This Changes Everything (56 page)

There is a real sadness to many of these choices: beneath the bravado of
the bar scene are sky-high divorce rates due to prolonged separations and intense work stress, soaring levels of addiction, and a great
many people wishing to be anywhere but where they are. This kind of disassociation is part of what makes it possible for decent people to inflict the scale of damage to the land that extreme energy demands. A coalfield worker in Gillette, Wyoming, for instance, told me that to get through his workdays, he had trained himself to think of the Powder River Basin as “another planet.”
¹³
(The moonscape
left behind by strip mining no doubt made this mental trick easier).

These are perfectly understandable survival strategies—but when the extractive industry’s culture of structural transience bumps up against a group of deeply rooted people with an intense love of their homeplace and a determination to protect it, the effect can be explosive.

When these very different worlds collide,
one of the things that seems to happen is that, as in Bella Bella, communities begin to cherish what they have—and what they stand to lose—even more than before the extractive threat arrived. This is particularly striking because many of the people waging the fiercest anti-extraction battles are, at least by traditional measures, poor. But they are still determined to defend a richness that
our economy has not figured out how to count. “Our kitchens are filled with homemade jams and preserves, sacks of nuts, crates of honey and cheese, all produced by us,” Doina Dediu, a Romanian villager protesting fracking, told a reporter. “We are not even that poor. Maybe we don’t have money, but we have clean water and we are healthy and we just want to be left alone.”
¹⁴

So often these battles
seem to come to this stark choice: water vs. gas. Water vs. oil. Water vs. coal. In fact, what has emerged in the movement against extreme extraction is less an anti–fossil fuels movement than a pro-water movement.

I was first struck by this in December 2011 when I attended a signing ceremony for the Save the Fraser Declaration, the historic Indigenous people’s declaration pledging to prevent
the Northern Gateway pipeline and
any other tar sands project of its kind from accessing British Columbia territory. More than 130 First Nations have signed, along with many nonIndigenous endorsers. The ceremony was held at the Vancouver Public Library, with several chiefs present to add their names. Among those addressing the bank of cameras that day was Marilyn Baptiste, then elected chief of
Xeni Gwet’in, one of the communities of the Tsilhqot’in First Nation. She introduced herself, her people, and their stake in the fight by naming interconnected bodies of water: “We are at the headwaters of Chilko, which is one of the largest wild salmon runs, that is also part of the Taseko, that drains into the Chilko, the Chilko into the Chilcotin, and into the Fraser. It’s common sense for all
of our people to join together.”
¹⁵

The point of drawing this liquid map was clear to all present: of course all of these different nations and groups would join together to fight the threat of an oil spill—they are all already united by water; by the lakes and rivers, streams and oceans that drain into one another. And in British Columbia, the living connection among all of these waterways is
the salmon, that remarkably versatile traveler, which moves through fresh-and saltwater and back again during its life cycle. That’s why the declaration that was being signed was not called the “Stop the Tankers and Pipelines Declaration” but rather the “Save the Fraser Declaration”—the Fraser, at almost 1,400 kilometers, being the longest river in B.C. and home to its most productive salmon fishery.
As the declaration states: “A threat to the Fraser and its headwaters is a threat to all who depend on its health. We will not allow our fish, animals, plants, people, and ways of life to be placed at risk. . . . We will not allow the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipelines, or similar Tar Sands projects, to cross our lands, territories and watersheds, or the ocean migration routes of Fraser
River salmon.”
¹⁶

If the tar sands pipeline threatens to become an artery of death, carrying poison across an estimated one thousand waterways, then these interconnected bodies of water that Chief Baptiste was mapping are arteries of life, flowing together to bind all of these disparate communities in common purpose.
¹⁷

The duty to protect water doesn’t just unite opposition to this one pipeline;
it is the animating force behind every single movement fighting extreme extraction. Whether deepwater drilling, fracking, or mining;
whether pipelines, big rigs, or export terminals, communities are terrified about what these activities will do to their water systems. This fear is what binds together the southeastern Montana cattle ranchers with the Northern Cheyenne with the Washington State
communities fighting coal trains and export terminals. Fear of contaminated drinking water is what kick-started the anti-fracking movement (and when a proposal surfaced that would allow the drilling of roughly twenty thousand fracking wells in the Delaware River Basin—the source of freshwater for fifteen million Americans—it is what kicked the movement squarely into the U.S. mainstream).
¹⁸

