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| On the way to Chihuahua, Mexico, 10.15. Photo, Wendy Lynne Lee |
First, Friday, October 2nd: I recognized my fine friend and ally, David--even tough we'd never met in person--when he pulled up in front of the El Paso, Texas Airport in a well-utilized truck with Mexican plates. The flight had been arranged fairly hastily, and I was already counting the hours before my class the following Monday afternoon at 5PM.
But all of this--the flight, the class, the country--soon gave way to that delightful and all too rare gift called conversation, the kind we have with old friends, even the ones whose faces are new to us. Wending our way through the gorgeous spareness of Chihuahua, Mexico's highland desert is bounded by the endless Sierra Madre, and is one of the most biologically diverse desert eco-regions on the planet (http://www.worldwildlife.org/ecoregions/na1303).
It's also among the most endangered by a host of industries flying the flags of NAFTA's free trade beneficiaries--and most recently by Pemex (Petroleos Mexicanos) whose intention is to begin fracking despite what are now well-established hazards to the ecologies, the habitats, the communities and the peoples whose voices they routinely ignore.
With an estimated 600 Trillion cubic feet of "recoverable" shale gas, the only wonder is why we haven't seen more gas rigs already (https://ejatlas.org/conflict/resistance-to-fracking-in-chihuahua-mexico).
But this is because Pemex and its corporate colleagues are going to have a real fight on their hands.
In Veracruz they already do.
Crossing the border into Mexico, David and I were on our way to the city Chihuahua, Chihuahua for the Foro Binacional: En defensa del desierto y el agua. No al fracking, where I was scheduled to speak to an audience of activists, insurgents, organizers, indigenous people all gathered to discuss, strategize, share ideas, and work out conflicts in the interest--I soon came to understand--no so much of protecting property, but of defending land.
Land--that is the soil which makes possible the place, the life, the ancestral sensibilities, the culture of long-rooted human and nonhuman communities whose own ebb and flow reflect the living ecologies to which they pay tribute.
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| Photo, Chihuahua, Wendy Lynne Lee, 10.15. |
Property is not land, and land is not property.
Yet it's "property" that continues to dominate the discourse of too many American anti-fracking activists who, even when they advocate for environmental protections for state parks seem to think more in the horse-trading terms of one mile set-backs, negotiated subsurface agreements, and the salvage of wood lots surrounded by well pads, than in terms of the organic, the historical, the aesthetic, or the experienced.
We seem to think only in terms of surfaces, parcels, and right of ways-- when there is far more to be said about ways of life whose peoples know the earth by its very texture and smell.
I don't know--would not pretend to know--what might have been on the mind of one young indigenous woman who smiled at me from across what seemed centuries of culture and tradition at the Foro Nacional. Unmistakable, however, was her pondering sober gaze from behind a scarf whose bright colors bespoke a world as old as it was rich and living, a world of land.
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| Photo, Wendy Lynne Lee |
Still, I knew her to have travelled a long ways with her husband and baby because she understood intimately--no doubt in her very blood--the threat Pemex and its multinational analogues pose to her rootedness of place in the world of her family, her plants, her animals, her life.
By the time I had finished what offering I had to make to Foro Nacional, by the time I had struggled through countless conversations outside an auditorium alive with strategy, planning, and new ideas, I had come to realize that Socrates really was right when he asks us in The Apology for what we're willing to give up our lives.
None give up their lives for mere property.
We give up our lives for land.
And that I would keep it.
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What follows is a presentation I am very honored to be able to give October 3rd, In Chihuahua, Mexico, at the Foro binacional:
“En defensa del desierto y el agua. No al fracking."
The conference description is as follows:
"Chihuahua vs fracking, la Alianza Mexicana contra el Fracking y la Fundación Heinrich Böll convocan al foro donde especialistas, organizaciones y comunidades afectadas por la fractura hidráulica o fracking y por gasoductos informarán con datos científicos y experiencias sobre las consecuencias que esta práctica conlleva."
