Grounded: The Local Politics of Energy in a Northern Arizona Boomtown

The city of Page, AZ is a remote energy town located in far Northern Arizona. Founded in 1957 as a temporary worker’s camp for crews building the Glen Canyon Dam, Page then boomed again in the 1970s with the construction of the Navajo Generating Station—the largest coal-fired power plant in the West. Together, these infrastructures have framed the local economy for most of the last five decades, transforming Page from “the dustpan of the earth” into “the West’s ‘Most Powerful Town’”. Through vast corporate and public subsidies, the City has gradually come to function as a regional resource broker. Even now, as its historical bases are eroded by energy transition and climate change, Page continually recommits to the extractive lifeways which have sustained it across its history.

This dissertation is a historical ethnography of energy infrastructure and social poetics in a remote corner of the industrial Southwest. Drawing on 19 months of fieldwork conducted between 2022 and 2025, I demonstrate how Page’s historical narratives, spatial politics, labor markets, and environmental affects are made and unmade alongside the production of power and water resources. Throughout the text, I cultivate an analytic of groundedness to name the epistemic, spatial, and technical registers of energy infrastructure which form Page’s civic conditions of possibility. I look to these grounds as the volatile local contingencies through which larger structural forces are brought into being.

Writing from the mid-transition in one of the Southwest’s most paradigmatic boomtowns, this dissertation contributes to ongoing conversations in energy, (post-)industrialism, and scale. Throughout the dissertation, I attend to stories which exceed or frustrate conventional imaginaries of power and water resources. By grounding this analysis in work, governance, and knowledge production, I depict the transfer of industrial ideologies into such domains as green energy, public administration, environmental management, and more. Throughout the dissertation, I thus examine how a local reliance on energy’s “hard path” informs the boomtown’s desperate attempt to reinhabit fictitious pasts.