Below is an updated, white paper style, version of a somewhat older paper. It includes a bibliography for more convenient sourcing, and updated examples of my argument that advertising for the natural gas industry is both a cynical ploy to manipulate concession to the industry's destruction of our air and water--and thereby a wholesale debauchery of the promise of American democracy. As the years of the liquidation of our forests, farms, and fen have worn on, and reports of water and contamination become ever clearer, natural gas industry propaganda has become even more desperate to appeal to patriot-saturated fear-mongering over "national" security" and "energy independence"--both of which are actively undermined by the industry's hell-bent-for-leather exports to a global marker where the highest bidder determines the price of that gas.
The Corporatization of American Democracy:
Slickwater Horizontal Hydraulic Fracturing and
the Extortion of “The Good American”
Of all the
potential crises that threaten to undermine the grand experiment called
“America Democracy,” I’ll argue that those which pose the greatest danger
involve the emergence of the Too-Big-To-Fail Big Energy corporation’s
bank-rolled gambits called “shale play,” that is, horizontal, slickwater,
hydraulic fracturing for shale-bound natural gas. Sponsored by some of the
biggest and most morally compromised industries flying the American flag—Exxon,
Shell-Mobil, Chesapeake, Halliburton, BP, Chevron, PVR, Cabot, Williams—the
threat posed to clean water, breathable air, private property, public lands,
and community integrity is becoming more and more clearly established at the
same time such corporations are posting record profits and donating millions to
the political campaigns of policy-makers. It’s thus no surprise that such
corporations appeal to the patriotic sentiments of citizens, that they exploit
what I’ll call the rhetoric of “the good American” to extort consent.
Consider, for
example, Chesapeake, who advertises itself as “America’s Champion of Natural
Gas” who’s “fueling America’s future,” or Exxon, who just bought Canadian
drilling corporation, Celtic Exploration Ltd, for $2.59 billion1,
and who insists that hydraulic fracturing is “the process [that
is] is helping America unlock our vast supplies of domestic energy” despite the
fact that the corporation’s stated goal is to ship natural gas not to American
sites of use, but to global markets—especially the Asian pacific.2 Or
Cabot, who sponsors Mom, apple pie, baseball, flag-waving events in Susquehanna
County, PA—near Dimock,3 one of the major film sites for Josh Fox’ Gasland).4 Or lastly,
consider FrackNation, the industry-funded Phelim McAleer and Ann
McElhinney film which appeals to image after image of American flags and
flag-waving Americans to directly attack Gas Land, and to promote natural gas development5.
These
examples are a dime a dozen, and their rhetoric resonates not only with
Americans, but particularly with those American who live in the most
environmentally vulnerable locations for fracking, folks living in rural
counties and municipalities like Columbia County, PA. Right now, we are
twenty-five minutes downstream from a 7,800 gallon chemically drilled frack
operation, 45 minutes from several compressor stations, including the Central
new York Oil and Gas (CVYNOG) Janet Hock Road, Davidson Township, Columbia
County site I’ve been photo-documenting for the past several years.6
We’re 20 minutes from a fracking-water withdrawal station on Route 11 directly
adjacent to the Susquehanna River, one hour from an enormous water withdrawal
near a Jersey Shore site that required the evictions of 32 economically
vulnerable families thanks to Aqua America7. We live directly on
Williams Partner’s Transco Pipeline, now the site of a new proposed FERC
(Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) application for an expansion called the
Atlantic Sunrise8.
Moreover, the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE) is
now open for business to fracking corporations via SB 367 that makes state
lands—including campuses—available to all forms of mineral extraction and their
infrastructure operations.9
Over the last
several years, fracking and its multiplying ancillary enterprises, compressor
stations, dehydration stations, water withdrawals, chemical manufacturers,
explosive manufacturers, spill clean-ups, trucking enterprises, plastic lining
makers, engineering business like Larson Design10, sand transport
services, drill bit makers, etc., have promoted themselves as a kind of panacea
for the recession—and in some cases as the answer to restoring revenue to cash-strapped
municipalities and other public-sector institutions (like PASSHE) suffering
under the governor’s steep budget cuts. Revenues to date from Act 13’s impact
fee is $630 million from all corporations engaged in fracking in PA as of 201411.
