Al Gore knows he’s been getting some mighty bad press lately, that even staunch Democrats have embraced the media caricature of him as a “stiff” and “boring” automaton from the Disneyland Hall of Vice Presidents. He’s trying mightily to shrug it off.
“I find the coverage stiff and boring,” he told Salon News. Not that the veep is complaining. “I feel fine about it,” he insists, though his calm seems more calculating political strategy than thick skin. “I would honestly not swap my position in this race for anyone else’s; I’m not peaking too early,” he adds, only half-kidding. “You know, in stock car races, it’s usually the second car in the gun lap that wins.”
Gore is referring to his current weak position in the polls compared with his likely opponent in the 2000 election, high-flying Texas Gov. George W. Bush. Gore hopes Bush has only one direction to go in the polls and that direction is down.
Thus, the vice president can insist that he’s quite content, for now, being the Rodney Dangerfield of American politics.
Not surprisingly, Gore’s allies blame the substance-averse, scandal-happy national media. They say that the conventional wisdom — that his campaign is lackluster and hobbled by infighting, that he has been stumbling everywhere he goes, and that as a public speaker Gore is only slightly more animated than a corpse — is just plain wrong.
Gore’s allies might just have a point. It’s hard to look at the last two years of Gore’s press clips and not see a fairly intentional effort on the part of journalists to turn the veep into a stiff, self-important caricature.
Take his most infamous utterance to date: “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet,” from an interview he gave to CNN a few months back.
While this was obviously an overstatement, Gore actually does deserve a substantial amount of credit for the technology through which you’re reading this story. “Gore took a critical part [in launching the Internet],” says Dave Farber, a professor of telecommunication systems at the University of Pennsylvania. “He did misspeak, and everybody jumped on him, but he made a very significant contribution.”
Vinton Cerf, the Stanford researcher who sketched out a design for the Internet in 1973, seconds that emotion: “It is entirely fitting that the vice president take some credit for helping to create an environment in which Internet could thrive.”
Then there was the flap that ensued when Gore, during an off-the-record chat, boasted that the character of Oliver Barrett in Erich Segal’s “Love Story” was based on him. Pounce went the media. “Does he think, going into 2000, that this will give him a romantic glow, or a romantic afterglow?” snarked the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd.
But Time Magazine’s Karen Tumulty, with whom Gore had the actual conversation, told a columnist that Dowd and others got the story wrong, that “Gore was telling us something that was basically true.”
Segal himself, in fact, has confirmed that Barrett is an amalgam of both Gore and his Harvard roommate, actor Tommy Lee Jones.
Then there was the “farm boy” fracas in March, when reporters ripped Gore for an Iowa speech in which he exaggerated his own farming credentials. “In Iowa, Gore claimed that he was a farm boy who plowed steep hillsides with mules,” wrote the Cincinnati Enquirer in an editorial titled “King of Gaffes: Al Gore out-Quayles Dan.”
But as even conservative Gore biographer Bob Zelnick acknowledged in his fairly critical book, “Gore: A Political Life,” the veep did, indeed, spend “long weekends, summers, holidays, and his entire seventh year” in Carthage, Tenn., working on the family farm. Young Gore woke before dawn, fed the livestock, cleaned out the hog parlors and cleared a field one summer “with only a small hand-axe as his tool.”
The media’s newest anti-Gore flap, “Floodgate,” simply continues the anti-Gore trend.
On July 22, not far from Cornish, N.H., Gore, New Hampshire Gov. Jeanne Shaheen and a cadre of Democrats and reporters piled into canoes and started floating down the Connecticut River.
It was a fairly typical campaign photo op; Gore sat erect in his canoe, the perfect perpendicular man, as always. After finishing his 45-minute ride, Gore participated in a carefully staged press conference announcing an immense grant for the Connecticut River Joint Commission and others to implement various components of the American Heritage River Action Plan.
But then a Washington Times reporter in attendance stumbled onto a man who complained to him that environmentalists had been after the river commission to raise the water level of the river for some time to benefit the fish. The man was discouraged that it wasn’t until the vice president came to the river for a photo op that the commission finally acted, releasing millions of gallons into the river simply to ensure that Gore’s canoe didn’t scrape the rocks.
It sounded like another mini-scandal, but there was just one key problem: No one affiliated with the Gore campaign had anything to do with the decision to raise the river’s water level. The head of the river commission had come up with the idea in order to help along a photo op that was going to bring national attention to her cause. And, it should be emphasized, raising the river level was actually good for the environment.
