In 1940, Phoenix was once a small, agricultural urban of sixty-five thousand, and the Navajo Reservation was once an open panorama of scattered sheepherders. 40 years later, Phoenix had blossomed right into a city of 1.5 million humans and the territory of the Navajo state used to be domestic to 2 of the most important strip mines on the earth. 5 coal-burning energy vegetation surrounded the reservation, producing electrical energy for export to Phoenix, l. a., and different towns. Exploring the postwar advancements of those very various landscapes, Power Lines tells the tale of the far-reaching environmental and social inequalities of metropolitan progress, and the roots of the modern coal-fueled weather switch crisis.

Andrew Needham explains how reasonably cheap electrical energy turned a demand for contemporary lifestyles in Phoenix—driving meeting strains and cooling the oppressive warmth. Navajo officers at the start was hoping strength improvement may increase their lands too, yet as ash piles marked their panorama, pollution crammed the skies, and virtually 1/2 Navajo families remained with out electrical energy, many Navajos got here to view energy strains as an indication in their subordination within the Southwest. Drawing jointly city, environmental, and American Indian heritage, Needham demonstrates how strength strains created unequal connections among far-off landscapes and the way environmental alterations linked to suburbanization reached a long way past the metropolitan frontier. Needham additionally deals a brand new account of postwar inequality, arguing that citizens of the metropolitan outer edge suffered comparable styles of marginalization as these confronted in America's internal cities.

Telling how coal from Indian lands grew to become the gasoline of modernity within the Southwest, Power Lines explores the dramatic results that this power method has had at the humans and surroundings of the region.