Sounds like a fair chunk of change, but when you consider that (a) this
represents nearly 30 corporations including Chesapeake, Exxon, and Cabot, (b)
this is for the entire state, (c) a single accident can exhaust any
municipality’s entire share, (d) even the more modest among these corporation’s
profits may well be into the billions by the time export depots like Cove Point
Maryland’s are operative, and lastly, (e) that until parts of the Act 13 law
were overturned as unconstitutional in July, 2014, it preempted virtually all
local decision-making in municipalities, it becomes very clear that the cost to
environment, human and nonhuman health, community integrity, roads and bridges,
and public institutions like schools, nursing homes, and town parks, outweigh
benefits accruing to a very few.12 Even the promise of jobs is only as reliable as the boom to
bust cycle of the extraction industry’s history, particularly when the facts
are that this promise is a hollow one—even during the boom.13 When
you factor in that the real cost in risk and accident for many gas well workers
is among the highest in the nation, (especially for truck drivers),14
that the gas boom has generated a virtual renaissance in work for lawyers
pursuing accident claims,15 the gap between the real
beneficiaries—lawyers, CEOs, shareholders—and those who bear the real
costs—everyone else—becomes obvious.
The language of
“energy independence,” “energy security,” “free enterprise,” “the
entrepreneurial spirit,” and even “national security” were quickly appropriated
by corporations like Chesapeake who promise “Cheap, Abundant, and American” in
their advertising and who insist that they can be trusted because, after all,
they’re American too. Those who dared to challenge this appeal to patriotism
were cast as un-American,16, anti-capitalist, anti-progress Luddite
enemies of the state,17 an image easily promoted through industry
propaganda to further justify the state’s legislative usurpation of the
prerogatives and responsibilities of townships and municipalities to regulate
“shale play” via Act 13. Films like the American
Petroleum Institute’s “Truthland,”18 and aggressive advertising
websites pretending to offer expert testimony and advice like Energy in Depth19 are
saturated in patriotic images and slogans which make clear that fracking is the
American way—and that anyone who questions the authority of either state
governments who subsidize the industry or the industry itself is ripe for
target as, for example, a “socialist,” or “Communist.” Or worse. As reported in
Common Dreams March, 2012,20
anti-fracking activists are increasingly the targets of FBI surveillance (even
as reports of “eco-terrorism” are on the decrease), and the use of state and
local police to insure industry prerogatives is becoming commonplace.21
Despite
the obvious risks, however, a growing movement of activists, fracktivists demanding not a moratorium
but a ban, has begun to take hold in Pennsylvania, galvanized by a first-hand
experience and an informed understanding that fracking threatens not only the
environment in its aesthetic and recreational dimensions, but the very water,
air and soil necessary to life, that it threatens a way of life—especially for rural and semi-rural Americans. It’s
ironic that many of these folks would not identify as environmentalists. In
fact, notions like “sacrifice for country” are for them powerfully persuasive
in light of their rural, military, and working class experience. Nonetheless,
as the evidence of the real risks of fracking mounts regarding the safety of
the process, the pollutants involved, the damage to community infrastructure,
the long-term health effects, and the destruction of hunting lands/fishing
waterways, even some of the staunchest of patriots have begun to find
themselves at town hall meetings sitting across from Big Energy executives—but
not on their sides.
To be clear these
risks include at least the following sixteen items:
1. The toxicity of the chemicals
involved in the fracking process itself, and the veritable certainty that these
will migrate eventually along fissures in well-casings into ground water.22
2. The necessity of deep injection
wells for the permanent disposal of wastewater that is no longer usable by
human beings.23
3. The actual earthquakes the USGS
associates with deep injection wells, and the potential dangerous fissures to
well casings caused by a repeating pattern of seismic activity.24
4. The already patent environmental
destruction, pollution and noise hazards caused by compressor stations,
transmission lines, and water withdrawal facilities near public schools,
hospitals, and other community assets.25
5. The nearly complete absence of regulation in “Class One”
rural areas with respect to the construction and monitoring of transmission
lines in and out of compressor stations.26
6. The destructive consequences for
the sensitive ecologies and endangered species.27
7. The potential extinction of
whole species of microorganism—some of which likely remain uncatalogued or even
undiscovered—and who make their home in shale deposits.28
8. The actual erosion of roads and
bridges due to increased heavy truck traffic.29.
