IT WAS LATE February, and intermittent snow blew across the road. On the gray, high-desert horizon, a dark structure loomed above the piñon and juniper. “This is a new one!” Kendra Pinto said, pointing at the well site.
Pinto (Diné) grew up in this area, where sandstone mesas give way to shallow valleys and pale badlands of eggshell-colored clays. She watched the landscape change with the influx of fracking activity that peaked around 2014. Now, nearly a decade later, she is among the community’s most prominent critics of the industry. In 2017, she began volunteering for Earthworks, an environmental nonprofit focused on oil, gas and mining pollution. Now, she works for it as a thermographer, documenting air emissions using a specialized infrared camera designed to detect gas emissions.
Driving to another site in Counselor Chapter, a small community in the eastern reaches of the Navajo Nation where the political chapters are outside the reservation boundaries, she described the different types of equipment — flare stacks, storage tanks, gas compressors — from which she commonly sees emissions. Pinto said that most air emissions seem to come from operators intentionally flaring or venting excess gases that build up in the equipment, rather than unintentional emissions, such as from aging underground pipes. She and her colleagues refrain from calling any emissions “leaks,” though: While these systems were designed to emit gas, usually as a safety mechanism, the vapor trails she films are often caused by malfunctioning equipment.
“These little flares should be lit and combusting all the hydrocarbons, but when you put the camera on (a
