How Rural America Got Fracked

[xchrom]

http://www.thenation.com/article/167980/how-rural-america-got-fracked

f the world can be seen in a grain of sand, watch out. As Wisconsinites are learning, there’s money (and misery) in sand—and if you’ve got the right kind, an oil company may soon be at your doorstep.

March in Wisconsin used to mean snow on the ground, temperatures so cold that farmers worried about their cows freezing to death. But as I traveled around rural townships and villages in early March to interview people about frac-sand mining, a little-known cousin of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” daytime temperatures soared to nearly eighty degrees—bizarre weather that seemed to be sending a meteorological message.

In this troubling spring, Wisconsin’s prairies and farmland fanned out to undulating hills that cradled the land and its people. Within their embrace, the rackety calls of geese echoed from ice-free ponds, bald eagles wheeled in the sky and deer leaped in the brush. And for the first time in my life, I heard the thrilling warble of sandhill cranes.

Yet this peaceful rural landscape is swiftly becoming part of a vast assembly line in the corporate race for the last fossil fuels on the planet. The target: the sand in the land of the cranes.

[zbdent]

1. rural America may get a real surprise ...

especially if they get a situation like in Ohio ... the Repug-instituted "scientists" at the Ohio EPA made sure that the frackers didn't have to disclose the chemicals used.

Just wait until the rurals start discovering an odd taste in their well water ...

[Nihil]

2. Some brutal quotes in that article ...

> That year (2009), from all US sources, frac-sand producers used or sold
> over 6.5 million metric tons of sand—about what the Great Pyramid of Giza
> weighs. Last month, ... corporations were hauling at least 15 million metric tons
> a year from the state’s hills.

> Awash in promises of corporate jobs and easy money, those who lease and
> sell their land just shrug. “The landscape is gonna change when it’s all said
> and done,” says dairy farmer Bobby Schindler, who in 2008 leased his land
> in Chippewa County to a frac-sand company called Canadian Sand and
> Proppant. (EOG, the former Enron, has since taken over the lease.)
> “Instead of being a hill it’s gonna be a valley, but all seeded down, and
> you’d never know there’s a mine there unless you were familiar with the area.”

> Local citizens did manage to get the corporation to agree to give the town
> $250,000 for the first two million tons mined annually, $50,000 more than
> its original offer. In exchange, the township agreed that any ordinance it
> might pass in the future to restrict mining wouldn’t apply to Unimin.
> Multiply the two million tons of frac-sand tonnage Unimin expects to mine
> annually starting in 2013 by the $300 a ton the industry makes and you’ll
> find that the township only gets .0004 percent of what the company will gross.

Greed. Stupidity. Destruction.


> Geology that has taken millions of years to form is now being transformed
> into part of a system, a machine, helping to drive global climate change.

Another marker in the Anthropocene discontinuity.

[xchrom]

3. +1