9. The actual emission of diesel
and other carcinogens from trucks idling for long periods at frack sites, water
withdrawal stations, and compressor stations.30
10. The risk of carcinogen exposure
to human and nonhuman health from the frack site wastewater deposit pools and
from compressor stations.31.
11. Community conflict destined to
erupt between those who lease and those who refuse to lease, some of whom now
claim they’ll have to be shot before the state can take their land under the
guise of recognizing the lease of mineral rights to energy corporations.32.
12. The erosion of private property
rights by those who would decline a gas lease and who are then subject to
compulsory condemnation, forced pooling, and the appeal to eminent domain by
the state--all in the interest of allowing the gas corporations to not only
frack on such properties, but construct roads, waste pits, and transmission lines
in and out of a fracking operation.33
13. The effective neutering of
municipalities and township boards to govern the infrastructure of their
communities under, now overturned, Pennsylvania’s Act 13 that would have
shifted the power to determine fracking operations from the municipality to the
State Attorney General’s Office.34
14. The actual use of fracking
wastewater as road de-icer in winter despite its carcinogenic properties.35
15. The harmful effects of Act 13’s
gag order which prevents physicians from releasing vital information to
patients exposed to frack fluids in the event of illness.36.
16. The potentially hazardous
effects for neighboring towns, municipalities, and even states of items 1-15.
While it is important to be clear
about these hazards, my aims here are not about—at least directly—the hazards per se—all of which are well established
and publicly available. My claim is that fracking is a concrete,
visually compelling epitome of the much bigger crisis of
American democracy, namely, the corporatization of state and federal government
through, among other tactics, appropriation of the patriotic and thereby
disarming discourse of the “good American.” The consequences of this appropriation include not only a
fundamental and potentially irrecoverable corruption of the very language and
imagery of the public good, but substantial risk to the conditions upon which
this good depends—clean water and breathable air.
Unlike other
current dimensions of the crisis—the collapse of the banks, or the wreckage of
the housing markets, for example fracking endangers the conditions of life
itself, not only in terms of toxins and other irrecoverable pollutants, but in
virtue of
(a) the permanent
removal of water from rivers, ponds, and lakes, and
(b) the
concentration of pollutants in the what water remains.
Fracking effectively converts a
necessary condition of life into a marketable and unrecyclable commodity, and it’s no real wonder that this demands a
propaganda campaign that can either conceal this fact or make sacrifice to it
seem worthy and honorable—even a patriotic duty. The cynical and mercenary
appropriation of catch-phrases like “national security” and “standard of
living” reveals an industry whose key decision-makers know the dangers of their
production processes, and thus know that their “justificatory” rhetoric must
include a strategy for neutralizing those who would organize to resist it. What
better strategy than the appropriation of the “good American” against
which—especially in the contemporary political climate—those who resist can be
cast as “Leftists,” environmental whackos,” “tree-huggers,” “Communists,” or “un-American”? As
anti-patriots against whom the police, the National Guard and the Army can be
deployed? Traitors to country who can, if necessary, lose their lives for the
sake of “national security”? Or at least arrested and detained.37
On March 9, 2012
President Obama signed into law a bill, H.R. 347,38 that makes
protests at political events at which Secret Service agents are deployed to
protect anyone one present illegal—even if the presence of the agents is
unknown to the protesters. The bill effectively makes even non-violent protest
subject to police harassment since the protesters have no way of knowing
whether they are in violation of the law. Not only, then, does government have
a new means by which to repress dissent, it will have one more tool for
identifying the Good American—he or she who does not engage their first
amendment rights at all:
The
US House of Representatives voted 388-to-3 in favor of H.R. 347
late Monday [2.6.12], a bill which is being dubbed the Federal Restricted
Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011…Under the act, the government is
also given the power to bring charges against Americans engaged in political
protest anywhere in the country…In the text of the act, the law is allowed to
be used against anyone who knowingly enters or remains in a restricted building
or grounds without lawful authority to do so, but those grounds are considered
any area where someone — rather it’s President Obama, Senator Santorum or
Governor Romney — will be temporarily visiting, whether or not the public is
even made aware. Entering such a facility is thus outlawed, as is disrupting
the orderly conduct of “official functions,” engaging in disorderly conduct
“within such proximity to” the event or acting violent to anyone, anywhere near
the premises. Under that verbiage, that means a peaceful protest outside a
candidate’s concession speech would be a federal offense...39
The critic might, of course, object arguing that protests in isolated
settings like remote forests or deserts are still an option, but this, of
course, defeats the purpose of bringing public awareness to the issues
connected to fracking. Though perhaps at first blush not obviously tethered to
the corporatization of government, such a bill
(1) effectively criminalizes
protest—including that engaged by anti-fracking activists—since there is no way
of knowing whether a Secret Service detail might not be present at a
politically sensitive event attended by CEO’s of Big Energy corporations, and
(2) makes dissent against
government sanctioned corporate policy that much more unlikely—protecting
corporations under the guise of protecting the public.