But the curious fact that the river was flooded for the sake of a photo op — on behalf of a politician already stereotyped as being artificial, in a campaign already labeled as faltering — was too good to pass up.
The following day, a headline blared from the front page of the Washington Times: “New Hampshire able to float Gore’s boat.”
“Nearly 4 billion gallons of water were unleashed from a massive dam Thursday to raise the level of the Connecticut River in Cornish, N.H., so that Vice President Al Gore’s canoe would not get stuck during an environmental photo opportunity,” wrote the Times’ correspondent.
“Gore in Environmental Quandary,” ventured the Associated Press.
That afternoon, CNN’s “Inside Politics” reported that “Vice President Al Gore is facing political heat over the fact that millions of gallons of water had to be released from an up-river dam in order to provide enough for him to take a campaign photo-op canoe trip downstream during a regional drought.”
By the time the Gore motorcade reached a house party in Rochester, N.H., all the vice president’s men were in a tizzy, huddling and pacing and otherwise chagrined. Other reporters — by now under pressure from their editors — called Gore’s press secretary to get a comment on the matter.
“Critics Paddle Gore in ‘Dam’ Rowing Row,” screamed the New York Post.
“Campaign blasted for water release,” yelled the Charleston Daily Mail.
“A Canoe Trip Becomes a Political Misadventure for Gore,” said the New York Times, discreet as ever.
By the time I parted company with the Gore campaign that Friday afternoon, it was clear that any hope for positive stories from his two-day visit to New Hampshire — that his campaign skills have markedly improved, say, or that despite bad press, the Gore 2000 organization seems to be generating lots of excitement — were drowned out by “Floodgate.”
Even apart from the supposed gaffes, Gore suffers from the notion that he’s one stiff dude, a cigar-store Indian with a major pole up his ass. It started with his posture, which is pluperfect, like a backward parenthesis. His neck doesn’t seem to twist, so all his turns are from the waist, as if he were doing the ’80s break-dancing move “the robot.”
Despite these odd physical characteristics, Gore hardly seems stiff in a small group setting; in fact, he was perfectly capable of generating excitement at a gathering in a barn in Etna, N.H., on July 22, where he genuinely wowed the crowd. In fact, in small groups throughout New Hampshire that week — whether at house parties, or while conducting a seminar at a New Hampshire technical college, Gore conveyed an appealing personality, relaxed yet serious, wonky yet concerned and always quite charming.
He scored positive reviews from many of the pleasantly surprised voters who attended his events. “I thought he was very personable … and very comfortable,” said Polly Dale, a substitute teacher who leans Republican and saw Gore at the technical college. “I was very impressed.”
Gore told Salon that his comfort level on the stump “hasn’t been freshly examined [by the media] in a while. I don’t mind that; it’s OK. I joke from time to time that I benefit from low expectations.”
“My response is always ‘stiff compared to who?’” says Bill Turque, a national correspondent for Newsweek whose as-yet-untitled biography of Gore will hit bookstores early next year. “Who is this long line of great theatrical talents who run for president? There’s Clinton and Reagan, but after that, who are they talking about?
“Stiff compared to George Bush? To Mike Dukakis? To Bob Dole? Gore’s not the most fluid guy. For a long time he was very self-conscious about his age [he was sworn into the House at the tender age of 28], and also he talks about very technical things, like climate change, information technology, environmental restoration. But I think he’s capable of being very good campaigner.”
Friends and confidants of the vice president argue that whatever stiffness remains comes from Gore’s inability to feign sincerity. Whereas a 30-second encounter with President Clinton can make you feel like he’s your new best friend, Gore doesn’t do that. And Clinton, of course, is full of crap. Not that Gore never is; but while every pol has a degree of phoniness, it may be that Al Gore doesn’t have enough, at least not on the stump, to please his critics.
When he’s comfortable, the vice president can actually be quite a wise-ass. When I ask him what his biggest faults are, he says, with a twinkle: “I work too hard. I’m too kind. I care too much. If I were better balanced, I would have at least one unkind thought in my body.” Not bad, for a stiff.
If you forget the stuff about his image, there are still plenty of substantive criticisms to be fired at Gore. Among them:
- On important policy questions, Gore can be cautious to a fault, perhaps one result of having seen his father’s Senate career cut down by bold stances in favor of civil rights and against the Vietnam War.
- Gore become an overly aggressive fund-raiser during the last election cycle, pushing the law to the limit, despite his earlier statements in favor of campaign finance reform.
- In betrayal of the nickname former President Bush once gave him — “Ozone” — environmentalists think Gore has sold them out, and that he has abandoned his environmental principles.
