Executive Director's Note: "...So That the Earth Might Sing"
By Carolyn Raffensperger
“We know so little of the worlds beneath our feet. Look up on a cloudless night and you might see the light from a star thousands of trillions of miles away, or pick out the craters left by asteroid strikes on the moon’s face. Look down and your sight stops at topsoil, tarmac, toe.”
Years ago, I was one of three members of an Illinois commission charged with determining the suitability of a site for a low-level radioactive waste disposal facility. Would this site safely store the waste for 500 years? As part of the state’s effort to answer that question, geologists mapped the subsurface geology using geophones and acoustics.
During the hearings on the site suitability the geologists took us out to the field to show how this mapping technique worked. They hooked the geophones to microphones so we could hear the sounds the scientists were recording. I was astounded to hear the creaks and moans. Those weren’t sound waves released by the geologists in their mapping effort. These were the sounds the Earth made. It wasn’t silent deep below the surface of the Earth!
I asked one of the geologists if the Earth sang. He said, “No. It only groans.”
I have been haunted by that comment over the years. It came to mind in 2016 as I stood on the banks of the Des Moines River while they drilled under the River to make a tunnel for the Dakota Access pipeline. The noise was fearsome. They drilled from both sides of the river and hoped to meet in the middle. They didn’t on the first two tries. The drilling and the roar were interminable.
Now the fossil fuel industry has new plans for occupying and disturbing the deep subsurface world: storing carbon dioxide (CO2) from carbon capture and storage projects or using the CO2 to extract more oil from nearly depleted wells. They want to use the vast wilderness under our feet to absorb the huge quantities of our waste, the very waste that has destroyed our atmosphere.
In my younger days, I frequently spoke to school children about the environment. Garbage was the issue of that generation. At some point in every talk I gave, a young boy, and it was almost always a boy, would have this great idea. Shoot the garbage to the moon!
Burying CO2 is an idea equivalent to that of a grade school child. Shove it below ground even though we don’t have the slightest inkling of the ecology of that world. Out of sight, out of mind.
Robert McFarlane says “[w]e are presently living through the Anthropocene, an epoch of immense and often frightening change at a planetary scale, in which ‘crisis’ exists not as an ever-deferred future apocalypse but rather as an ongoing occurrence experienced most severely by the most vulnerable. Time is profoundly out of joint—and so is place…. ‘Deep time’ is the chronology of the underland.”
My radioactive waste commission rejected that site, and in the end, no new radioactive waste facility was sited in the Midwest. We were unanimous in our decision that the waste would be a hazard to future generations. One of my fellow commissioners had been an engineer on the Alyeska crude oil pipeline in Alaska. Seeing the damage done by the pipeline, he had vowed to never allow that kind of damage to happen again.
In this issue of the Networker we speak on behalf of the Earth and future generations with a close look at the consequences of the fossil fuel industry’s callous disregard for the wild ecology of the below world. We do this so that, in McFarlane’s words, we “…see ourselves as part of a web of gift, inheritance and legacy stretching over millions of years past and millions to come, bringing us to consider what we are leaving behind for the epochs and beings that will follow us.”
We do this so that the Earth might sing.
* All Robert McFarlane quotes from Underland chapter entitled “Descending,” pp. 11 and 15