A Secret War of Activists -- With the World in the Balance
| by Ellen Cantarow
Courtesy: Tom Dispatch
( November 19, 2012,
Washington DC, Sri Lanka Guardian) There’s a war going on that you know nothing
about between a coalition of great powers and a small insurgent movement.
It’s a secret war being waged in the shadows while you go about your everyday
life.
In the end, this
conflict may matter more than those in Iraq and Afghanistan ever did. And
yet it’s taking place far from newspaper front pages and with hardly a notice
on the nightly news. Nor is it being fought in Yemen or Pakistan or
Somalia, but in small hamlets in upstate New York. There, a loose network
of activists is waging a guerrilla campaign not with improvised explosive
devices or rocket-propelled grenades, but with zoning ordinances and
petitions.
The weaponry may be
humdrum, but the stakes couldn’t be higher. Ultimately, the fate of the planet
may hang in the balance.
All summer long, the climate-change nightmares
came on fast and furious. Once-fertile swathes of American heartland baked into an aridity reminiscent of
sub-Saharan Africa. Hundreds of thousands of fish dead
in overheated streams. Six million acres in the West consumed by
wildfires. In September, a reportcommissioned by 20 governments predicted that as many as 100 million
people across the world could die by 2030 if fossil-fuel consumption isn’t
reduced. And all of this was before superstorm Sandy wreaked havoc on the
New York metropolitan area and the Jersey shore.
Washington’s
leadership, when it comes to climate change, is already mired in failure.
President Obama permitted oil
giant BP to resume drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, while Shell was allowed to
begin drilling tests in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska.
At the moment, the best hope for placing restraints on climate change
lies with grassroots movements.
In January, I chronicled upstate New York’s homegrown
resistance to high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing, an extreme-energy
technology that extracts methane (“natural gas”) from the Earth’s deepest
regions. Since then, local opposition has continued to face off against
the energy industry and state government in a way that may set the tone for the
rest of the country in the decades ahead. In small hamlets and tiny towns
you’ve never heard of, grassroots activists are making a stand in what could be
the beginning of a final showdown for Earth’s future.
Frack Fight
2012
New York isn’t just
another state. Its largest city is the
world’s financial capital. Six of its former governors have gone on to
the presidency and Governor Andrew Cuomo seems to have his sights set on a run
for the White House, possibly in 2016. It also has a history of movements, from
abolition and women’s suffrage in the nineteenth century to Occupy in the
twenty-first. Its environmental campaigns have included the watershed Storm King Mountain case, in which
activists defeated Con Edison’s plan to carve a giant facility into the face of
that Hudson River landmark. The decision established the right of anyone to
litigate on behalf of the environment.
Today, that activist
legacy is evident in a grassroots insurgency in upstate New York, a struggle by
ordinary Americans to protect what remains of their democracy and the Earth’s
fragile environment from giant corporations intent on wrecking both. On one
side stands New York’s anti-fracking community; on the other, the natural gas
industry, the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation, and New York’s
industry-allied Joint Landowners Coalition.
As for Governor Cuomo,
he has managed to anger both sides. He seemed to bowto industry this past June by hinting that
he would end a 2010 moratorium on fracking introduced by his predecessor David
Paterson and open the state to the process; then, in October, he appeared to retreat after
furious protests staged in Washington D.C., as well as Albany, Binghamton, and
other upstate towns.
“I have never seen [an environmental
movement] spread with such wildfire as this,” says Robert Boyle, a legendary
environmental activist and journalist who was central in the Storm King case
and founded Riverkeeper, the prototype for all
later river-guardian organizations. “It took me 13 or 14 years to get the first
Riverkeeper going. Fracking isn’t like that. It’s like lighting a train of
powder.”
Developed in 2008 and
vastly more expansive in its infrastructure than the purely vertical form of
fracking invented by Halliburton Corporation in the 1940s, high-volume
horizontal hydraulic fracturing is a land-devouring, water-squandering
technology with a greenhouse gas footprint greater than that of coal. The process
begins by propelling one to nine million gallons of sand-and-chemical-laced
water at hyperbaric bomb-like pressures a mile or more beneath Earth's surface.