The
movement against Keystone XL would, similarly, never have resonated as powerfully as it did had TransCanada not made the inflammatory decision to route the pipeline through the Ogallala Aquifer—a vast underground source of freshwater beneath the Great Plains that provides drinking water to approximately two million people and supplies roughly 30 percent of the country’s irrigation groundwater.
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In addition to the contamination threats, almost all these extractive projects also stand out simply for how much water they require. For instance, it takes 2.3 barrels of water to produce a single barrel of oil from tar sands mining—much more than the 0.1 to 0.3 barrels of water needed for each barrel of conventional crude. Which is why the tar sands mines and upgrading plants are surrounded
by those giant tailings “ponds” visible from space. Fracking for both shale gas and “tight oil” similarly requires far more water than conventional drilling and is much more water-intensive than the fracking methods used in the 1990s. According to a 2012 study, modern fracking “events” (as they are called) use an average of five million gallons of water—“70 to 300 times the amount of fluid used in
traditional fracking.” Once used, much of this water is radioactive and toxic. In 2012, the industry created 280 billion gallons of such wastewater in the U.S. alone—“enough to flood all of Washington DC beneath a 22ft deep toxic lagoon,” as
The Guardian
noted.
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In other words, extreme energy demands that we destroy a whole lot of the essential substance we need to survive—water—just to keep
extracting more of the very substances threatening our survival and that we can power our lives without.

This is coming, moreover, at a time when freshwater sources are imperiled around the world. Indeed, the water used in extraction operations often comes from aquifers that are already depleted from years of serial droughts, as is the case in southern California, where prospectors are eyeing
the enormous Monterey Shale, and in Texas, where fracking has skyrocketed in recent years. Meanwhile, the Karoo—an arid and spectacular region of South Africa that Shell is planning to frack—literally translates as “land of the great thirst.” Which helps explain why Oom Johannes Willemse, a local spiritual leader, says, “Water is so holy. If you don’t have water, you don’t have anything worth living
for.” He adds, “I will fight to the death. I won’t allow this water to be destroyed.”
²¹

The fight against pollution and climate change can seem abstract at times; but wherever they live, people will fight for their water. Even die for it.

“Can we live without water?” the anti-fracking farmers chant in Pungesti, Romania.

“No!”

“Can we live without Chevron?”

“Yes!”
²²

These truths emerge not
out of an abstract theory about “the commons” but out of lived experience. Growing in strength and connecting communities in all parts of the world, they speak to something deep and unsettled in many of us. We know that we are trapped within an economic system that has it backward; it behaves as if there is no end to what is actually finite (clean water, fossil fuels, and the atmospheric space to
absorb their emissions) while insisting that there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually quite flexible: the financial resources that human institutions manufacture, and that, if imagined differently, could build the kind of caring society we need. Anni Vassiliou, a youth worker who is part of the struggle against the Eldorado gold mine in Greece, describes this as living in “an upside
down world. We are in danger of more and more floods. We are in danger of never, here in Greece, never experiencing spring and fall again. And they’re telling us that we are in danger of exiting the Euro. How crazy is that?”
²³
Put another way, a broken bank is a crisis we can fix; a broken Arctic we cannot.

It’s not yet clear which side will win many of the struggles outlined in these
pages—only that the companies in the crosshairs are up against far more than they bargained for. There have, however, already been some solid victories, too many to fully catalogue here.

For instance, activists have won fracking bans or moratoria in dozens of cities and towns and in much larger territories too. Alongside France, countries with moratoria include Bulgaria, the Netherlands, the
Czech Republic, and South Africa (though South Africa has since lifted the ban). Moratoria or bans are also in place in the states and provinces of Vermont, Quebec, as well as Newfoundland and Labrador (as of early 2014, New York’s contentious moratorium still held but it looked shaky). This track record is all the more remarkable considering that so much local anti-fracking activism has not received
foundation funding, and is instead financed the old-fashioned way: by passing the hat at community events and with countless volunteer hours.