Consider,
for example, a recent event at Kutztown University, Kutztown PA, where Lt.
Governor of Pennsylvania Tom Cawley defended the claim that state universities
should be willing to “work with the gas companies” who may want to drill on
college campuses in the state. Among the members of the audience were
anti-fracking protesters, one of whom, Sean Kitchen (who stood with his back to
the Lt. Governor and his panel), made the claim that “[w]hat
you're saying is that you endorse poisoning college students across the state?”
In combination with an increasingly dominant national rhetoric that identifies
the good of corporations with the economic health of the country, protesters
like Mr. Kitchen are not only likely to be criminalized but, in fact, worse—cast as outside American citizenship.
Laws that effectively criminalize protest send a clear message: the place of a
citizen is acquiescence. To protest government sanctioned corporate enterprise
is to take up a position against the government. The good American does not
behave this way.40
Such a democracy,
I suggest, is not merely in crisis; indeed, to the extent that the very
narrative of citizenship has been co-opted to ends having naught but
coincidentally to do with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and
everything to do with profits and share-holder portfolios, “democracy” has
itself become just another advertising slogan: we are free to wave our flags
while bulldozers take down our trees and tear up our land to make room for
access roads, frack pads, compressor stations, and transmission lines. In fact,
if you’re lucky enough to live in a class one region of Pennsylvania—fewer than
ten houses per a square mile—you’re free to imagine yourself in a kind of Wild
West. No regulations govern the construction of gas transmission lines where
you live at all. And according to the new national patriotic narrative, only he
or she who fails to have the nation’s interests at heart or who simply does not
understand the immense benefits to the economy would deign to complain that
this is not “freedom,” much less stand and accuse the gas industry of poisoning
American citizens for profit.
Such a
citizen-dissenter is not Aubrey McClendon, the CEO of the nation’s largest
energy corporation, Chesapeake Energy, who deploys the rhetoric of the Good
American at least indirectly by appealing to economic and energy security. As
reported by Jeff Goodell of The Rolling Stone “To hear him [McClendon] tell it, the cleaner-than-coal fuel he
produces will revive our faltering economy, free us from the tyranny of foreign
oil and save the planet from global warming.”41 McClendon’s appeal
to love of country, however, conceals a very dark underside, one surely about
“country” and “love,” but not about democratic decision-making, much less the
good of his fellow citizens. Goodell continues:
[W]hat McClendon leaves out is the real nature of the business he's
in. Fracking, it turns out, is about producing cheap energy the same way the
mortgage crisis was about helping realize the dreams of middle-class
homeowners. For Chesapeake, the primary profit in fracking comes not from
selling the gas itself, but from buying and flipping the land that contains the
gas. The company is now the largest leaseholder in the United States, owning
the drilling rights to some 15 million acres – an area more than twice the size
of Maryland. McClendon has financed this land grab with junk bonds and complex
partnerships and future production deals, creating a highly leveraged, deeply
indebted company that has more in common with Enron than ExxonMobil. As
McClendon put it in a conference call with Wall Street analysts a few years
ago, "I can assure you that buying leases for x and selling them for 5x or
10x is a lot more profitable than trying to produce gas at $5 or $6 per million
cubic feet."42
It turns out, in other words, that
even the patriotic rhetoric of “cheap and abundant” natural gas is simply a
cover story for the acquisition and marketing of land—land that used to be
rural America. This rhetoric demotes the national interest, the common good, to
transferable real estate. To identify the good of this corporation with the health of the country is to identify the
health of the country not with the freedom of its citizens, not with the
stability or strength of its democratic institutions, but with its market
value—fifteen million acres in McClendon’s case. The state, moreover, has not
only become an enthusiastic player in what Arthur Berman, respected energy
consultant, calls a Ponzi Scheme, it is now engaged in the erection of
laws—including laws that criminalize protest—aimed at protecting what now must
be called America, INC.