- As an outspoken opponent of big tobacco — and someone who made a tortured speech before the nation about how his chain-smoking sister had died of lung cancer — his decision to hire as his media man Carter Eskew, big tobacco’s advertising superstar, seems outright hypocritical.
- He often speaks to people in ways they find condescending, and varies his manner only slightly whether he’s talking to kids at a day-care center or to their moms at campaign events with a wandering-mike shtick.
- In an era when the public seems to be seeking bipartisan cooperation from political leaders, Gore is a partisan Democrat from the old school.
So far, however, none of these faults are contributing to his media problems. What you hear, over and over, are the “Love Story,” Internet, and farm-boy flaps.
“Al Gore is like the fat boy in the schoolyard,” Russell Baker wrote in the New York Times in 1997, right after the “Love Story” fracas. “Tormenting him is so much fun that nobody can resist … Victims are necessary in schoolyards to satisfy the nastier angels of youthful nature. Victims in politics fulfill similarly shameful needs, but a politician, once draped in the trappings of victimhood, faces dangerous practical problems.”
One way you can tell another election season is approaching is to check out Gore’s waistline. That’s because he tries to get into shape before each new campaign gets under way. This year, for example, he’s already dropped about 15 pounds; his arms are veiny from weight lifting, his face is chiseled where it was previously puffy, and he looks to be in better shape than many of his Secret Service guys.
Gore approaches fitness the way he approaches everything — with pious studiousness and methodical dedication.
He was the same way back in the early 1970s, when he was a reporter for the Nashville Tennessean. “Journalism school [professors] and city editors, the advice they always give you is before you ever go on assignment, go to the library and look up the clips,” says Frank Sutherland, who worked with Gore at the Tennessean and is its current editor. “He is the only reporter I knew who always did that. He was always prepared for an interview; he never went into an interview cold.”
Despite reports of infighting at Gore 2000 headquarters, the vice president’s campaign actually seems to be running smoothly. It’s the hard-born result of typical Gore diligence, dedication and homework — plus, of course, the cushy benefits that come from being an incumbent.
In both New Hampshire and Iowa, the veep has been endorsed by an overwhelming majority of state officials. And though both states’ Democratic governors aren’t taking sides in the Gore-Bradley match-up, their spouses — Bill Shaheen, hubby to New Hampshire Gov. Jeanne Shaheen, and Iowa first lady Christie Vilsack — are full-fledged members of the Gore 2000 squad. Bradley made a strong drive to get the endorsements of Iowa’s two big labor unions, AFSCME and the UAW, but Gore snatched them both.
Gore’s also ahead in the polls. Among New Hampshire Democrats, Gore leads Bradley 48 percent to 32 percent. In the most recent poll of likely caucus voters in Iowa, Gore’s up 64 percent to 24 percent.
Besides being a dedicated worker, Gore has earned a reputation as someone always out a little bit ahead of the pack on the issues.
“The guy genuinely does look seriously around the corner and into the future on a lot of issues a lot people don’t pay attention to,” says Newsweek’s Turque. “In the early 1980s he was studying climate change and early global warming when that was not on people’s screens.
“In the early ’80s, he was also very interested in changes in computer infrastructure, in what he called the information superhighway,” Turque adds. “He would talk in congressional hearings about the day when everyone would have PCs in their homes. At his best, there’s almost a prophetic edge to the guy.”
One reason Gore’s always ahead of the curve is that he reads so much. The names he drops are not those of celebrities, but of authors.
Even though he failed to complete two separate graduate programs — law school and divinity school — Gore is every bit a scholar, which is why he comes off so very teacherly, rattling off figures and numbers and studies all the time.
“If he has a fault, it’s that he will explain something to death for you,” editor Sutherland says. But then again, in the early ’90s the then-senator came to the Tennessean to teach them all about global warming. The lesson lasted an arduous hour and a half, Sutherland says, but “when he was finished, we all understood what he was talking about.”
His scholarly edge manifests itself elsewhere in his life too. As first disclosed by biographer Zelnick, after having three daughters, Gore devoted himself to Dr. Landrum B. Shettles’ “How to Choose the Sex of Your Baby,” a serious text that recommends that, to procreate a son, the prospective father wear boxers, drink coffee immediately before sex, and attempt impregnation during the high-alkaline moment of ovulation.
In October 1982, Albert Gore III was born.
When Albert III was injured in a severe car accident in April 1989, Gore withdrew from politics somewhat, and boned up not only on his son’s injuries (he has since recovered) but also on environmental issues, for what would become his bestselling enviro-tract, “Earth in the Balance.”