And some victories against fossil fuel extraction receive almost no media attention, but are significant nonetheless. Like the fact that in 2010 Costa Rica passed a landmark law banning new open-pit mining projects anywhere in the country. Or that in 2012,
the residents of the Colombian archipelago of San Andrés, Providencia, and Santa Catalina successfully fended off government plans to open the waters around their beautiful islands to offshore oil drilling. The region is home to one of the largest coral reefs in the Western Hemisphere and as one account of the victory puts it, what was established was the fact that coral is “more important than
oil.”
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And then there is the wave of global victories against coal. Under mounting pressure, the World Bank as well as other large international funders have announced that they will no longer offer financing to coal
projects except in exceptional circumstances, which could turn out to be a severe blow to the industry if other financiers follow suit. In Gerze, Turkey, a major proposed coal
plant on the Black Sea was scuttled under community pressure. The Sierra Club’s hugely successful “Beyond Coal” campaign has, along with dozens of local partner organizations, succeeded in retiring 170 coal plants in the United States and prevented over 180 proposed plants since 2002.
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The campaign to block coal export terminals in the Pacific Northwest has similarly moved from strength to strength.
Three of the planned terminals—one near Clatskanie, Oregon, another in Coos Bay, Oregon, and another in Hoquiam, Washington—have already been nixed, the result of forceful community activism, much of it organized by the Power Past Coal coalition. Several port proposals are still pending but resistance is fierce, particularly to the largest of the bunch, just outside Bellingham, Washington.
“It’s not a fun time to be in the coal industry these days,” said Nick Carter, president and chief operating officer of the U.S. coal company Natural Resource Partners. “It’s not much fun to get up every day, go to work and spend your time fighting your own government.”
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In comparison, the actions against the various tar sands pipelines have not yet won any clear victories, only a series of
very long delays. But those delays matter a great deal because they have placed a question mark over the capacity of Alberta’s oil patch to make good on its growth projections. And if there is one thing billion-dollar investors hate, it’s political uncertainty. If Alberta’s landlocked oil patch can’t guarantee its investors a reliable route to the sea where bitumen can be loaded onto tankers, then,
as the province’s former minister of energy Ron Liepert put it, “the investment is going to dry up.” The head of one of the largest oil companies in the tar sands confirmed this in January 2014. “If there were no more pipeline expansions, I would have to slow down,” Cenovus CEO Brian Ferguson said. He clearly considered this some kind of threat, but from a climate perspective it sounded like the
best news in years.
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Even if these tactics succeed only in slowing expansion plans, the delays will buy time for clean energy sources to increase their market share and to be seen as more viable alternatives, weakening the power of the fossil fuel lobby. And, even more significantly, the delays give residents of the largest
markets in Asia a window of opportunity to strengthen their own demands
for a clean energy revolution.

Already, these demands are spreading so rapidly that it isn’t at all clear how long the market for new coal-fired plants and extra-dirty gasoline in Asia will continue to expand. In India, Blockadia-style uprisings have been on full display in recent years, with people’s movements against coal-fired power plants significantly slowing the rush to dirty energy in
some regions. The southeastern state of Andhra Pradesh has been the site of several iconic struggles, like one in the village of Kakarapalli, surrounded by rice patties and coconut groves, where local residents can be seen staffing a semipermanent checkpoint under a baobab tree at the entrance to town. The encampment chokes off the only road leading to a half-built power plant where construction was
halted amidst protests in 2011. In nearby Sompeta, another power plant proposal was stopped by a breakthrough alliance of urban middle-class professionals and subsistence farmers and fishers who united to protect the nearby wetlands. After police charged a crowd of protesters in 2010, shooting dead at least two people, a national uproar forced the National Environment Appellate Authority to revoke
the permit for the project.
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The community remains vigilant, with a daily rotating hunger strike entering its 1,500th day at the beginning of 2014.