This is
death-by-profiteering for the country and for its citizens—literally—and no
industry more pointedly epitomizes it than Big Energy. Corporate appropriations
of patriotic rhetoric are, of course, by themselves nothing new. It’s also
nothing new that the “good American” is expected to lay down her/his life for
the sake of country or national interest. Such is the oath of the soldier. It’s
not even new that such soldiers have been co-opted to fight and die in wars for
the sake of preserving and advancing corporate interests wrapped—also
literally—in the flag. Such is the case in Iraq. What is new, however, is that
because the process for extracting natural gas in the Marcellus or Utica Shale
Formations involves massive quantities of an essential resource—water—whose
contamination requires its permanent exclusion from any use other than
fracking, “sacrifice” can only be measured in terms of what lack of access to
clean water means for those who are dependent on that access, namely, human
beings, farm animals, wildlife, crops, forests, etc—in other words, living things. It is at least a crisis for democracy that, as good
Americans, we are being asked to sacrifice not merely clean water but water per se. That the rhetoric of this
sacrifice should be cast in the language of “energy security” by entities that
stand to make billions of dollars not only from it but from the enormous swaths
of land required to pursue it, is more than a crisis; it is, I think, either
the democracy’s death sentence or, if we’re lucky, its clarion call to foment
revolution.
To cast as un-American—and to codify this as
law—those who’d resist the assault on access to clean water not only
discourages the exercise of a basic right to freedom of expression, but makes
effectively traitorous the public recognition of facts. One is not required for the sake of being a
good American merely to lay down for one’s country, but to die for an
instantiation of “country” owned and operated by corporations. The “good
American” consents not merely to being fracked, but to those specific kinds of
death which accrue either to the consumption of contaminated water or—for those
even less fortunate—to lack of access even to that. While fracking corporations
deny the mounting evidence for the connection between, for example, fracking
and cancer, compressor station emissions and asthma, they insist, for example
that the physician nondisclosure section of Pennsylvania’s Act 13 which
prevents doctors from revealing the composition and amount of chemicals present
in frack fluids making their patients sick is rightly protected by proprietary
rights statutes. Moreover, as of this writing there are no studies that track
possible health effects to fracking operations, compressor stations, compressor
station explosions, open waste pits, land-fills that take frack “cake,” or
other varieties of exposure. Hence, it’s no surprise that fracking-promoters
insist that no ill health effects will follow from fracking,43 and
some even insist that fracking will improve water quality.44
One response, of
course, to my argument is that there are lots of dangerous fossil fuel
extraction processes, and that some danger just is the price we have to be
willing to pay for energy. This premise, however, is faulty—we only have to pay
this price if we insist on our current levels of consumption, refuse to develop
alternatives, and forego conservation. But the state and corporations like
Chesapeake are not the only players in this genocidal drama, and, I suggest,
would not be able to legitimate their own dictatorial program without the cover
of other complicit institutions, particularly the university. As fracking
corporations “partner” with universities to conduct the basic science (at
tax-payer’s expense), develop extraction methods, and provide expertise and
basic labor (in the form of graduate students), so does the state promote the
university as a undemocratic institution no longer acting as a public trust.
But as the recent case of Penn State’s participation in an industry-sponsored
and disputed study of the economic benefits of natural gas production shows,
“public trust” is itself part of an advertising campaign designed to protect
the image of a public research university, while its commitment to unfettered
inquiry and critical investigation die on the vine.45 As the
watchdog group, Food and Water Watch
document:
Reports out of Penn State
and the Public Policy Institute of New York project tens of thousands of jobs
will be created as a result of natural gas development; the MSC calls for
hundreds of thousands. Two reports released today by the watchdog group Food and Water Watch show that those projections are optimistic at best, and
based on flawed numbers. They refute the last point the natural gas industry
used to defend its practice of drilling wells and releasing underground methane
gas using sand, water, and chemicals, in rural and wild areas.46
Moreover, the lion’s share of the profits likely to
accrue to fracking are already destined for foreign markets: “the major players
in shale gas are multinational oil and gas companies with plans to export U.S.