Most of that fluid stays underground. Of the remainder, next to nothing is ever
again available for irrigation or drinking. A recent report by the independent, nonpartisan U.S.
Government Accountability Office concluded that fracking poses serious risks to
health and the environment.
New York State’s
grassroots resistance to fracking began about four years ago around kitchen
tables and in living rooms as neighbors started talking about this frightening
technology. Shallow drilling for easily obtainable gas had been done for
decades in the state, but this gargantuan industrial effort represented
something else again.
Anthony
Ingraffea of Cornell
University’s Department of Engineering, co-author of a study that established
the global warming footprint of the industry, calls this new form of fracking
an unparalleled danger to the environment and human health. “There’s much more
land clearing, much more devastation of forests and fields. . . thousands of
miles of pipelines. . . many compressor stations [that] require burning
enormous quantities of diesel. . . [emitting] hydrocarbons into the
atmosphere.” He adds that it’s a case of “the health of many versus the wealth
of a few.”
Against that wealth
stands a movement of the 99% -- farmers, physicists, journalists, teachers,
librarians, innkeepers, brewery owners, and engineers. “In Middlefield we’re
nothing special,” says Kelly Branigan, a realtor who last year founded a group
called Middlefield Neighbors. “We’re just regular people who got together and
learned, and reached in our pockets to go to work on this. It’s inspiring, it’s
awesome, and it’s America -- its own little revolution.”
Last year, Middlefield
became one of New York’s first towns to use the humblest of tools, zoning
ordinances, to beat back fracking. Previously, that had seemed like an
impossible task for ordinary people. In 1981, the state had exempted gas
corporations from New York’s constitutionally guaranteed home rule under which
town ordinances trump state law. In 2011, however, Ithaca-based lawyers Helen
and David Slottje overturned that gas-cozy law by establishing that, while the
state regulates industry, towns can use their zoning powers to keep it out.
Since then, a cascade of bans and moratoria -- more than 140 in all -- have
protected towns all over New York from high-volume frack drilling.
This Is What
Democracy Looks Like
Caroline, a small
hamlet in Tompkins County (population 3,282), is the second town in the state
to get 100% of its electricity through wind power and one of the most recent to
pass a fracking ban. Its residents typify the grassroots resistance of
upstate New York.
“I’m very skeptical
that multinational corporations have the best interests of communities at
heart,” Don Barber, Caroline’s Supervisor, told me recently. “The federal
government sold [Americans] out when they exempted fracking from the Clean
Water and Air Acts,” he added. “Federal and state governments are not
advocating for the civil society. There’s only one level left. That’s the local
government, and it puts a tremendous load on our shoulders.”
Caroline’s Deputy
Supervisor, Dominic Frongillo, sees local resistance in global terms. “We’re
unexpectedly finding ourselves in the ground zero for climate change,” he says.
“It used to be somewhere else, mountaintop removal in West Virginia, deep-sea
drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, tar sands in Alberta, Canada. But now...it’s
right here under our feet in upstate New York. The line is drawn here. We can’t
keep escaping the fossil fuel industry. You can’t move other places, you
just have to dig in where you are.”
Two years of pre-ban
work in Caroline included an election that replaced pro-drilling members of the
town board with fracking opponents, public education forums, and a six-month
petition drive. “We knocked on every single door two or three times,” recalls
Bill Podulka, a retired physicist who co-founded the town’s resistance
organization, ROUSE (Residents Opposed to Unsafe Shale Gas Extraction). “Many
people were opposed to gas-drilling but were afraid to speak out, not realizing
that the folks concerned were a silent majority.” In the end, 71% of those
approached signed the petition, which requested a ban.
On September 11th, a
final debate between drilling opponents and proponents took place, after which
Barber called for the vote. A ban was overwhelmingly endorsed. “For the
first time,” he told the crowd gathered in Caroline’s white clapboard town
hall, “I will be voting to change the balance of rights between individuals and
civil society. This is because of the impacts of fracking on health and the
environment. And the majority of our citizens have voted to pass the ban.” The
board then ruled 4 to 1 in favor.
