The Moral Urgency of Stopping this Intergenerational Theft
Conversation with Ranjana Bhandari,
Founder and Executive Director of Liveable Arlington
In this edition of the Networker, editor Carmi Orenstein speaks with Ranjana Bhandari, the founder and executive director of the grassroots environmental advocacy group Liveable Arlington. Liveable Arlington began organizing in 2015 against the rapid expansion of gas drilling, fracking, and its infrastructure in Arlington, Texas.
Ranjana is the 2017 recipient of the Community Sentinel Award from FracTracker Alliance. In 2018, she won the Special Service Award from the Texas Chapter of the Sierra Club, is a Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project, and is on the Board of Earthworks. Ranjana has a master’s degree in economics from Brown University.
We speak with Ranjana about the status of fracking in the Barnett Shale (which lies under the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex), Liveable Arlington’s grassroots organizing, her thinking about using science and the law to protect public health and the climate, and connections to larger movements.
Editor: Ranjana, to orient readers who may know more about the status of fracking (or oil and gas development in general) in other geographic regions, can you describe the current state of affairs with regard to fracking in the Barnett Shale overall and in Arlington in particular?
Ranjana Bhandari: Arlington is a city in Texas, with about 400,000 people in an area of 99 square miles on top of a natural gas reservoir called the Barnett Shale. We have close to 400 methane gas wells employing hydraulic fracturing in 52 drill sites. The standard setback of 600 feet is measured from the wellhead to the main building of the “protected use,” and is routinely lowered to 300 feet by the city council. That translates to gas wells right next door to daycares, homes, medical offices.
Lit up fracking rig behind Arlington, Texas home.
In Tarrant County, where Liveable Arlington is based, close to 1 million out of 2.1 million residents live less than half a mile from fracking sites. In our county, almost 1 in 5 children have asthma and since 2014, we have the highest rate of birth defects of similar counties in our state. Overall, 5.3 million Texans live within half a mile of an oil and gas site.
Quoting a recent analysis,
More than 30,000 Arlington children go to public school within half a mile of wells… and up to 7,600 infants and young children attend private day cares within that radius. Eighty-five percent of the public school students are children of color, and more than two-thirds live in poverty. Altogether, more than half of Arlington’s public schools and day care facilities are within a half-mile of active gas production. Eight day care centers are within 600 feet, the standard setback in Arlington.
Total Energies, a global energy giant based in France—a country that itself bans hydraulic fracturing—is ramping up new drilling in Arlington. In the last two years, they have applied to drill about 40 new gas wells here, all of them next door to homes, mobile home communities, and daycares.
Editor: This is a terribly daunting situation for the community to contend with. The website of the organization Earthworks says that Liveable Arlington “is known for leading winning campaigns to stop drilling expansion in very difficult terrain.” We applaud you for this! Most anti-fracking victories that we’re aware of are incredibly hard-fought. They may also be of limited scope, even when they result in important protections for local populations. Can you offer examples of your successes, and share something about the strategies and tactics that led to them?
RB: I agree that these wins are rare and extremely hard to secure. Fracking is like a Hydra: each win is inevitably followed by a new, even worse gas well project. In the last few months, Total applied for new fracking permits at five sites here.
We live in a state that prioritizes the profits of polluters, over protecting its residents and the ecology that nurtures them, in its laws and regulatory bodies. The asymmetry of power and resources between a small grassroots organization like ours and the nexus of industry and their powerful political allies is immense. Losing is not an option however, because our children’s health and future hang in the balance.
Our children do not have any voice in the reckless decisions being made that rob them of a liveable future. The moral urgency of stopping this intergenerational theft keeps us focused on the mission, not on the enormity and difficulty of the task. My job is to find ways to build campaigns and grow community power and win despite the odds. We are strategic, persistent, build bridges across the political spectrum, and pursue every possible tactic to protect our children.
Our first big winning campaign in 2017 called “Save Lake Arlington” stopped an injection well from disposing toxic fracking waste by our city’s lake, which supplies drinking water to half a million people in this county. The state of Texas had overruled the city’s ban on injection wells and permitted the well. We were a tiny group and had just received our first grant of $1,400. Within weeks, Liveable collected and submitted almost 3,000 letters of opposition from Arlington residents to the state, requesting legal standing for each of them in a public hearing about the disposal well. The volume of resident requests for standing overwhelmed the permitting agency and the company’s lawyers. Media covered the story, and after months of seeking postponements and moving the hearing to bigger and bigger venues, the company withdrew its application. We won an unprecedented victory.
We built on this success and won stronger protections for residents in our gas drilling rules, like requiring supermajority votes for setback reductions, electric rigs, noise rules, and protecting daycare playgrounds, and we began to challenge new fracking permits. These changes may seem minor, but industry and the city could not abide by any of them. They all resulted in violations.