shale gas outside of the U.S., likely to Asia.”47
A particularly
striking example of the use of patriotic rhetoric to promote industry
objectives, as if these were consistent with the university mission, comes in
the person of Penn State Professor of Geoscience, Terry Engelder, “father of
Marcellus Shale” who describes the state-university-corporation alliance this
way:
Engelder doesn’t just talk up
the Marcellus Shale. “I have to make a bit of a sales pitch for Penn State,” he
says. He repeatedly points out the quote, “symbiosis between the gas industry
and Penn State,” and asked them to invest in research at Penn State, quote,
“The type of research that’s necessary to answer some of these questions that
are going to be so critical to the future of Marcellus development,” the type
of research that he, himself, will be doing… Engelder has started a research
project. 10 oil and gas companies are paying about $40,000 each so students can
map the Appalachian Basin, showing companies where best to drill. Engelder also
has a multimillion dollar project to help engineers figure out, among other
things, how much pressure they need to frack wells. Penn State depends hugely
on industry money, and not just on the oil and gas industry, on pharmaceutical
companies, and on weapons manufacturers, and on the government. All major
research universities do, not just Penn State. But Penn State’s got one of the
oldest and best gas and petroleum engineering schools in the country. Without
industry money, the school might not survive. Flip through this year’s awards
banquet program for the Energy and Mineral Engineering students, and it’s an
industry roster. They’re getting money from Chesapeake Energy, Consol Energy,
Chevron, BP, ConocoPhillips, Marathon Oil. Some of these students will go on to
work for these companies, and make lots of money, and give it back to Penn
State, which is great for the university. But if you take a close look at how
some of these donations work, you can see how entwined the university is, not
just with the gas industry, but also with state government, and how all three
of them are united on the topic of drilling.48
The “symbiosis” to which Engelder refers is precisely
another unholy alliance. In a
piece titled “The Unholy Alliance of Big Energy,
Big University, Big State: My Exchange with Terry Engelder”, I put the point this way:
This is not the story of a
university; it’s the story of a university beholden to an industry that has
come to dictate key aspects of the university’s mission. Penn State has
effectively forfeited its responsibility to act as an independent agent for the
public good, and uses the professorial status of one of its celebrity own—Terry
Engelder—to legitimate it…Professor Engelder is beholden not to Penn State
(other than to legitimate his status), but to those corporations who fund his
research into the Marcellus Shale, who fund his graduate student’s future
careers, who donate enormous sums to his university—and to his place in
history. Engelder’s own claim was that “the discovery [of natural gas] could be
worth $1 trillion.” To be clear: I am not claiming that Professor Engelder
profits monetarily through his association with the Natural Gas Industry. He
may; he may not. I don’t know. What I am claiming is that Engelder epitomizes
the forfeiture of academic integrity consequent on the corporatization of the
university—and that in the end this impugns Penn State as a public trust. This
could not be better represented than in Engelder’s own words concerning the
abuse of the state’s eminent domain, takings, and mineral rights laws to
appropriate private property through forced pooling: “I suspect that if the
commission were to word their recommendations for pooling in a clever enough
way, this would provide political cover for the governor himself…Engelder knows
that his appeal as a university academic offers the best possible propaganda to
the industry and, as a bonus, offers cover to a state government—the Corbett
administration—that’s as deeply compromised by fracking dollars as are its
appointments to key agencies and positions hail from Big Energy.49
Key to my argument here, however, is the rhetoric Engelder
deploys to legitimate this alliance. He explicitly appeals to the true
patriot’s willingness to sacrifice for the nation’s “energy security”:
”This [fracking] is a new technology. The gas industry is
learning as they go along and we need to give them a chance to get it right.”
He then quoted John F. Kennedy, telling those of us in the audience to “ask
what we can do for our country” and thanking us for our patriotism for living
in the heart of what he called ‘the sacrifice zone.”50
The appeal to
John F. Kennedy is especially striking, given that the language he used about
what one can do for her/his country was directed not at the forfeiture of our
rights, but rather at instantiating democratic principle in the form of
service. To suggest that allowing the appropriation and potential contamination
of one’s land and water counts as such a service or that the offer of a chance
“to get it right” is somehow owed to the fracking corporations betrays, I
think, precisely the perversity of this unholy alliance.
