FARMINGTON, New Mexico - Eco-aviator Bruce Gordon flies his red-and-white striped Cessna over rugged desert, explaining to eight wide-eyed passengers how the parched lands below have been etched and stretched in search of fossil fuels.

He draws attention to the natural gas wells, 35,000 in total, peppered between the houses and ranches dotting the region and connected by a tangled web of dirt roads. A coming boom in shale-gas exploration is expected to bring thousands more.

"You can see all the different kinds of geology in this area, it's pretty amazing," says Gordon, at the same time lamenting the rampant energy development that's reshaping the natural landscape. His goal, as founder of non-profit company EcoFlight, is to offer a bird's eye view of the big mess being made on the ground.

As the single-prop plane climbs to 2,500 metres Gordon points to a faint black monolith in the distance, the San Juan coal-fired power plant, which divides the otherwise clear airspace with its sickly orange blanket of haze.

The group then flies south to a second coal-fired plant - the Four Corners generating station - and a neighbouring coal mine, both located on Navajo Indian territory. It is here, on these sparsely populated native lands about the size of West Virginia, that a debate over the energy future of the region is unfolding.

The Navajos, a nation of 168,000 spread throughout parts of New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah, are at a crossroads. The rate of poverty is nearly 60 per cent, and more than half of adults living on the reserve are without work. Two out of every five homes, which tend to be broadly dispersed, have no electricity or plumbing.

Understandably, the Navajos want to lift themselves out of poverty, and tribal leaders argue the quickest way to achieve that is to exploit even more of the vast black resource under their feet: coal.

How the U.S. government eventually responds to the desires of this self-governing nation will show world leaders, who next week will gather in Copenhagen to hammer out a new international climate treaty, how serious it is about reducing U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions.

Give in to the Navajos' dirty fuel pursuit and coal-dependent countries such as China, which are being asked to crack down on emissions despite their own poverty challenges, will scream hypocrisy. Say no and the Navajos, echoing China, can rightfully ask why the largest Indian reservation in the United States is being denied the standard of living that other Americans enjoy.

"That's the question we're trying to deal with," says Sandra Begay-Campbell, a Navajo Indian and director of the native communities energy program for Sandia National Laboratories, part of the U.S. Department of Energy.

Her job is to demonstrate to tribal leaders that doing what they've always done is no longer the only option and that clean energy should be capturing more of their attention. As much as 85 per cent of the Navajo Nation's current revenue comes from outdated coal leases and that needs to change, she says. "How do you diversify? What do you do next? That's where renewables become key."

It's a hard sell. The Navajo tribal council continues to be obsessed with its coal prospects. This, despite a suspected rise in the rate of respiratory disease on the reserve, high levels of mercury contamination in ground water and fish, and the health and environmental consequences of past uranium mining that led to a moratorium on that industry in 2005.

For six years the push has been on to construct a new 1,500-megawatt pulverized coal plant called Desert Rock, located just southeast of the existing Four Corners generating station on Navajo lands. Desert Rock, a partnership with power development giant Sithe Global, would rely on coal from an adjacent Navajo open-pit mine and sell its electricity to Las Vegas, Phoenix and other power-hungry growth centres in the U.S. Southwest.

Together, the plant and the mine would create nearly 800 jobs over five years.

"It's all about putting food on the table, putting shoes on little feet," Joe Shirley, president of the Navajo tribal council, told reporters in early 2008. In September he called it the "most important economic development project" in the Navajo Nation's history.

The Navajo Nation would get $54 million a year from coal royalties and fees for land and water use rights, but wouldn't get any of the electricity from the high-voltage transmission lines that stretch across Navajo territory.

It amounts to desperate, short-term thinking that will end up doing more harm than good for the community, critics of the coal plant proposal argue. Not all Navajo people are supportive of the plan, says Lori Goodman, part of the all-Navajo environmental group Diné CARE, or Citizens Against Ruining our Environment. "This is a clearly a decision made by the tribal government, but none of the people are for this as far as we know." Her group has been promoting the idea of developing solar projects and other low-emission alternatives on Navajo lands, either to be used by the people or sold to neighbouring jurisdictions that need it. Clear skies, wide-open spaces, and hot geology create ideal conditions for wind, solar, and geothermal projects. One 500-megawatt wind farm is already in the works.