But Gore’s clean-as-a-whistle reputation took a hit when he teamed up with Clinton. As one of Clinton’s most valuable assets on the ’92 campaign trail, as well as at the policy-making table, Gore was an able, on-message Tonto to Clinton’s Kemosabe. But when Gore’s work ethic and unquestioning Democratic partisan loyalty were channeled into the Clinton-Gore-DNC fund-raising apparatus, suddenly the diligence of the heir apparent got him into trouble.
His April 1996 fund-raising at the Hsi Lai Buddhist temple was especially crass, and his wormy attempt to extricate himself from the media fallout was clumsy. At the very least, he skated around the edge of the law, and afterward, Gore had only himself to blame for the fallout from this incident.
When Bradley hammers Gore on campaign finance reform, as he has done especially hard in the past few weeks, he’s therefore pushing on a vulnerable and largely self-inflicted wound.
Gore knows he is in a dirty business. He’s aware that politics is soaked with compromises and necessary evils, and he seems to have come to terms with that a long time ago. At a New Hampshire house party last week, in response to a young man who had inquired about the rewards of public service, Gore said, “It is self-government. People in it are just … trying to do the best we can. [People] make mistakes. But the cumulative power of the American experiment has thrilled the entire world, because people like you are willing to make it work — in spite of all the difficulties.
“There’s something in our American system about the exchange of ideas,” Gore went on, “that can be translated into tangible changes in the way we live our lives together that’s just different from any other country that came before us. And if you’re willing to put up with what it takes to be a part of that — I’m telling you, if you keep your heart right, the rewards are just beyond measure.”
For months now, Bradley’s been jabbing Gore for only seizing upon only the little issues and not thinking Bradleyesque deep thoughts. That cuts both ways, of course: New Hampshire House Minority Leader Peter Burling, a Democrat who’s endorsed Gore, described a one-hour meeting with Bradley this way: “I knew I was in the presence of remarkable intelligence, but I can’t say I fully understood what he was talking about.”
Still, Bradley is on target when he derides Gore as hampered by caution. On the stump, Gore talks about niche issues like suburban traffic congestion, better preschool education and prescription drug benefits for seniors using Medicare.
In Congress, he picked similar small issues, taking on the makers of contact-lens solution and baby formula. Sutherland says that when he asked Gore, ‘Why do you pick these issues?’ Gore replied: “Because I can do something about them.”
Gore is quick to point out that there are grander themes at stake in this election, however. Whatever his “practical idealism” shares with Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” in rhetoric and overall squishiness, Gore argues that the differences couldn’t be more stark, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.
The next president, he points out, will probably appoint three Supreme Court justices. So, as he tells a crowded barn in Etna, N.H., “the future of many of our individual rights is at risk.”
He and Bush differ on “policy toward crime and handguns,” he says, arguing his belief in photo-licensing and waiting periods for handgun buyers, while “the other side wants more concealed weapons.”
Gore opposes the tax cut the Republicans in Congress are pushing, wanting to use the budget surplus “to extend the life of Social Security” and “bring about revolutionary changes in our public schools.”
Gore argues that the success of his “practical idealism” can be measured in its accomplishments, not its rhetoric.
“The best thing that President Clinton and I have done is to translate the lofty ideals that have always been at the heart of the Democratic party into a practical program that has made it possible to really achieve goals that were once felt to be beyond our reach,” he told Salon. “Although we still have so much work to do, I feel that we’ve been able to restore some measure of confidence in the promise of self-government in a time that that confidence has begun to wane.”
In contrast to the boyish, impulsive Clinton, the quick-tempered, formerly hard-partying Bush and lofty dreamer Bradley, Al Gore is staking out ground as the grown-up in chief. The administration’s policies show “the kind of patience and common sense that make it possible to really achieve [Democratic] ideals,” he says. “Our anti-crime program, our economic program, our education program, you can go right down the list. We have made a lot of progress in a lot of areas where people were beginning to think there was no realistic hope.”
Clinton’s (and Gore’s) accomplishments aren’t just a net plus, of course. In Gore’s last run for the presidency, in ’88, he was prisoner only to his own record and caution; now he’s a prisoner of Clinton’s foibles, too. Every Republican candidate links Gore to Clinton and, by extension, to Monica, to the China scandal, to Whitewater — hoping to exploit the national weariness for this administration.