Stealth
Invasion
About a year and a half
ago, as Caroline and other towns were moving to protect their land from the
industry, XTO, a subsidiary of Exxon-Mobil Corporation, began preparing for a
possible fracking future in the state. It eyed tree-shaded, Oquaga Creek,
a trout-laden Delaware tributary in upper New York State’s Sanford County,
leased the land, and applied to the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) for
a water-withdrawal permit. XTO required, it said, a quarter of a million
gallons of water from the creek every day for its hydraulic fracturing
operations.
Delaware Riverkeeper,
an environmental organization, found out about the XTO application and spread
the word. Within days, the DRBC received 7,900 letters of outrage. On
June 1, 2011, hundreds of citizens, organized by grassroots anti-frackers,
packed a hearing in Deposit, a village in Sanford Township that lies at the
confluence of the creek and the western branch of the Delaware River. Only two
people spoke at the meeting in favor of XTO. One was the Supervisor (mayor) of
Sanford, Dewey Decker. He applauded the XTO application and denounced
protestors as “outsiders.” He is among a group of landowners who have leased land to
XTO for hundreds of millions of dollars. (Decker refused to be
interviewed for this article.) The rest of the crowd spoke up for the creek,
its fish, and its wildlife. The Delaware River Basin Commission indefinitely
tabled the XTO application.
While a grassroots
victory, the episode also served as a warning about how determined the industry
is to move forward with fracking plans despite the state-enforced moratorium
still in place. As a result, Caroline and other towns are continuing to
develop local anti-fracking measures, since they know that the 2010 ban on the
process will end whenever Governor Cuomo okays rules currently being written by
the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC).
When it comes to those
rules and fracking more generally, the DEC has a conflict of interest.
While it is supposed to protect the environment, it is also tasked with
regulating the very industries that exploit it through the agency’s Mineral
Resources Division. Last year, the DEC received over
80,000 written comments on the latest draft of its guidelines for the industry,
the 1,500-page “SGEIS” (which stands for “Supplemental Generic Environmental
Impact Statement"). Drilling opponents outnumbered proponents 10 to 1. The
deluge was a record in the agency’s history.
Activists weren’t the
only ones with a keen interest in the SGEIS, however. Documents obtained
through New York’s Freedom of Information Law indicate that, in mid-August
2011, six weeks before the DEC made its statement public, the agency shared detailed
summaries of it with gas corporation representatives, giving the industry a
chance to influence the final document before it went public.
Two days before the
SGEIS was opened to public scrutiny, an attorney for the Oklahoma-based
Chesapeake Energy Corporation and other companies asked regulators to “reduce
or eliminate” a requirement for the sophisticated testing of fracking
fluids. Such fluids are laden with toxins, including carcinogens, which
storms could wash away from drilling sites -- an especially grim prospect given
the catastrophic flooding experienced in the state over the last three years.
At the same time, two
upstate New York journalists revealed that Bradley Field, the head of the
DEC’s Mineral Resources Division, had signed a petition that denied the
existence of climate change. Formerly of Getty Oil and Marathon Oil,
Field also serves as the state’s representative to the Interstate Oil and Gas
Compact Commission and the Ground Water Protection Council, both industry
fronts which maintain that fracking is benign. As this was coming to
light, state officials anonymously leaked word
of a plan to open five counties on New York’s border with Pennsylvania to
fracking as long as communities there supported the technology.
This is What
Autocracy Looks Like
In May 2012, Dewey
Decker and his board passed a resolution pledging that the town of Sanford would take
no action against fracking, while awaiting the decision of the DEC. There was
no prior notice. Citizens were left to read about it in their local papers.
“You wake up the next morning and say, ‘What happened?’” commented Doug
Vitarious, a retired Sanford elementary school teacher.