Distributed generation, such as rooftop solar, is also considered the best way to bring electricity - and by association refrigeration - to Navajo households, which unlike their cousins, the Pueblos, aren't clustered in dense communities more easily served by utility distribution lines.

This presents opportunities for native entrepreneurs like Dave Melton, founder of green power developer Sacred Power. During an interview at his Albuquerque headquarters, Melton gets off his chair and turns off the lights. The room goes pitch black.

"They don't have lights where there are no windows; they don't have lights at night," he says, explaining that many Navajo children must do homework with a flashlight. "This is their problem. It's a basic human need."

Sacred Power, with the help of federal grants, has so far installed more than 400 solar power systems for Navajo households.

Experts say reducing pollution and greenhouse-gas emissions isn't the only reason to embrace more renewable energy in the region. Mike Hightower, who heads up water and energy research at Sandia National Laboratories, says the cooling requirements of fossil-fuel plants make them extremely water intensive. The San Juan coal plant, which is slightly larger than the proposed Desert Rock plant, requires 30 million cubic metres of water annually, roughly as much water as 110,000 Canadian households would go through each year. But drought is a recurring problem in the U.S. southwest, and population growth is already putting a strain on surface and ground water resources. Not surprising, energy demands are climbing.

It's not just a problem for states like New Mexico and Arizona. "We're looking at quadrupling the amount of water consumed by the energy sector," says Hightower. "Where are you going to get that?"

Melton agrees that water is a huge issue. "Here in the west water is everything," he says. The phrase "Mi casa es su casa" - my home is your home - might as well be followed by the line "Pero mi agua es mi agua" - but my water is my water.

To the applause of its many opponents, the Desert Rock project faced a setback in September when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency withdrew the air permit it originally issued in 2008 and launched a new review. The government of New Mexico had appealed the original permit, arguing that the Bush administration failed to consider the harmful effects of the plant's CO2 emissions. This time around CO2 will weigh heavily in the permitting decision.

This only strengthened the resolve of the tribal council and Sithe, which a few weeks earlier had applied for a $451 million (U.S.) energy department grant that would help pay for a carbon capture and pipeline project. The idea was to capture CO2 from Desert Rock, compress the gas, and then ship it through a 100-kilometre pipeline to west Texas where it would be pumped into the ground for enhanced oil recovery.

Shirley has been outspoken about the right of the Navajo Nation to self-determination. He's also scolded the environmentalists who oppose Desert Rock, arguing that renewables can't do the job alone and that cracking down on a single coal plant and mine makes no sense when India and China are expected to build hundreds of new coal plants over the coming decades.

"It is unlikely that developing countries will discontinue using coal to produce electricity," he said during a speech in September. In an earlier talk, he said if the U.S. government is serious about slowing greenhouse gas emissions it should target China and stop "picking on the poor Navajo Nation quagmired in impoverishment in its backyard."

Melton, a Laguna Pueblo member, says for many Navajos embracing renewable energy and battling climate change is icing on the cake. But before you get the icing you've got to have the cake. "Economic development for them comes first, because they don't have a lot of options."

And that's the heart of the Navajo debate. Is renewable energy enough? Can the opportunities that come from mining more coal and using it to generate electricity be ignored when many Navajos rely on candles at night to see? Is it worth the potential health and environmental consequences?

As pilot Bruce Gordon flies his Cessna over the Four Corners coal plant the contentious nature of the issue abruptly interrupts his sky tour. An anonymous voice from a nearby plane interjects over an open-air frequency.

"Wonder what kind of plane this guy is flying," says the voice, referring to Gordon and the irony of using a fuel-powered plane while criticizing fossil-fuel development. "Must be powered by solar," the mystery pilot says sarcastically.

Gordon, when back on the ground an hour later, was a bit taken aback. "That's never happened before." He says he understood the other pilot's point, but insists the bigger picture is being missed. "I'm just tired of stupid people ruining my country."