In 2020, Liveable Arlington set the stage for stopping Total Energies from fracking three gas wells behind an Arlington preschool where 100 percent of students are children of color. The city council rejected the permits with a 6-2 vote. This area is an example of a “sacrifice zone,” where polluters operate disproportionately in, for example, neighborhoods where people of color live. Liveable Arlington worked really hard to change that locally. This became a national story with interviews and coverage on NPR’s Living on Earth, Bloomberg, Reveal, Mother Jones and others. Then, the 2021 elections ushered in a new city council that improperly overturned the “no” vote on those same permits. As a community watchdog, Liveable filed a lawsuit in district court. The city council reversed their vote, and once again denied Total Energies the permit.
Our organizing principles are simple. We:
Articulate a positive vision. Our organization exists to fight for a liveable Arlington and a liveable planet for our children. It is driven by deep mother love for all our children.
Root advocacy in the most current science. We keep up with the most current public health research on fracking and often invite scientists like Dr. Sandra Steingraber and physicians like Dr. Anne Epstein to give presentations to residents, allied groups, and government officials about these issues. We then make the results accessible to the community with easy to read materials in English and Spanish, and in videos.
Search for common ground. Team members talk to everyone. Children’s health is a shared concern across deep local political divides.
Build diverse and inclusive coalitions across race, socioeconomics, gender, and identity. In its campaign to stop Total from fracking behind a preschool, Liveable allied itself with organizers working on immigrant rights and poverty, the Social Justice Committee at Arlington’s largest Catholic church, preschool staff, parents, and neighbors. We do not limit alliances to environmental groups. Air and health are critical concerns for everyone. We feel that this work is part of the large struggle for civil rights and justice in our nation and across the globe, that we are doing the work of environmental justice.
Are a resource to residents, government officials, and other organizations.
Believe that each win is a cause for hope, not despair. Even though we see no end to fracking where we live—as a mother who feels very deeply the immorality of this enterprise, that will condemn all our children to an unliveable planet and endangers their health and well-being every day in places like Arlington—the act of resistance is absolutely essential.
Liveable had been so successful in organizing against new permits that, since that lawsuit and win, our city has started giving drilling permits “administratively”—without public hearings—to shut us out of the process. Even simple requests for information are being referred to the Texas Attorney General’s office, when they were not in the past.
Editor: We applaud you for the important victories and share your frustration at the political fallout from these successes. You recently led Dr. Earthea Nance, the administrator of EPA Region 6, on a fracking tour. Inside Climate News reported,
The EPA officials saw drill sites adjacent to day cares centers, and others surrounded by apartment complexes. A large gas compressor station fumed across the street from a high school, and another stood beside a popular fishing spot.
I was struck by your own reported comments, and those of Nance: you spoke about the rollout of fracking occurring in "a complete regulatory vacuum,” and Nance is quoted as saying, "You have really opened my eyes... It’s as if there's no lid or roof.” What are we to make of this—the ongoing lack of regulation and an EPA regional administrator's complete lack of awareness? She said, “We’ll pay more attention to what’s happening here.” What has Liveable Arlington asked of the EPA and what are your expectations for follow up?
RB: Thanks to the extraordinary influence of the fossil fuel industry in government, Halliburton's CEO and then Vice President Cheney was able to get fracking exempted from major federal environmental laws like the Safe Drinking Water Act and associated EPA oversight. Texas state government, our air regulator TCEQ, and the Texas Railroad Commission which is charged with oil and gas oversight also operate with similar conflicts of interest. The Railroad Commission is headed by people who profit from the industry.
City governments that are charged with issuing permits benefit financially (Arlington’s gas royalty fund has made $150 million), are politically linked to the same interests, and have no expertise or interest in evaluating or mitigating harms. When one Texas city voted to ban fracking, our state legislature took away every city’s ability to regulate fracking even modestly. So residents in places like Arlington have had absolutely no protection, industry oversight, or monitoring.
Arlington playground near fracking rig.
We loved that EPA Region 6 administrator, Dr. Earthea Nance, accepted our invitation to take a fracking tour with us and see first-hand what “urban drilling” looks like. I have taken many people on drilling tours over the last 10 years, and this was the most important tour I have led. We wanted to show her the true human toll of fracking and how unequally distributed its impacts are in Arlington and across our nation.
Rules governing oil and gas development vary from state to state. Fairness demands ONE regulatory regime across America. Children in Texas should not be asked to sacrifice more than children in New York to power our nation’s lifestyles.
On the tour, the EPA team were able to see how dangerously close to drilling we live, how exposed, our schools, childcare facilities and residents are. Sharon Wilson from Earthworks was on the tour with an optical gas imaging camera and showed Dr. Nance and her team massive emission plumes coming out of compressor stations.