In June, a headline in
the Deposit Courier, a
Sanford paper, read “Local Officials in Eligible Communities Approve
Pro-Drilling Resolutions.” Accompanying the piece was a map of towns that had
passed such resolutions. The subscript under the map read: “Joint
Landowners Coalition of N.Y.” The JLCNY is the state’s grassroots gas industry
ally, whose stated mission is to “foster... the common interest... as it
pertains to natural gas development.” Decker represents the organization in
Sanford.
During the summer,
Vitarious and other citizens asked their town board where the resolution had
originated, but were met with silence. They requested that the board rescind
the resolution and conduct a referendum. Decker refused.
By the end of August,
43 towns in the region had passed resolutions modeled on one appearing at the
JLCNY website. It stipulates that at the local level “no moratorium on hydraulic
fracturing will be put in place before the state of New York has made it’s
[sic] decision.” Under New York’s Freedom of Information Law, Catskill Citizens
for Safe Energy and the National Resources Defense Council obtained records
from Sanford and two other towns about how they
achieved their objectives. The records, says Bruce Ferguson of Catskill
Citizens for Safe Energy, “detail contacts between gas industry operatives and
officials.”
Two months before
superstorm Sandy swamped parts of the state, Sue Rapp, a psychotherapist from the town of Vestal, told me that
flooding worries her as much as anything else about fracking. Upper New York
State suffered flooding in 2010 and 2011. And then came Sandy. Floods
turn millions of gallons of fracking waste-water for which there is no safe
storage into streams of poisons that wash into waterways.
Unlike Sanford’s board,
Vestal’s has not formally blocked debate. It has heard arguments for a
moratorium by Rapp and an organization she co-founded, Vestal Residents for
Safe Energy (VERSE), as well as pleas for a moratorium by physicians and
academics. Its reaction, however, has simply been to sit on its hands, waiting
for the DEC and Cuomo to make a final decision. This amounts to adopting the
JLCNY position in all but formal vote. “What is happening?” asked
Rapp rhetorically at a demonstration in Binghamton this past September.
“They are trying to shut us down. But we do vote and we will vote. We do not
constitute [what pro-drillers call] the tyranny of the majority, but simply the
majority. That is called democracy.”
Demonstrations against
Cuomo’s frack plan, which drew thousands to Washington D.C., Albany, and
elsewhere in New York, included pledges to commit sustained acts of civil
disobedience should the governor carry out plans to open the Pennsylvania
border area of the state to fracking. At the end of September, theNew York
Times announced that Cuomo
had retreated from his June stance. The report credited the state’s grassroots
movement for his change of mind. Legendary for his toughness and
political smarts, the governor will confront a political challenge in the
coming months. Either he will please gas-industry supporters or his Democratic
base. Whichever way he goes, it could affect his chances for the White House.
The stakes, however,
are far larger than Cuomo’s presidential aspirations. Opening any part of
the state to fracking will certainly damage the local environment. More
importantly, a grassroots win in New York State could open the door to a nationwide
anti-fracking surge. A loss might, in the long run, result ina cascade of
environmental degradation beyond the planet’s ability to cope. As
unlikely as it sounds, the fate of the Earth may rest with the residents of
Middlefield, Caroline, Vestal, and scores of tiny villages and small towns
you’ve never heard of.
“All eyes are on New
York,” says Chris Burger, a former Broome County legislator and one of a small
group who persuaded New York’s last governor, David Paterson, to pass the
state’s moratorium on fracking. “This is the biggest environmental issue New
York has ever faced [and not just] New York, the nation, and the world. If it’s
going to be stopped, it will be stopped here.”
Ellen Cantarow
first wrote from Israel and the West Bank in 1979. ATomDispatch
regular, her writing has been published in The Village
Voice, Grand Street, Mother Jones, Alternet, Counterpunch, and ZNet, and anthologized
by the South End Press. She is also lead author and general editor of an
oral-history trilogy, Moving
the Mountain: Women Working for Social Change, published in 1981 by The
Feminist Press/McGraw-Hill, widely anthologized, and still in print.
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Copyright 2012 Ellen
Cantarow
