ago a giant coalfired plant was built, originally without pollution controls, to help provide power for Los Angeles and Southern California. Four giant smoke plumes polluted the crystal-clear air of Indian country. Environmentalists were incensed, and we believe rightly so, for it was indeed an outrageous idea to keep the Los Angeles air clean by moving the stench under Indian noses.

Since then, the plant has been forced to install scrubbers, and the four plumes at Four Corners have all but disappeared. Coal gasification is basically clean, and the pollution by the plants will only be a fraction of that produced by the power plant in its present, pollution-controlled state. Opposition to gasification once more unmasks the environmentalists as being not in the business of clean air, but in the business of technophobia.

Water is not a major problem. There is enough unallocated water in the San Juan River to support not only the present two plants, but also four more to be constructed in the next 10 to 15 years. And even if the resulting population centers use up the water now available, California would probably be willing to negotiate some water allotments from the Colorado river. California has few alternatives, and none involving domestic supplies; 20,000 acre-feet of water per year for 500 million cu.ft. of gas a day is probably an attractive bargain.

But deprived of arguments about air and water, the no-growth crusaders have fallen back on another idea: The impact of gasification plants, they claim, could wipe out the Navajo culture.

They do not know that the Navajos are America's most viable and fastest growing Indian tribe. They do not know that by their ingenuity in sheep raising, weaving and jewelry making, the Navajos survived when they were herded into a patch of barren semidesert. They do not know that they are insulting the Navajos by suggesting that they might not survive a non-crisis concocted by ecofreaks.

And there is more that they do not know. They have just returned from London and Paris to cocktail parties in air-conditioned houses. They boast about having read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Have they ever seen the heartbreaking mudhuts and hovels, reminiscent of pictures from the Great Depression, in which the Navajos live along the eastern edge of the reservation? Have they considered what a $30 million payroll (plus further millions in leases and royalties to the local Indian government) will do for them?

The question has already been answered by the Navajo Tribal Council. It has accepted the plan and signed agreements with the companies, saying, in effect, to these Don Qixotes of Indian rights "Don't be so good to us."