Consider this, then, an environmental Occupy Wall Street. It
knows no divisions of social class or political affiliation. Everyone,
after all, needs clean water.
This
is a story about water, the land surrounding it, and the lives it
sustains. Clean water should be a right: there is no life without it.
New York is what you might call a “water state.” Its rivers and their
tributaries only start with the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, the Delaware,
and the Susquehanna. The best known of its lakes are Great Lakes Erie
and Ontario, Lake George, and the Finger Lakes. Its brooks, creeks, and
trout streams are fishermen’s lore.
Far
below this rippling wealth there’s a vast, rocky netherworld called the
Marcellus Shale. Stretching through southern New York, Pennsylvania,
Ohio, and West Virginia, the shale contains bubbles of methane, the
remains of life that died 400 million years ago. Gas corporations have
lusted for the methane in the Marcellus since at least 1967 when one of
them plotted with the Atomic Energy Agency to explode a
nuclear bomb to
unleash it. That idea died, but it’s been reborn in the form of a
technology invented by Halliburton Corporation: high-volume horizontal
hydraulic fracturing -- “fracking” for short.
Fracking uses prodigious amounts of
water laced with sand and a startling menu of
poisonous chemicals to
blast the methane out of the shale. At hyperbaric bomb-like pressures,
this technology propels five to seven million gallons of
sand-and-chemical-laced water a mile or so down a well bore into the
shale.
Up comes the methane --
along with about a million gallons of wastewater containing the original
fracking chemicals and other substances that were also in the shale,
among them
radioactive elements and carcinogens.
There are 400,000 such wells in the United States. Surrounded by
rumbling machinery, serviced by tens of thousands of diesel trucks, this
nightmare technology for energy release has turned rural areas in 34
U.S. states into toxic industrial zones.
Shale gas isn’t the conventional kind that lit your grandmother’s stove. It’s one of those
“extreme energy” forms
so difficult to produce that merely accessing them poses unprecedented
dangers to the planet. In every fracking state but New York, where a
moratorium against the process has been in effect since 2010, the gas
industry has
contaminated ground water,
sickened people, poisoned livestock, and killed wildlife.
At a time when the
International Energy Agency reports
that we have five more years of fossil-fuel use at current levels
before the planet goes into irreversible climate change, fracking has a
greenhouse gas footprint larger than that of coal. And with the
greatest water crisis in
human history underway, fracking injects mind-numbing quantities of
purposely-poisoned fresh water into the Earth. As for the trillions
(repeat: trillions) of gallons of wastewater generated by the industry,
getting rid of it is its
own story. Fracking has also been linked to
earthquakes: eleven in Ohio alone (normally not an earthquake zone) over the past year.
But
for once, this story isn’t about tragedy. It’s about a resistance
movement that has arisen to challenge some of the most powerful
corporations in history. Here you will find no handsomely funded
national environmental organizations: some of them in fact have had a
cozy
relationship with
the gas industry, embracing the industry’s line that natural gas is a
“bridge” to future alternative energies. (In fact, shale gas
suppresses the development of renewable energies.)
New York’s “Little Revolution”
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