As the EPA finalizes methane rules for the first time (an earlier attempt was put on hold by Trump) to cut emissions of methane and compounds like benzene from fracking operations, we wanted her to see how desperately we need very strong rules, and enforcement of those rules in Arlington and in all of Tarrant County. Our county would be one of the biggest beneficiaries nationally of these new rules.
Our state and local government have not protected us. We want the EPA to immediately start work on a Federal Implementation Plan (FIP) for those new standards. Any State Implementation Plan (SIP) put forward by the Texas Railroad Commission and TCEQ will not adequately protect the health of Texans, and we need the EPA to step in. As the biggest methane polluter on the planet, Texas needs these rules meaningfully enforced more than anyone. Texas regulators are not up to the task.
We also hope to continue to stay in touch and work with the Dallas EPA office on issues that continuously arise here.
Editor: You’ve mentioned that Liveable Arlington has made use of our Compendium, a compilation of the evidence documenting the continuing and increasing impacts of fracking and fracking infrastructure on health and environment. Since the Compendium’s eighth edition, we’ve seen further, even stronger evidence (partially due to the deplorable continued exposures of populations to be studied) on direct health impacts, not to mention ecological effects, air and water pollution, and so on. We have new evidence of decreased birth weight linked to gestation in proximity to gas production—most dramatically for infants born to Black women—in a study of 28 gas-producing U.S. states. We have devastating evidence that Pennsylvania children whose birth residences were near fracking were two to three times more likely to be subsequently diagnosed with leukemia than those who did not. We have new documentation on the link between death from stroke and proximity to fracking, across fracking states. And a Pennsylvania study, which uses a methodology that takes advantage of the fracking ban in neighboring New York State, showed more hospitalizations for cardiovascular diseases than would be expected in the absence of fracking.
Some of us tend to receive each new study as a potential game-changer for policy. We want to think, surely our society can’t continue to use a technology linked to such devastating effects, especially when it comes to infants and children. But we know from experience that our governmental systems are deeply flawed, in many cases corrupted by “regulatory capture” on the federal, state, and municipal levels. Do you remain committed to using science as a tool to impact policy on oil and gas extraction? How might we use the science more effectively? Can you point to examples where you and your fellow organizers felt the science was persuasive to someone in power?
RB: I want to remind readers that when fracking was unleashed on highly populated communities in the Barnett Shale a dozen years ago, no environmental or health assessments were done to prove that it was safe for residents. Instead, we were subject to a slick disinformation campaign that described fracking as a benign venture that would be a good neighbor.
Fort Worth real estate sign near fracking.
Our first job at Liveable Arlington, when we started in 2015, was to set the record straight. We educated ourselves in the newly available science, collected evidence of pollution with the help of allied organizations like Earthworks, and made presentations for local government officials and community organizations. We submitted written materials at public hearings documenting harms and backed that by citing research. The Compendium has been a powerful resource for our advocacy. It reveals the lies of fracking propagandists and their allies in government.
We set out to make a public health case against fracking with our local government by showing harms to our children locally from exposure to fracking pollution. At Liveable we have had a conscious strategy of educating everyone with decision making responsibility of those risks—to strip away the political cover provided by fracking industry propaganda.
This led to some representatives voting against more gas wells. Voting to expand a polluting industry that harms children is potentially embarrassing when everyone knows that the official knows what the risks and harms are. Those who choose to still vote for more gas wells have often prefaced their votes by denying that science and claiming that it did not provide complete certainty of harm, or by professing fear of industry lawsuits. So, I know that if all decisions about fossil fuel extraction and combustion are based on what science tells us, we can still change course and restore a liveable community for the children of frontline communities like Arlington and slow down the climate crisis.
Given the amount of science illiteracy and the fossil fuel industry’s continued huge expenditures on science denial that we need to contend with, we work to make the research easily understandable to government officials and everyone living in shale communities. We have done this by providing easy to understand materials in both English and Spanish. Still, it is a daunting task to attempt to educate and influence biased elected and appointed officials, and our community members—however well prepared—have sometimes had very difficult experiences interacting with them.
While science unfortunately does not drive policy and government decision making in our state, it does help mobilize affected residents.
We believe that sound laws and regulations should be based on the best scientific consensus to ensure that all our children grow up in communities that are healthy with access to clean air and water, and inherit a liveable planet that sustains life. Unfortunately, our politics are captive to special interests, disregard children, and discount the future too much.