The paper itself, part personal reflection from the Pennsylvania shalefields, part factual survey of immediate destruction and likely future impacts, and part analysis of continuing fossil fuel extraction in light of climate change, stems from my current book project: "Eco-Nihilism: The Philosophical Geopolitics of the Climate Change Apocalypse," available, I hope in later 2016, Lexington Press.
From Activism to Insurgency:
Civil Disobedience is an Act of Self-Defense
Wendy Lynne Lee
Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania
Presentation and Photographs:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/wendylynnelee/albums/72157659193602785
https://www.academia.edu/16323726/From_Activism_to_Insurgency_Civil_Disobedience_is_an_Act_of_Self-Defense
I remember a time when I’d take my daughter,
Carley, on meandering Sunday morning drives through the thousands shades of
green that color the hills and valleys, the farms and forests of rural
Pennsylvania. I’d grown up in the Southwest United States amidst riotous
transformations from desert pinks to shimmering grasslands to the indigo of the
Rockies at night, but I’d also grown to love the explosions of rust-red,
Marigold-yellow, and pumpkin, the incredible show that Autumn in the Northeast U.S.
puts on every year. Even though the Granite of the Colorado Rockies had to make
way for ancient Appalachian Basin shale beds, geology has long signified
something permanent, historical, and all-but-immutable for me; it had been a
source of both wonder and consolation—at least until the drill rigs, sand cans,
waste water tankers, armies of roust-abouts, engineers, and project managers
showed up in their shiny white trucks with their Texas and Oklahoma plates.
It’s hard to exaggerate the extent to which
Pennsylvanians were caught off guard by the invasion of gas companies like
Cabot, Chesapeake, XTO, Range Resources, or “Wildcatters” with catchy names
like Inflection or Penneco. It felt like a military offensive; only instead of
tanks and armored personnel carriers, we watched tractor-trailers carrying
gigantic drill bits, immense engines and turbines, huge silica-conveyors, and
literally thousands of white trucks with diamond plate boxes full of chemicals
and explosives rambling down two lane country roads, ripping them up from stem
to stern along the way to acres and acres of flattened mountain top—“pads”
converted from forest and wildlife habitat into parking lots for the monstrous
machinery of gas production.
The Marcellus drilling boom began in earnest in
2005—but was no doubt on the drawing boards of the big oil and gas companies
years earlier spurred on by weak environmental regulations, a long history of resource
liquidation, pollution, corporate abrogation of responsibility, and a culture
of resignation to political turpitude and regulatory neglect. The Marcellus is the fourth largest
shale play in the U.S. as of 2012 (http://www.usasymposium.com/bakken/docs/Clover
Global Solutions,LP - The Seven Major US Shale Plays.pdf), and is
likely to move up that list once the hundreds of miles of new or upgraded
transmission and gathering pipeline are completed along with compressor
facilities and export depots. As reported by the Pipeline and Gas Journal as far back as 2011:
More than half of the
interstate natural-gas pipeline projects proposed to federal energy regulators
since early 2010 involve Pennsylvania — at a cost estimated at more than $2
billion, the Associated Press reported on Aug. 15. That means hundreds of new
miles of transmission and gathering lines as part of the network that extends
through Pennsylvania and neighboring states, as well as dozens of new or
upgraded compression stations. (http://www.pipelineandgasjournal.com/pennsylvania-new-hub-pipeline-work)
It’s
an easy thing to tell you what you already know—horizontal, slickwater
hydraulic fracturing—fracking—is bad.
According to Global Witness, environmental
activists in Latin America and Southeast Asia in have taken the lead in
bringing the public’s attention to the serious environmental, wildlife habitat
destruction, and human health issues associated with what restoration ecologist
Kevin Heatley has called “dispersed
industrialization,” namely, an
industrializing process unconfined to a particular location of manufacture, but
instead dispersed throughout wide regions of extraction, processing, and
transport. With at least forty documented cases of environmental activists
murdered in Mexico from 2002-2012, and more than 908 worldwide, we all know how
that the stakes are high. You know it; the oil and gas industry knows it; the
politicians and policy-makers know it. Indeed, the only stakes higher than the
prospect of billions of petrodollars filling the pockets of some of the world’s
most mercenary and ruthless corporations are the existential conditions of the
planet itself.
