The date — July 16 — has always had special resonance for me. In the 1970s, during extended wanderings in the Four Corners area, I was amazed that nuclear bombs were still being tested in Nevada, long after the first atomic explosion in history on July 16, 1945 in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Scientific tests that scattered radioactive waste across America seemed a perverse and fitting metaphor for our culture. Big. Loud. Toxic.

In the summer of 1979, Glenn Switkes, Randy Hayes and I ventured to the Southwest from the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley, to document the legacy of uranium mining in Navajo country. As an intern at Mother Jones magazine, I had received a thick envelope of documents from Peterson Zah, then director of DNA Peoples Legal Services (and later Chairman of the Navajo Nation). The Navajos were suing a string of federal agencies for decades of radioactive waste contamination at thousands of abandoned uranium mines, for tons of tailings scattered to the wind at deserted mill sites, and for a growing epidemic of lung cancer among former uranium miners. We went to see if there was a film there.

As we started our six-week journey, I drove our van late one night up a dirt road. I was trying to find the village of Crownpoint, where uranium exploration was booming, and I made a wrong turn in the dark and ended up at a giant, red, spot-lit sign that proclaimed: “STOP – RADIOACTIVE MATERIALS BEYOND THIS POINT!” We had stumbled into the Church Rock uranium mine and mill, north of Gallup. It was too dark to film the bizarre scene so we agreed to return later in our trip.

Six weeks later, as we circled to the west and started heading back to California, we drove up to the Church Rock site – on July 15, 1979. We filmed the red stop sign and dust blowing all over the place as Navajo men walked around with no masks to protect their lungs. The footage I shot was very shaky. The place scared me. As we turned our van around to leave we were stopped by a mesmerizing vision: a large stretch of water sparkling in the sunlight. In our weeks in the desert we had barely seen any water. I hopped out of the van and snapped a few still photos of what I later learned was a radioactive pond where an expanse of uranium mill waste called “tailings” lay covered with water to prevent the release of carcinogenic radon gas.

That night we stopped in the Hopi village of Kykotsmovi on our way home and had dinner with White Bear Fredericks, a Hopi elder who had been Frank Waters’ chief informant for Book of the Hopi. This was the era of American hostages in Iran, long gas lines and a looming energy crisis. The anti-nuclear movement was in full swing after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident. White Bear turned on the television and we watched President Jimmy Carter give a nationally televised address promising an “Energy Mobilization Board” to fast-track new coal and synthetic fuels development in the West. Fittingly, Carter never mentioned nuclear power. It was a powerful omen for the film we had just started shooting on the legacy and the threat of energy development in Indian Country.

After he turned off the TV, White Bear went on a tirade, invoking Hopi prophecy and promising that the banks would soon fail and the economic system collapse. As the Hopi had long been warning, White Bear said, the Earth simply cannot sustain the insults that Western culture relentlessly continues to impose on her.

At about that same moment, back east a couple hundred miles, in total darkness, the pond of water that blanketed the radioactive tailings at the Church Rock mill pierced a small, inadequate earthen dam, and millions of gallons of poisonous sludge flowed out onto the Navajo Nation and down the Rio Puerco.

A couple days later, back home in California, I sifted through a stack of San Francisco Chronicles that had piled up while I was away. A one-paragraph article in the back of the paper caught my eye. Dateline: Church Rock, New Mexico. “Tiny Crack Blamed” said the little 12-point headline. “United Nuclear officials attributed a waste spill here to a tiny crack in their tailings dam.”

I called the editor of the Gallup Independent and asked about the spill. He said, “Hundreds of millions of gallons of radioactive waste escaped. It was the largest accidental release of radioactive material in U.S. history — bigger than Three Mile Island — and you are the first person to call.”

I had never published anything before, but I called Sandy Close at the Pacific News Service and told her about the accident. She asked me to write about it, and my piece ended up in the Los Angeles Times and Boston Globe. I wrote a grant proposal to the Arizona Humanities Council and mailed it in as Time and Newsweek cover stories predicted “The Rape of the West.” A month later we received a $35,000 grant from the Arizona Humanities Council, and work began in earnest on the film that would be The Four Corners: A National Sacrifice Area?

And it all started thirty years ago today, on July 16, 1979.