Editor: These are good reminders to all of us of what we are up against. We also see continued research and documentation on the environmental injustices of oil and gas development and policy (or lack thereof?) in the United States, with multiple studies published since the last edition of the Compendium in April 2022. One recent study showed that communities that were more economically deprived in Pennsylvania had increased exposure to gas well waste disposal. Even the “density” of leaks from gas pipelines in 13 metropolitan areas was shown to be higher where there was a higher percent of people of color in the area and lower median household income. Another study demonstrated that historical “red-lining” is linked with the siting of fossil fuel (including gas) power plants and with present-day inequalities in air pollutant emissions. What are your thoughts about this added layer of harm—the disproportionate toxic exposures inflicted on communities of color and the poor—that the fossil fuel industry has produced? Is this true for Arlington? What tools should we be using or developing to counter this ongoing and unacceptable situation effectively? If you’re familiar with the Biden Administration’s executive order establishing the “Justice40 Initiative,” meant to funnel 40 percent of the overall benefits of specified Federal investments to “disadvantaged communities that are marginalized, underserved, and overburdened by pollution,” does it sway you toward believing the United States will make progress on these historic and ongoing structural inequalities?
RB: Since our first campaign, I have been deeply aware of the racial disparities in siting of polluting gas wells and fracking infrastructure. The proposed injection well we targeted threatened the drinking water for our entire county but was sited in a historically black community that is a sacrifice zone overrun with fracking sites, a compressor station, and a power plant. According to an analysis done by the Associated Press, two thirds of fracking wells in Arlington are located in the eastern part of the city where a majority of the residents are people of color.
EPA’s EJscreen tool analysis of the Truman site where the city recently administratively approved six gas wells shows that in a 1,320-foot radius around the site, 83 percent of the residents are people of color, 54 percent do not have a high school diploma, 67 percent are low income, 46 percent are linguistically isolated, and 10% percent of the residents are children under five years of age.
Even though fracking sites dot our entire city, communities of color have greater exposure and often much less ability to intervene and stop gas well permits. One of the ways this inequity is perpetuated is that renters have no voice in gas well permitting. Large rental complexes often have the most exposure to fracking and have more young families of color with fewer resources. Segregation in housing exists because local zoning decisions separate single family housing where residents are often owners, from multiple family housing which is rental. Liveable Arlington has consciously chosen to confront environmental injustice by organizing in neighborhoods where a majority of the residents are people of color. These are the hardest battles to fight, and we believe that they are the most important to win.
Since sacrifice zones located in communities of color often have many polluting industries located in them, we should require assessment of cumulative pollution exposure from all existing sources prior to issuing permits.
I also fear that when the planned or unplanned demise of fossil fuels eventually happens, the shutdowns will happen last in states like Texas, and that poor communities of color will be the last to see shutdowns, investments in new jobs, and in clean ups and remediation. If the Justice40 Initiative can address some of this, it will be a welcome development. But we also need to plan for an equitable shutdown of fracking and clean up and compensation. Of course, to those of us who have lived with fracking for 15 years now, an end to this industry seems distant.
Editor: We’re inspired by this firm commitment to environmental justice, and we know you are also committed to climate justice. Liveable Arlington’s website states: "Our work is grounded in Arlington neighborhoods, but we understand that we must work together to protect our region, our state, and our planet from the severe health and climate impacts of the oil & gas industry’s expansion." How might community-based frontline organizations connect themselves to these larger, common struggles? Are there examples of your work or intentions you could share about that?
RB: When we first began organizing, there was very little interest in fighting the climate crisis locally.
Even now, in a state like Texas where the political structure is so aligned with fossil fuel interests, government policy is accelerating climate chaos. Whether one is fighting the health impacts of fracking in extraction communities like Arlington, or the climate impacts of methane emissions from fracking somewhere else, we all target the same corporations and the same political interests. “Think globally, act locally” has been our guiding principle from the beginning. Every gas well we stop, every methane leak that we get plugged, is a win for our global climate.
Extraction community based organizations can be very effective as the forward face of the climate movement in many places. We speak to severe, unjust harms already being inflicted, and represent the urgency of action now, without giving politicians the breathing room of kicking the can down the road with lies about humanity having time or magical thinking about future technologies that will save our children. By the same token, organizations focused on climate working to transition humanity away from fossil fuel use are our best hope to protect our children from the dangers of growing up in an extraction community.
We collaborate and ally with, support, and are supported by many local, regional, and national organizations on various campaigns. Before Liveable, I started an online community to share our experience of fracking that spanned many countries including Ireland, the United Kingdom, Australia Namibia, Uganda, and South Africa.
I am a child of the global south—I grew up in India and am deeply conscious of the effect of western fossil fuel consumption on billions of lives in places that did not fuel the climate crisis. So, we support the work for climate justice.
Growing an interlinked regional, national, and global movement, and to be a part of one, is important. We always want to expand our movement building work. Even though we base our advocacy on science—which is alarming in its findings about fossil fuel extraction and use—the only way we can win is if we build a political movement that is strong enough and broad enough to move the levers of power.