Which in the end may be Gore’s biggest problem. As one of the few candidates with a legitimate claim to service in Vietnam, intelligence, a fairly moderate record, much-improving campaign skills and a strong political organization, you’d think Gore would be doing better in the polls than he is so far.
But Clinton may be the one monkey he can’t get off his back. Gore has done a bit to distance himself from Clinton but there’s really only so much he can get away with. At the Etna barn party, one New Hampshirite told Gore that he wished he had stood by Clinton even more, telling the country that Clinton “was your friend.”
“He is my friend,” Gore said in response. “I’ve had a closer working relationship with him than any vice president. My philosophy is, ‘Hate the sin, love the sinner.’ If you have a friend who makes a mistake, that doesn’t destroy the friendship.”
No, I thought to myself, but it might just destroy your candidacy. And it might help explain why everybody always seems to be picking on you, too.
If the world can be seen in a grain of sand, watch out. As Wisconsinites are learning, there’s money (and misery) in sand — and if you’ve got the right kind, an oil company may soon be at your doorstep.
March in Wisconsin used to mean snow on the ground, temperatures so cold that farmers worried about their cows freezing to death. But as I traveled around rural townships and villages in early March to interview people about frac-sand mining, a little-known cousin of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” daytime temperatures soared to nearly 80 degrees — bizarre weather that seemed to be sending a meteorological message.
In this troubling spring, Wisconsin’s prairies and farmland fanned out to undulating hills that cradled the land and its people. Within their embrace, the rackety calls of geese echoed from ice-free ponds, bald eagles wheeled in the sky, and deer leaped in the brush. And for the first time in my life, I heard the thrilling warble of sandhill cranes.
Yet this peaceful rural landscape is swiftly becoming part of a vast assembly line in the corporate race for the last fossil fuels on the planet. The target: the sand in the land of the cranes.
Five hundred million years ago, an ocean surged here, shaping a unique wealth of hills and bluffs that, under mantles of greenery and trees, are sandstone. That sandstone contains a particularly pure form of crystalline silica. Its grains, perfectly rounded, are strong enough to resist the extreme pressures of the technology called hydraulic fracturing, which pumps vast quantities of that sand, as well as water and chemicals, into ancient shale formations to force out methane and other forms of “natural gas.”
That sand, which props open fractures in the shale, has to come from somewhere. Without it, the fracking industry would grind to a halt. So big multinational corporations are descending on this bucolic region to cart off its prehistoric sand, which will later be forcefully injected into the earth elsewhere across the country to produce more natural gas. Geology that has taken millions of years to form is now being transformed into part of a system, a machine, helping to drive global climate change.
“The valleys will be filled… the mountains and hills made level”
Boom times for hydraulic fracturing began in 2008 when new horizontal-drilling methods transformed an industry formerly dependent on strictly vertical boring. Frac-sand mining took off in tandem with this development.
“It’s huge,” said a U.S. Geological Survey mineral commodity specialist in 2009. “I’ve never seen anything like it, the growth. It makes my head spin.” That year, from all U.S. sources, frac-sand producers used or sold over 6.5 million metric tons of sand — about what the Great Pyramid of Giza weighs. Last month, Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) Senior Manager and Special Projects Coordinator Tom Woletz said corporations were hauling at least 15 million metric tons a year from the state’s hills.
By July 2011, between 22 and 36 frac-sand facilities in Wisconsin were either operating or approved. Seven months later, said Woletz, there were over 60 mines and 45 processing (refinement) plants in operation. “By the time your article appears, these figures will be obsolete,” claims Pat Popple, who in 2008 founded the first group to oppose frac-sand mining, Concerned Chippewa Citizens (now part of The Save the Hills Alliance).
Jerry Lausted, a retired teacher and also a farmer, showed me the tawny ridges of sand that delineated a strip mine near the town of Menomonie where he lives. “If we were looking from the air,” he added, “you’d see ponds in the bottom of the mine where they dump the industrial waste water. If you scan to the left, you’ll see the hills that are going to disappear.”
Those hills are gigantic sponges, absorbing water, filtering it, and providing the region’s aquifer with the purest water imaginable. According to Lausted, sand mining takes its toll on “air quality, water quality and quantity. Recreational aspects of the community are damaged. Property values [are lowered.] But the big thing is, you’re removing the hills that you can’t replace. They’re a huge water manufacturing factory that Mother Nature gave us, and they’re gone.”
It’s impossible to grasp the scope of the devastation from the road, but aerial videos and photographs reveal vast, bleak sandy wastelands punctuated with waste ponds and industrial installations where Wisconsin hills once stood.