Engelder recognizes the violation of property rights suffered by
landowners and farmers, but regards the sacrifice as “necessary,” in other
words, essential to the American way of life. “If we want to talk about
sacrifice, then we look to Dimock,” he said, referring to the best-known
Pennsylvania site for drilling accidents”51
To characterize the
irreparable losses of Dimock citizens as “sacrifice,” as if the their
deliberate and collective will were to give up their water, opens the door to
genocide. Here’s why: The citizens of Dimock were not asked whether they wanted
to make this sacrifice. It was, in fact, forced on them. It’s irrelevant
whether the gas industry—Cabot in this case—intended to contaminate their
wells. It didn’t. What’s clear is that Cabot knew this was possible, and
continued to frack regardless. This is the story of every fracking operation,
every compressor station, every transmission line, and every water withdrawal
station: unlike even the pollution produced by coal, hydraulic fracturing
destroys water in massive and irreplaceable quantities. To cast this kind of
violence in the language of patriotic sacrifice—to draft laws to reinforce
it—is at once to recognize it as violence—recast as sacrifice—and to conceal it
behind the good American—she or he who lays down her land to a Ponzi scheme,
his water to a deep injection well, and her life to an America owned by folks
like Aubrey McClendon.
To
bring this point home one more time: SB 367 (sponsored by Republican Don White
who received received over $94,000 in campaign contributions from the industry52)
authorizes PASSHE university presidents, under the advisement of the
chancellor, the option of leasing PASSHE campuses to Big Extraction. I recently
argued that
[e]xtraction is merely one piece of the transmogrification of
PASSHE schools, converting what is an essential public good in the creation of
thinking citizens into effectively privatized for-profits whose aims are not
education, but the next generation of workers laboring under the tutelage of
those who can afford to send their children to far more expensive private
institutions. That Cavanaugh applauds the wholesale dismantling of Antioch College and the firing of tenured professors
for the sake of “cost-savings” and “efficiencies,” that his “wish list” in the
on-going negotiations with the PASSHE faculty union, APSCUF (The Association of
Pennsylvania College and University Faculties) is a recipe for
union-busting—including the creation of a poorly paid underclass of non-tenure
“lecturers,” the reclassification of department chairs as “managers,” and the
conversion of “brick and mortar” classroom education into “executive model”
on-line courses –makes clear that what the chancellor values is not education, but the manufacture of workers most
attractive to the industries he welcomes to your kid’s campus via
his presidents, or rather, your kid’s campus-factory where he or
she can expect to see the liberal arts demoted to “service curricula” and
programs which serve the extraction industries front-page-promoted on university websites.53
The Frack-U bill, in other
words, pretends to be a way to save public education from the budget cuts the
governor “had” to impose, but the facts tell a very different story, one that
could spell disaster on campuses like Lock haven, Slippery Rock, Mansfield,
IUP—and Bloomsburg. Imagine, for example, the disaster awaiting the student who
inadvisably tries to cross Rt. 487 on some foggy morning between public school
buses, fracking sand trucks, perhaps a chemical explosives crew truck, and a
frack-waste hauler taking “cake” to the White Pines landfill. I have already
begun to photograph this escalating traffic.
“We're the biggest frackers in the
world," declares Chesapeake’s Aubrey McClendon proudly over a $400 bottle
of French Bordeaux at a restaurant he co-owns in his hometown of Oklahoma City.
"We frack all the time. What's the big deal?”54 I think the big
deal is death. Death in virtue of the “big deal.” And this, I think, epitomizes
not only the crisis of American democracy—but that of a future for which
“sustainability” is in danger of becoming just one more advertising slogan on
the way to ecocide.
Sources
16. http://www.rightwingnews.com/environment/russia-funds-and-conspires-with-anti-fracking-activists/.
22. http://fracfocus.org/chemical-use/what-chemicals-are-used,
and http://www.post-gazette.com/local/washington/2014/08/06/Pa-finds-tainted-water-soil-at-three-Washington-County-shale-sites/stories/201408050198.
31. http://www.catskillmountainkeeper.org/our-programs/fracking/whats-wrong-with-fracking-2/wastewater/.
39. http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2012/02/houses-passes-new-bill-that-would-make.html.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
49. http://www.ragingchickenpress.org/2012/02/15/the-unholy-alliance-of-big-energy-big-university-big-state-my-exchange-with-terry-engelder/.
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