Hydrofracking, sounds obscene, and it is if you care for, honor and respect Mother Earth. Short for high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing, hydrofracking involves injecting huge amounts of water, mixed with sand and toxic chemicals at high pressures to break up deep shale rock formations (see map below) and release the natural gas through a well to the surface. For a gluttonous energy-consuming country such as the USA, hydrofracking is the newest energy gold rush to meet an ever-growing demand, but at what environmental and human health expense? If we rush to poison our remaining water supplies for short-term economic gain to exploit non-renewable energy resources such as shale gas, what we have left is a dry, barren wasteland.
Some numbers for perspective. The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates extend to over 800 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) in technically recoverable US oil shale deposits, with 3.11 Tcf of shale gas produced in 2009 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shale_gas_in_the_United_States). The EIA’s US total natural gas estimates are 2,587 Tcf, which includes undiscovered, unproved, and unconventional sources; and 237 Tcf of proven natural gas reserves (http://www.naturalgas.org/overview/resources.asp). For 2009, the EIA reports US natural gas marketed production at 21.7 Tcf (and 2.7 Tcf net imports representing approximately 12% of annual consumption) and US natural gas consumption totaled 22.8 Tcf (http://www.eia.gov/oil_gas/natural_gas/data_publications/natural_gas_annual/nga.html).
The New York Times ongoing investigative reporting series in 2011, “Drilling Down,” features exposés on hydrofracking to examine the risks of natural-gas drilling and efforts to regulate this rapidly growing industry. One of the component articles, “Extracting Natural Gas From Rock: A look at the process and hazards of hydraulic fracturing,” February 26, 2011 by Graham Roberts, Mika Gröndahl and Bill Marsh, provides an introductory engineering explanation of the hydrofracking process (see excellent animated illustration athttp://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/02/27/us/fracking.html). Once the well is constructed in place, shale gas production and waste storage systems come into play. See graphical depiction in “Chemicals and Toxic Materials That Come With Hydrofracking: Waste disposal and other hazards in drilling for natural gas,” March 1, 2011 by Mika Gröndahl, Bill Marsh and Graham Roberts (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/03/01/us/chemicals-and-toxic-materials-in-hydrofracking.html).
Other excellent “Drilling Down” articles reveal the risk and controversy in deploying hyrdrofracking: groundwater pollution, radioactive pollutants brought to surface; atmospheric pollution; shale gas flaring or release contributing global warming; leaching and spills of toxic wastes from surface holding tanks or from accidents involving transport tanker trucks, earthquakes and subsidence, and more. For example, a hydrofracking well can produce over a million gallons of wastewater that is often laced with highly corrosive salts, carcinogens like benzene and radioactive elements like radium, all of which can occur naturally thousands of feet underground. Other carcinogenic materials can be added to the wastewater by the chemicals used in the hydrofracking itself (see “Regulation Lax as Gas Wells’ Tainted Water Hits Rivers,” February 26, 2011 by Ian Urbina (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/us/27gas.html?ref=drillingdown).
Hydrofracking alarms are sounded in several videos, such as the accompanying NYT video entitled “Natural Gas and Polluted Air,” February 27, 2011 by Erik Olsen about negative hydrofracking impacts in Garfield County, Colorado causing some residents to flee to safer locations as environmental refugees (http://video.nytimes.com/video/2011/02/26/us/100000000650773/natgas.html). Another powerful video is “Fracking Hell: The Untold Story,” January 11, 2011 by Earth Focus and UK’s Ecologist Film Unit (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEB_Wwe-uBM&feature=related). Josh Fox, an independent film maker who lives in Pennsylvania, produced a 2010 Sundance Film Festival documentary, “Gasland,” that is a journey of discovery of communities impacted by hydrofracking across America http://www.gaslandthemovie.com/about-the-film). Many videos are posted to Youtube showing homeowners’ tap water catching on fire after drinking water supplies compromised by hydrofracking volatiles. And lets not leave out the musical video, “My Water’s on Fire Tonight,” May 12, 2011 by the Studio 20 NYC in collaboration with http://www.ProPublica.org (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHQu3SeUwUI).
How refreshing, how important is water? “Cool, clear water” is what Bob Nolan sang about. A famous Country/Western songwriter and performer with Sons of the Pioneers (I recall Roy Rogers, the singing cowboy on television in the 1950s, who was an original member of the group), Nolan wrote the classic song “Cool Water” about precious water to a man and his mule, Dan, traversing a desert. Somewhat earlier Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s epic poem published in 1798, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” included a memorable stanza about precious water needed by a becalmed, thirsty crew at sea.
“Cool Water”
(Bob Nolan, 1936)
All day I’ve faced a barren waste
Without the taste of water, cool water.
Old Dan and I with throats burnt dry
And souls that cry for water,
Cool, clear water.[Chorus]:
Keep a-movin’, Dan, don’t you listen to him, Dan,
He’s a devil not a man
And he spreads the burning sand with water,
Cool water.