When corporations apply to counties for mining permits, they must file “reclamation” plans. But Larry Schneider, a retired metallurgist and industrial consultant with a specialized knowledge of mining, calls the reclamation process “an absolute farce.”
Reclamation projects by mining corporations since the 1970s may have made mined areas “look a little less than an absolute wasteland,” he observes. “But did they reintroduce the biodiversity? Did they reintroduce the beauty and the ecology? No.”
Studies bear out his verdict. “Every year,” wrote Mrinal Ghose in the Journal of Scientific and Industrial Research, “large areas are continually becoming unfertile in spite of efforts to grow vegetation on the degraded mined land.”
Awash in promises of corporate jobs and easy money, those who lease and sell their land just shrug. “The landscape is gonna change when it’s all said and done,” says dairy farmer Bobby Schindler, who in 2008 leased his land in Chippewa County to a frac-sand company called Canadian Sand and Proppant. (EOG, the former Enron, has since taken over the lease.) “Instead of being a hill it’s gonna be a valley, but all seeded down, and you’d never know there’s a mine there unless you were familiar with the area.”
Of the mining he adds, “It’s really put a boost to the area. It’s impressive the amount of money that’s exchanging hands.” Eighty-four-year-old Letha Webster, who sold her land 100 miles south of Schindler’s to another mining corporation, Unimin, says that leaving her home of 56 years is “just the price of progress.”
Jamie and Kevin Gregar — both 30-something native Wisconsinites and military veterans — lived in a trailer and saved their money so that they could settle down in a pastoral paradise once Kevin returned from Iraq. In January 2011, they found a dream home near tiny Tunnel City. (The village takes its name from a nearby rail tunnel). “It’s just gorgeous — the hills, the trees, the woodland, the animals,” says Jamie. “It’s perfect.”
Five months after they moved in, she learned that neighbors had leased their land to “a sand mine” company. “What’s a sand mine?” she asked.
Less than a year later, they know all too well. The Gregars’ land is now surrounded on three sides by an unsightly panorama of mining preparations. Unimin is uprooting trees, gouging out topsoil, and tearing down the nearby hills. “It looks like a disaster zone, like a bomb went off,” Jamie tells me.
When I mention her service to her country, her voice breaks. “I am devastated. We’ve done everything right. We’ve done everything we were supposed to. We just wanted to raise our family in a good location and have good neighbors and to have it taken away from us for something we don’t support…” Her voice trails off in tears.
For Unimin, the village of Tunnel City in Greenfield township was a perfect target. Not only did the land contain the coveted crystalline silica; it was close to a rail spur. No need for the hundreds of diesel trucks that other corporations use to haul sand from mine sites to processing plants. No need, either, for transport from processing plants to rail junctions where hundreds of trains haul frac-sand by the millions of tons each year to fracture other once-rural landscapes. Here, instead, the entire assembly line operates in one industrial zone.
There was also no need for jumping the hurdles zoning laws sometimes erect. Like many Wisconsin towns where a culture of diehard individualism sees zoning as an assault on personal freedom, Greenfield and all its municipalities, including Tunnel City, are unzoned. This allowed the corporation to make deals with individual landowners. For the 8.5 acres where Letha Webster and her husband Gene lived for 56 years, assessed in 2010 at $147,500, Unimin paid $330,000. Overall, between late May and July 2011, it paid $5.3 million for 436 acres with a market value of about $1.1 million.
There was no time for public education about the potential negative possibilities of frac-sand mining: the destruction of the hills, the decline in property values, the danger of silicosis (once considered a strictly occupational lung disease) from blowing silica dust, contamination of ground water from the chemicals used in the processing plants, the blaze of lights all night long, noise from hundreds of train cars, houses shaken by blasting. Ron Koshoshek, a leading environmentalist who works with Wisconsin’s powerful Towns Association to educate townships about the industry, says that “frac-sand mining will virtually end all residential development in rural townships.” The result will be “a large-scale net loss of tax dollars to towns, increasing taxes for those who remain.”
Town-Busting Tactics
Frac-sand corporations count on a combination of naïveté, trust, and incomprehension in rural hamlets that previously dealt with companies no larger than Wisconsin’s local sand and gravel industries. Before 2008, town boards had never handled anything beyond road maintenance and other basic municipal issues. Today, multinational corporations use their considerable resources to steamroll local councils and win sweetheart deals. That’s how the residents of Tunnel City got taken to the cleaners.