What I want to make sure I impress on you, however,
is that although the risks you’ve taken to expose this criminal enterprise are
tremendous, they’re of equally tremendous value. Fact is, I wish I could get my
own fellow Americans to take this crisis as seriously as you do, as did 448
murdered Brazilians, 109 Hondurans, and 67 Phillippines, among others. The stakes really are that high. Defined
narrowly, hydraulic fracturing
is the process of drilling down into the earth before
a high-pressure water mixture is directed at the rock to release the gas
inside. Water, sand and chemicals are injected into the rock at high pressure
which allows the gas to flow out to the head of the well. The process is
carried out vertically or, more commonly, by drilling horizontally to the rock
layer. The process can create new pathways to release gas or can be used to
extend existing channels. (http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-14432401).
But that’s only a tiny sliver of the
story. Fact is, once you account for the full scale of environmental, health
and community cost you realize that “fracking” is just shorthand for a process
of industrialization that—since 2005 and 500,000 active natural gas wells in
the U.S. alone—is responsible for
·
The damage or destruction of at least 360,000 acres
of land.
·
The permanent contamination of at least 250
billion gallons of water. (enough water to supply 20,591,781
people for a year)
·
The injection of at least 2 billion gallons of
chemicals, many of them carcinogens, deep into the ground.
·
The emission of 450 tons of air pollution.
·
The emission of at least 280 million gallons of
wastewater, a substantial portion of it radioactive.
·
4000 documented cases of contaminated ground
water, and 100 million metric tons of carbon dioxide or methane emissions from
completed wells.
The amounts vary widely, but
anywhere from 2 to 16 million gallons of water per frack are necessary to the drilling process according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). In
Pennsylvania’s Marcellus shale play, the typical number of gallons is 4.5
million/ (http://www.usgs.gov/faq/categories/10132/3824),
requiring 400 tanker trucks, often idling, emitting diesel fumes (http://www.dangersoffracking.com/). According to one university study,
[t]he large fleets of diesel trucks…required to support
the fracking process significantly increase ground level ozone and particulate
matter as well as the risk of traffic
accidents. Ground level
ozone is a potent pulmonary irritant responsible for reduced pulmonary function
and the exacerbation of asthma and emphysema. Elevations in
particulate matter are responsible for an increased incidence of asthma, cardiovascular disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary
disease, and cancer. (http://emba.villanova.edu/content/dam/villanova/sustainability/McD-LFrackingEnvironmentHealth.pdf).
Eack frack on average
requires 40,000 gallons of
chemicals to “stimulate” the well. These include benzene, lead, uranium,
mercury, hydrochloric acid, formaldehyde, ethylene glycol, among a host of other
carcinogens, toxins, and neurotoxins.
Methane—a potent greenhouse
gas—leaches from the fissures produced by chemically induced explosions
intended to release the gas. As of 2013 there were over 1000 documented cases
of drinking well water contamination in the U.S. It doesn’t take a rocket
scientist to see that this is a dangerous business, especially when you
consider that a well can be fracked up to 18 times, and that less than half the
“produced” waste-water is recovered (http://www.dangersoffracking.com/). No one really knows where exactly the rest of it goes, and
the industry not only ignores this issue, but once the wells are sealed and the
site “restored,” the company packs up and leaves. It’s important to note that
“restored” means little more than planting a cosmetic layer of grass, and that
“pack up and leave” is typically followed by significant economic hardship for
communities whose ancillary businesses—hotels, restaurants, and taverns—have
become dependent on the dollars spent by gas-workers imported from Texas,
Oklahoma, or Louisianna—and I haven’t even addressed the increase, ranging from
chemical to mechanical—of exposure to hazards affecting gas industry workers.
