April 2023 Networker:
A Fracked Nation |
| Volume 28 (4), April 2023 |
| I was a proud reader of the manuscript that became Sandra Steingraber’s 2011 book, Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis. The final chapter, “Bicycles on Main Street (and High-Volume Slickwater Hydraulic Fracturing)” is nothing less than prescient as it imagines what might become of a small town situated over a massive “shale play,” if the gas industry has their way. Sandra was working with very little available data at the time and nevertheless efficiently outlines what we could know about fracking even then: “five sure things,” she called this information. (I’m tempted to go on, but if you haven’t read the book, you should!)
(We successfully fought off fracking itself in New York State, though we need to dramatically accelerate the state’s transition off of piped-in gas, the largest share of which comes from the fracking fields of Pennsylvania.)
Fast-forward to today and those across the United States who live amid drilling and fracking activity—across otherwise dissimilar landscapes—will recognize the features of this industrialization that Sandra described in 2011. In the meantime, we now have no shortage of stomach-churning data on the public health, ecological, air, water, soil, and climate impacts of this frenzy that was allowed to unfold basically unregulated. In her column this month, Sandra traces how we ended up in the “lawless place” that this now-typical method of fossil gas extraction occupies. Also in this issue, I was fortunate to interview Ranjana Bhandari, founder and executive director of the frontline organization Liveable Arlington, which works strategically to protect the community (within the Dallas-Fort Worth area) from that lawless place that is Texas’ captured oil and gas regulatory environment. Readers will be inspired by Ranjana’s extraordinary environmental and climate justice commitment and what the group has accomplished against overwhelming odds. For those who may have never seen what urban and suburban fracking look like, one look at her photos tells the story. This month we celebrate our colleague Martha Dina Argüello, executive director of Physicians for Social Responsibility Los Angeles. Martha and PSR-LA represent another powerful example of a leader and her organization’s steadfast and collaborative tackling of complex environmental health crises, including—but not only—urban drilling and the whole carbon economy. I’m also grateful to PSR-LA for their work advocating for nuclear weapons abolition and a complete cleanup of the radioactive and chemically contaminated Santa Susana Field Laboratory, which we’ve written about in these pages. Back from a sabbatical, Martha wrote that she feels full of promise, and we hope you will, too after hearing from and about the phenomenal women in this issue of the Networker.
Carmi Orenstein, MPH
CHPNY Program Director, SEHN |
Celebrating our Colleagues:
Martha Dina Argüello |
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Martha Dina Argüello
Executive Director at Physicians for Social Responsibility - Los Angeles
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| This month we celebrate a colleague with whom we at SEHN have been honored to collaborate for at least two decades: Martha Dina Argüello. SEHN’s Carolyn Raffensperger says,
One of the immense pleasures in working with Martha is her kaleidoscopic mind: she takes a set of ideas, then turns the lens and all of a sudden we see something entirely new. I first met Martha through a phone call to Physicians for Social Responsibility – Los Angeles (PSR-LA) in the very early 2000s. I called her office, she answered and when I said my name she exclaimed that she was reading my book on the precautionary principle at that very moment. Synchronicity at its finest. Martha became a key player in advancing the precautionary principle in policy, particularly within California and applying it to environmental justice. As the now longtime executive director of PSR-LA, she shares her exquisite set of skills with a wide audience.
Martha Dina joined the SEHN board in the early 2000s, so we got to work with her quite closely. While she is no longer on our board, we continue to work together. If I need a dose of inspiration, or to test a new idea, or to express outrage at some particularly bad industry proposal, I call her. Team Earth, Team Justice is far better off because Martha is one of the captains.
She says in turn, “Carolyn has mentored me over the years, and I continue to learn from her and the work of the Science and Environmental Health Network.” Martha recently took a sabbatical from her work and wrote eloquently about the contours of her recharge period, wholeheartedly endorsing the right to rest. It is to all of our benefit that she is re-energized and once again at the helm of PSR-LA. “Now, back in the swing of things, I am still asking how we can move closer to a restorative, health-affirming economy while simultaneously being forced to fight off damaging oil industry-driven false promises of a carbon-free future powered by more carbon and their ability to control our political system.” This challenge resonates deeply with us, and we look forward to continuing to move through it together. |
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.
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. Continue Reading |
The rePercussion Section:
A Short History of Fracking |
| by Sandra Steingraber, SEHN senior scientist |
| The signature work of Concerned Health Professionals of New York—now a program of the Science and Environmental Health Network—is the fracking science compendium. This compilation reviews the dangers posed by a now-ubiquitous set of techniques for extracting oil or natural gas that is collectively called hydraulic fracturing. To free the oil or natural gas trapped inside rocks, these methods use water, chemicals, sand, and high pressure to shatter deep shale formations. With more than 2,500 studies now published in the peer-reviewed literature, the climate and public health case against fracking is damning. From methane plumes to radioactive wastewater and from earthquakes to toxic air pollution, fracking wreaks havoc wherever it goes. The current eighth edition of the compendium, officially known as Compendium of Scientific, Medical, and Media Findings Demonstrating the Risks and Harms of Fracking, is 577 pages long. The ninth edition is underway. Recently, while organizing our files, I unearthed a paper copy of our first edition, which we sent to New York’s then-Governor Andrew Cuomo more than a decade ago. It reviews the evidence from just 65 published studies—all that were available at the time—and it is held together at the top left margin by a single staple. Admittedly, our decision to title this document a “compendium” was aspirational.
Reading through our first effort to summarize its perils made clear to me that some aspects of fracking have changed dramatically over the years while other things have not changed at all. One important difference between then and now is the outsized role that fracking currently plays in the operations of the fossil fuel industry. |
| SEHN science director Dr. Ted Schettler continues to be sought out for comment, here on the late March 2023 chemical spill into a Delaware River tributary in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and on the February train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio:
Board member Rebecca Altman published a piece in Orion:
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