On July 6, 2011, a Unimin representative ran the first public forum about frac-sand mining in the village. Other heavily attended and often heated community meetings followed, but given the cascades of cash, the town board chairman’s failure to take a stand against the mining corporation, and Unimin’s aggressiveness, tiny Tunnel City was a David without a slingshot.
Local citizens did manage to get the corporation to agree to give the town $250,000 for the first two million tons mined annually, $50,000 more than its original offer. In exchange, the township agreed that any ordinance it might pass in the future to restrict mining wouldn’t apply to Unimin. Multiply the two million tons of frac-sand tonnage Unimin expects to mine annually starting in 2013 by the $300 a ton the industry makes and you’ll find that the township only gets .0004% of what the company will gross.
For the Gregars, it’s been a nightmare. Unimin has refused five times to buy their land and no one else wants to live near a sand mine. What weighs most heavily on the couple is the possibility that their children will get silicosis from long-term exposure to dust from the mine sites. “We don’t want our kids to be lab rats for frac-sand mining companies,” says Jamie.
Drew Bradley, Unimin’s senior vice president of operations, waves such fears aside. “I think [citizens] are blowing it out of proportion,” he told a local publication. “There are plenty of silica mines sited close to communities. There have been no concerns exposed there.”
That’s cold comfort to the Gregars. Crystalline silica is a known carcinogen and the cause of silicosis, an irreversible, incurable disease. None of the very few rules applied to sand mining by the state’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) limit how much silica gets into the air outside of mines. That’s the main concern of those living near the facilities.
So in November 2011, Jamie Gregar and ten other citizens sent a 35-page petition to the DNR. The petitioners asked the agency to declare respirable crystalline silica a hazardous substance and to monitor it, using a public health protection level set by California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. The petition relies on studies, including one by the DNR itself, which acknowledge the risk of airborne silica from frac-sand mines for those who live nearby.
The DNR denied the petition, claiming among other things that — contrary to its own study’s findings — current standards are adequate. One of the petition’s signatories, Ron Koshoshek, wasn’t surprised. For 16 years he was a member of, and for nine years chaired, Wisconsin’s Public Intervenor Citizens Advisory Committee. Created in 1967, its role was to intercede on behalf of the environment, should tensions grow between the DNR’s two roles: environmental protector and corporate licensor. “The DNR,” he says, “is now a permitting agency for development and exploitation of resources.”
In 2010, Cathy Stepp, a confirmed anti-environmentalist who had previously railed against the DNR, belittling it as “anti-development, anti-transportation, and pro-garter snakes,” was appointed to head the agency by now-embattled Governor Scott Walker who explained: “I wanted someone with a chamber-of-commerce mentality.”
As for Jamie Gregar, her dreams have been dashed and she’s determined to leave her home. “At this point,” she says, “I don’t think there’s a price we wouldn’t accept.”
Frac-Sand vs. Food
Brian Norberg and his family in Prairie Farm, 137 miles northwest of Tunnel City, paid the ultimate price: he died while trying to mobilize the community against Procore, a subsidiary of the multinational oil and gas corporation Sanjel. The American flag that flies in front of the Norbergs’ house flanks a placard with a large, golden NORBERG, over which pheasants fly against a blue sky. It’s meant to represent the 1,500 acres the family has farmed for a century.
“When you start talking about industrial mining, to us, you’re violating the land,” Brian’s widow, Lisa, told me one March afternoon over lunch. She and other members of the family, as well as a friend, had gathered to describe Prairie Farm’s battle with the frac-sanders. “The family has had a really hard time accepting the fact that what we consider a beautiful way to live could be destroyed by big industry.”
Their fight against Procore started in April 2011: Sandy, a lifelong friend and neighbor, arrived with sand samples drillers had excavated from her land, and began enthusiastically describing the benefits of frac-sand mining. “Brian listened for a few minutes,” Lisa recalls. “Then he told her [that]… she and her sand vials could get the heck — that’s a much nicer word than what he used – off the farm. Sandy was hoping we would also be excited about jumping on the bandwagon. Brian informed her that our land would be used for the purpose God intended, farming.”
Brian quickly enlisted family and neighbors in an organizing effort against the company. In June 2011, Procore filed a reclamation plan — the first step in the permitting process — with the county’s land and water conservation department. Brian rushed to the county office to request a public hearing, but returned dejected and depressed. “He felt completely defeated that he could not protect the community from them moving in and destroying our lives,” recalls Lisa.
He died of a heart attack less than a day later at the age of 52. The family is convinced his death was a result of the stress caused by the conflict. That stress is certainly all too real. The frac-sand companies, says family friend Donna Goodlaxson, echoing many others I interviewed for this story, “go from community to community. And one of the things they try to do is pit people in the community against each other.”