Dan, can you see that big green tree
Where the water’s running free
And it’s waiting there for me
And you?The nights are cool and I’m a fool,
Each star’s a pool of water, cool water.
But with the dawn I’ll wake and yawn
And carry on to water,
Cool, clear water.[Chorus]
The shadows sway and seem to say,
“Tonight we pray for water,
Cool water.”
And ‘way up there He’ll hear our pray’r
And show us where there’s water,
Cool, clear water.[Chorus]
Dan’s feet are sore, he’s yearning for
Just one thing more than water,
Cool water.
Like me, I guess, he’d like to rest
Where there’s no quest for water,
Cool, clear water.[Chorus]
Excerpted from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
(Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798)Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
Before these iconic calls for fresh water, indigenous oral histories revere water as a living relation from the beginning of time. To many, if not all, American Indian peoples, water is sacred and has a spirit. Water sustains life, as observed in this Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address:
The Waters
We give thanks to all the Waters of the world for quenching our thirst and providing us with strength. Water is life. We know its power in many forms—waterfalls and rain, mists and streams, rivers and oceans. With one mind, we send greetings and thanks to the spirit of Water.
Now our minds are one.”
Excerpted from Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address: Greetings to the Natural World(http://americanindian.si.edu/education/files/thanksgiving_address.pdf).
Mother Earth Water Walk 2011 culminated at the Bad River Ojibwe Reservation on June 12 with Spirit Bundles from each direction offered with blessings. Carried on foot by American Indian grandmothers of many tribes with the message ‘Water Is Life,” sacred copper vessels of salt water from the Gulf of Mexico, Pacific, Arctic, and Atlantic Oceans were mixed ceremonially into Lake Superior (see excellent article published on July 8, 2011 by Paul DeMain of Indian Country News: http://indiancountrynews.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=11908&Itemid=1).
Tia Oros Peters, our Zuni sister who heads up The Seventh Generation Fund, provided collective voice for Water in her stirring speech at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in 2007 as follows:
Indigenous Peoples know Water as the sacred source and essence of all Life imbued with a spirit and a consciousness. The vitality of Water to our communities is expressed in a rainbow of songs, stories, and ceremonies, holding a special place in our cultures for the continuation of an Indigenous worldview that affirms the vital link of Water to life everlasting. And yet, springs from which our ancestors emerged from within the womb of Mother Earth, precious watersheds that feed our lakes and enable life, and rivers that carry our prayers to the forever after, are being destroyed. Privatization of Water and our other resources places them in the control of multi-national corporations, shortsighted governmental development policies, and the unrelenting encroachment by non-indigenous settlements, forcing us into poverty and pushing us further to the edge of existence, where we are already barely holding on by our fingertips for survival.
Environmental injustice including the ongoing invasions onto Indigenous territories, and the attendant wrongful taking of our natural resources, particularly the nearly unhindered exploitation and commodification of Water, obstruct critically needed access to our Waterways and threaten the survival of Indigenous Peoples and of our distinct cultures. These assaults have direct and tremendously destructive impacts and further impoverish our already vulnerable, besieged Peoples. Although North America is widely assumed to be a region of universal affluence, there are many thousands of Indigenous Peoples and communities, throughout the continent, who have no meaningful system of protection against the wrongful diversion, privatization, and oppression of our Water resources. In fact, many of us are dying of thirst.
Madame Chair, and esteemed members of this Forum, Indigenous women throughout the world who often have the primary responsibility of locating and carrying water for their families, and may risk their lives to do so now find only dust instead of water. In too many places, a polluted stream is our only source of Water. We hunger and can no longer plant our gardens, not because we have forgotten how to nurture life from a seed, but because without access to Water, our crops cannot flourish, and we cannot thrive without them. A child dies every eight seconds for lack of access to clean Water and many victims are our own, Indigenous children. The unquenchable greed of States, corporations, settlers, and other invaders, whose unrelenting actions on our lands constitute a Water war against Indigenous Peoples, are killing us all – violating our ecosystems, condemning our peoples, obliterating our futures.
What were once rich landscapes awake with forests and gardens, rivers and cornfields, alive with animals and birds, and a harmonious diversity of Indigenous cultures, are quickly becoming parched lands that only our tears can soften today. Let us dry our eyes and take action on the recommendations as offered. Water is a human right. Our children, those generations yet to be born, and all of our relations, are the ultimate casualties of this conflict. I urge you all to take immediate action on this most urgent matter. Thank you for your kind attention. Elahkwa” (http://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2007/05/indigenous-speak-out-for-sacred-water.html).
What do some American Indians have to say about hydrofracking, this latest threat to Mother Earth? See the Haudenosaunee Statement on Hydrofracking: http://www.hetf.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=57:haudenosaunee-statement-on-hydrofracking&catid=37:hydrofracking&Itemid=57
With deep respect for honoring, thanking, and replenishing Waters,
GEM Education Center Blog 