“The waste has to go somewhere.” News report.
LaVernia, Texas residents in Wilson County don’t want that toxic waste dumped in their backyard. So they have organized to fight it and this weekend they had a BBQ fundraiser to raise money for legal fees.
Communities have good reason to fight these kind of facilities and the long-term impacts they bring. But there is a hard fact that communities need to consider: “The waste has to go somewhere.” Is displacing that waste to a less fortunate community a moral solution?
I would like to see communities develop a plan for either helping to mitigate–means lesson damage not eliminate it–the damage in the communities that are forced to accept the waste, or a plan for how they will structure their community to decrease their participation in the activities–rabid consumerism and energy intensive lifestyles–that drive the need for this destructive practice.
Hydraulic fracturing presents humbling moral dilemmas. One community’s victory creates a sacrifice zone of another community. I consider these dilemmas everyday while working with communities.
Fracking justice and the American way
“The tables are turned. Americans aren’t used to being treated like they are the indigenous people being colonized. But that’s what’s happening.” So says Ben Price, project director for the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, in a recent story about Pennsylvania’s controversial Act 13. The new law severely limits municipal authority to regulate shale gas development.
I heard a similar sentiment from Calvin Tillman, former mayor of Dish, Texas, when he visited my hometown of Denton to help us think about revisions to our drilling and production ordinance. He gave a powerful speech about the health impacts and property rights violations he saw as Dish became the crossroads of America’s natural gas “superhighway.”
But Price’s formulation oversimplifies the question of justice. Americans lead commodious, energy-intensive lives that are dependent on resources like natural gas. We all benefit indirectly from fracking because we need the gas.
We prefer not to see or think about the conditions that make our everyday lives replete with gadgets and appliances possible. But for Denton and other communities atop shale formations, the wall between background production and foreground consumption has collapsed.
The question of justice is muddied when people start protesting developments in their backyard that produce commodities they consume in their homes. In one way, this is a principled stand against a ruthless utilitarian calculus that would sacrifice the few to satisfy the many. But in another way, it is hypocrisy if the upshot is that we are happy to consume the goodies as long as the nasty processes that make them available are located in someone else’s backyard.
Many who protest fracking try to divorce the question of distributive justice from an examination of the way we live. This leads to powerful rhetoric about colonizing corporations and powerless locals. We “citizens of the shale” are fighting this colonization with one hand and – through our consumer choices – financing it with the other.
Adam Briggle is a philosophy and religion professor and chair of the Denton Stakeholder Drilling Advisory Group. He can be reached at Adam.Briggle@unt.edu
About Sharon Wilson
Sharon Wilson is considered a leading citizen expert on the impacts of shale oil and gas extraction. She is the go-to person whether it’s top EPA officials from D.C., national and international news networks, or residents facing the shock of eminent domain and the devastating environmental effects of natural gas development in their backyards.
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Great post Sharon
I see this as a growing phenomenon: forced awakening. It’s hard to ignore or deny reality when it’s in your face – in your children’s faces.
Waking up to what we are and what has happened is a process of individual consciousness. Consider this e-mail recently posted on Morris Berman’s blog:
” I’m 56 years old, and for most of my life I’ve been haunted by the sense that, between the world I grew up in and the world I ended up in, something went terribly wrong. Don’t misunderstand – I’m not a nut. I’m a management consultant working with large arts organizations around issues of strategy and innovation, and pretty successful at it by the standards of an economically oriented world. But I have been haunted (it’s the only word that works) by a bone deep sense that something very fundamental went amiss in my lifetime. Your work has helped me to understand the source of my disquiet.
I think there must be millions like me facing a terrible choice. On one hand we can face the triumph in our time of a global consumer culture, and the soul sickness it creates and depends on, and live with the misery that nothing we can do can turn that historic tide. On the other, we can indulge in the delusion that if we just recycle enough, or embrace our inner child, or save the white tigers, or indulge in any number of anodynes, that we can change the world and redeem our species.
It’s really a choice of miseries – the misery of seeing a terrible truth, or the misery of denial. I have envied people who could do the latter, and tried to myself, but with no success. Your work has helped me realize that, for me anyway, the misery of denial is the greater of the two. Thank you.”
A choice of miseries, indeed.
Full post is here:
http://morrisberman.blogspot.com/2012/06/in-nutshell.html
One mind at a time, eh?
BTW – thanks for giving Chip a place to crash, so to speak.
Best…
Here’s a little more, por favor…
Just watched, then read, Bill Moyers’ essay from this week’s show. As always, truthtelling at it’s best.
“…that’s how Jefferson came to embody the oldest and longest war of all — the war between the self and the truth, between what we know and how we live.”
Right here:
http://billmoyers.com/segment/bill-moyers-essay-the-difficult-truths-behind-independence-day/
Aside from failing casings contaminating our water supply, disposal of this toxic waste is probably the largest problem the drillers face-which may explain why they never discuss it, and have attempted a number of different disposal methods. None of which are very cost effective-or rather, all cost more money than they’d rather spend, so they fabricate ‘benefits’ of drilling mud-such as land-farming it or dumping the toxic Flowback on roads to melt ice and snow.
I’m not sure if drilling mud can be recycled, but Flowback can. It should be required of all drillers to recycle Flowback.
We should ask ANGA-all those commercials they run on TV, they seem to have all the answers to everything related to natural gas development, why not this problem? Oh, that’s right, ANGA’s website is a one-way street. They are more than happy to provide you with all the info they want you to believe, but you can’t ask questions or post comments.
http://www.athensnews.com/ohio/article-37232-fracking-opponents-claim-theyve-got-test-results-on-contents-of-local-injection-well.html… “analysis of the brine, the release alleges, showed it to contain ‘alpha particles,’ indicative of radioactivity, as well as arsenic, barium, toluene and other toxic chemicals. The news release does not indicate what concentrations these substances were allegedly found in, but does quote a biology professor from Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia, Ben Stout, who claims that the brine qualifies to be classified as hazardous waste.