We could also talk for a good while about the uptick in crimes associated with
alcoholism, drug abuse, sexual assault, and sexually transmitted disease in
communities that host gas-related “man camps” (http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/inside-frackings-man-camps-where-sex-drugs-and-gonorrhea-run-rampant), the many regions across the U.S. who’ve experienced a surge
of drilling and/or waste-water injection well related earthquakes, and the
community division that results from pressures on hospital emergency services
resulting from all three of these (http://documents.foodandwaterwatch.org/doc/Social_Costs_of_Fracking.pdf). Earthquakes eported in Texas and Oklahoma, along with similar
reports from regions with scant history of seismic activity like Ohio,
Colorado, and California have not to date produced documented fatalities, but
what experts suggest is that smaller quakes are likely to be followed by larger
ones. The point, of course, is that any and all of these issues characterize
“fracking” (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/14/fracking-earthquake_n_5585892.html).
But even these facts
represent only a fraction of the real and potential future hazards associated
with fracking—especially in light of extremely poor reporting by an industry
left largely to police itself, the illegal dumping of waste fluids and other
hazardous materials well beyond the documented cases, the unknown hazards
associated with the combined effects of chemical interactions in frack waste
water left at the drill site, and the effects of the massive use of biocides in
the drilling process for human and nonhuman species. Benzene alone is associated with rashes, severe nose-bleeds,
dizziness, difficulty breathing, gastrointestinal distress, vomiting, and
headache, and fatigue (http://emba.villanova.edu/content/dam/villanova/sustainability/McD-LFrackingEnvironmentHealth.pdf). One scientist at Villanova University estimates that “[o]f the more than 350 [chemicals used in fracking] that were
investigated further, 75% were found to potentially affect the respiratory and
gastrointestinal systems, the liver, and various sensory organs. Moreover, more
than half of these chemicals could affect the brain and nervous system” (http://emba.villanova.edu/content/dam/villanova/sustainability/McD-LFrackingEnvironmentHealth.pdf).
The only really relevant questions, then,
about fracking are what can be done about it beyond hand wringing and bewailing
the fates of our children, and I’d argue that this latter—the fates of our
children—invests us with an incorrigible moral duty not merely to inform
ourselves of the facts, but to work in concert with others—locally, regionally,
and globally—to agitate for the only kind of enduring change that will matter:
an end to the domination of the multinationals and their analogues in
government whose systemic exploitation of our resources, our labor, and our
communities leaves us with a hundred choices of catsup at Walmart and a
wasteland where once there was a mountain, a desert, a river, a vista. The
continuation of fossil fuel production will leave our ecologies desolate, our
health deteriorated, and our hope potentially damaged beyond repair. We can’t
let this happen. What this means is that we too must change from insensible
consumers to informed citizens, from fearfully short-sighted to ferociously
future-oriented. I know that many of you have already undergone that
transformation.
Equipped with some experience as an activist
for women’s civil rights, nonhuman animal rights, and environmental
preservation, I came to the anti-fracking movement with high hopes that,
organized, vocal, and persistent, a fledgling movement would be able to make
our elected representatives see and hear what was happening on the farms, the
roads, in the state parks and the towns of rural Pennsylvania. I organized
protests, I participated in occupations, I took literally thousands of pictures
of frack pads, well-heads, pipeline cuts, compressor construction, forest
liquidation, truck traffic, polluted streams, chain link fence barriers—and
angry activists all over the state. I made these widely available through
social media. I gave speeches beseeching my representatives to act on behalf of
the constituents that elected them. I delivered carefully researched commentary
to the FERC—the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. I wrote letters, went to
countless hearings, and signed petitions. I wrote an incendiary blog dissecting
the industry as the reckless profiteering Behemoth it is. I gave interviews to
Mother Jones, National Public Radio, Democracy Now, American Prospect, and Alex
Chadwick’s BURN, among others. I’ve been investigated by the state police and
the FBI Eco-Terrorism Task Force. My phone’s been tapped and my house
vandalized, my dogs let out the gate of my modest quarter acre. This was not
fun.
