In the late 1960s, Peabody Energy, an international coal mining company, entered into an agreement with the Hopi and Navajo tribes of Arizona's Black Mesa to begin what would become the nation's largest strip mining operation. Over the ensuing decades, Peabody would do more than mine coal on tribal lands. Each day the company pumped more than a million gallons of groundwater from the local aquifer to turn the coal into a slurry that could be piped some 273 miles away, to the Mohave Generating Station in Laughlin, Nevada -- one of the dirtiest conventional coal-fired plants in the United States. Sacred springs ran dry (see "A Thirsty Nation" by Tim Folger, Fall 2004). In the late 1990s, the tribes turned to NRDC to stop Peabody from squandering their water, and NRDC launched an investigation into the loss of natural and cultural resources on Black Mesa. Now, after years of struggle, both the mining operation and the Mohave power plant will be shut down. This past spring, Southern California Edison, one of the primary owners of Mohave, announced that it would not invest in necessary upgrades to Mohave, citing unresolved water issues.