I learned some very valuable lessons—that’s
indeed, the last thing I hope you’ll take away today. They’re pretty
straightforward, and I now regard them as crucial not only to ending the
domination of the oil and gas industry, but to making possible a future worth the
immense sacrifice that will be required to realize it:
·
First, in all likelihood, the agencies charged
with the power and responsibility to protect our water, air, and soil are
either corrupt, incompetent, impotent or all three. Appealing to them in hopes
that they’ll act on our behalf may assuage our conscience, but it will not put
an end to the liquidation of our ecologies and communities. The naïve belief,
moreover, that environmental and labor law is drafted to protect and promote
our interests needs to be scrapped. Nothing could make these facts clearer than
NAFTA and now TPP.
·
Second, all the petitions, letters, blogs,
speeches, comments, hearings, etc, in the world are for naught if we do not
become a massive, global movement of insurgents united around a single
uncompromising and unwavering message: all
forms of unconventional oil and gas extraction must stop. They must stop
now, and they must stop entirely. We must demand equally uncompromising action
on climate change and the recognition that virtually all of the planet’s
current misfortunes—including the migrations of refugees, poverty and
starvation, the emergence of more virulent disease and disease vectors,
terrorism, species extinction, international and internecine war, and the
perilous loss of clean water—have as their foundation the deterioration of our
environmental conditions. Environmental integrity is the only soil in which
justice can grow to maturity; it is the only ground in which just institutions
can become rooted and enduring.
·
Third, although we’re routinely fear-mongered into
believing that acts of civil disobedience are inherently violent in virtue of
their violation of the law, the fact of the matter is that this is a falsehood
intended to intimidate and silence us. Indeed, we must become more willing than
ever to absorb the pepper-spray, the baton blows, the verbal assaults and the
bullets of governments who deploy law enforcement to insure the uninterrupted
flow of petroleum and petro-dollars into the bank accounts of its corporate
benefactors. Like those of the American Civil Rights Movement, our actions must
be timely, well-planned, creative, loud, and enduring. But they must be more.
They must be global in their scope, their inclusion of marginalized voices, and
in their objectives. They must take the rights of communities seriously—but not
at the forfeiture of organizing across borders—geographical or ideological. Our
insurgency must, I think, take as its galvanizing point of departure the clear
understanding that an industry willing to extract profits—quite literally—from
the bone marrow of the planet at the direct expense of its capacity to support
life is essentially nihilistic. Our concerted and relentless protest is thus an
act of self-defense.
·
Lastly, unlike many in the Pennsylvania
anti-fracking movement, we must not give up hope. This “giving up” come in at
least three varieties:
o
The first is that of the “fracktivist” who
satisfies her or himself that signing the next petition will be sufficient to
make a difference. They know better, but insofar as denial is a form of resignation,
such “activism” is more like walking away from the struggle than onto the
battlefield.
o
The second is the well-meaning organizer who has
bought into the false belief that acts of civil disobedience are beyond the
pale of legitimate protest; they too know that without a massive presence
holding up signs and giving speeches in front of government and/or corporate
offices will not likely be effective. Even the 400,000 at New York City’s March
for Climate Action has accomplished fairly little because its events—however
large—were predictably scripted; its organizers suitably intimidated by the
prospect of arrest.
o
Third—and perhaps most troubling—are those among
the “professional organizers” who depend on the continuation of the crisis,
whose careers are tethered to being heroes of a “movement,” and whose incomes
derive not from the hope that a better future is possible, but from the anxiety
and terror of a volatile present. The Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense
Fund, the Audubon Society, and several others—these are not our allies, and
they will gladly use us—characterizing us as terrorists and radicals—to make
their own compromising corporate-friendly positions appear sensible and good.
Our first responsibility, then, is to the kind of critical analysis that
permits us to see through hype and propaganda to the only hope worth
pursuing—that which offers to our children a future worth their own.
On this last note, however, I realize I’m
speaking not so much to you, but to my fellows in the U.S., people for whom my
heart breaks. For even though we may not face the prospect that we could be
murdered for speaking out against this criminal activity, we face the
culpability of being citizens of one of the most powerful nations on the
planet, a nation whose flag is deployed as propaganda by Exxon-Mobil, Anadarko,
Chesapeake, and Chevron—among so many others. What you face is violence; what
we face is shame. Which is worse, I’m not sure I know.
Wendy Lynne Lee