Instead of backing off, the Norbergs and other Prairie Farm residents continued Brian’s efforts. At an August 2011 public hearing, the town’s residents directly addressed Procore’s representatives. “What people had to say there was so powerful,” Goodlaxson remembers. “Those guys were blown out of their chairs. They weren’t prepared for us.”
“I think people insinuate that we’re little farmers in a little community and everyone’s an ignorant buffoon,” added Sue Glaser, domestic partner of Brian’s brother Wayne. “They found out in a real short time there was a lot of education behind this.”
“About 80% of the neighborhood was not happy about the potential change to our area,” Lisa adds. “But very few of us knew anything about this industry at [that] time.” To that end, Wisconsin’s Farmers’ Union and its Towns Association organized a day-long conference in December 2011 to help people “deal with this new industry.”
Meanwhile, other towns, alarmed by the explosion of frac-sand mining, were beginning to pass licensing ordinances to regulate the industry. In Wisconsin, counties can challenge zoning but not licensing ordinances, which fall under town police powers. These, according to Wisconsin law, cannot be overruled by counties or the state. Becky Glass, a Prairie Farm resident and an organizer with Labor Network for Sustainability, calls Wisconsin’s town police powers “the strongest tools towns have to fight or regulate frac-sand mining.” Consider them so many slingshots employed against the corporate Goliaths.
In April 2012, Prairie Farm’s three-man board voted 2 to 1 to pass such an ordinance to regulate any future mining effort in the town. No, such moves won’t stop frac-sand mining in Wisconsin, but they may at least mitigate its harm. Procore finally pulled out because of the resistance, says Glass, adding that the company has since returned with different personnel to try opening a mine near where she lives.
“It takes 1.2 acres per person per year to feed every person in this country,” says Lisa Norberg. “And the little township that I live in, we have 9,000 acres that are for farm use. So if we just close our eyes and bend over and let the mining companies come in, we’ll have thousands of people we can’t feed.”
Food or frac-sand: it’s a decision of vital importance across the country, but one most Americans don’t even realize is being made — largely by multinational corporations and dwindling numbers of yeoman farmers in what some in this country would call “the real America.” Most of us know nothing about these choices, but if the mining corporations have their way, we will soon enough — when we check out prices at the supermarket or grocery store. We’ll know it too, as global climate change continues to turn Wisconsin winters balmy and supercharge wild weather across the country.
While bucolic landscapes disappear, aquifers are fouled, and countless farms across rural Wisconsin morph into industrial wastelands, Lisa’s sons continue to work the Norberg’s land, just as their father once did. So does Brian’s nephew, 32-year-old Matthew, who took me on a jolting ride across his fields. The next time I’m in town, he assured me, we’ll visit places in the hills where water feeds into springs. Yes, you can drink the water there. It’s still the purest imaginable. Under the circumstances, though, no one knows for how long.
Ellen Cantarow’s work on Israel/Palestine has been widely published for over 30 years. Her long-time concern with climate change has led her to investigate the global depredations of oil and gas corporations at TomDispatch. Many thanks to Wisconsin filmmaker Jim Tittle, whose documentary, “The Price of Sand,” will appear in August 2012, and who shared both his interviewees and his time for this article.
This document was found on the computer of "Ecotopia" author Ernest Callenbach (1929-2012) after his death.
It originally appeared on
TomDispatch.com.
To all brothers and sisters who hold the dream in their hearts of a future world in which humans and all other beings live in harmony and mutual support — a world of sustainability, stability, and confidence. A world something like the one I described, so long ago, in “Ecotopia” and “Ecotopia Emerging.”
As I survey my life, which is coming near its end, I want to set down a few thoughts that might be useful to those coming after. It will soon be time for me to give back to Gaia the nutrients that I have used during a long, busy and happy life. I am not bitter or resentful at the approaching end; I have been one of the extraordinarily lucky ones. So it behooves me here to gather together some thoughts and attitudes that may prove useful in the dark times we are facing: a century or more of exceedingly difficult times.
How will those who survive manage it? What can we teach our friends, our children, our communities? Although we may not be capable of changing history, how can we equip ourselves to survive it?
I contemplate these questions in the full consciousness of my own mortality. Being offered an actual number of likely months to live, even though the estimate is uncertain, mightily focuses the mind. On personal things, of course, on loved ones and even loved things, but also on the Big Picture.
But let us begin with last things first, for a change. The analysis will come later, for those who wish it.
Hope. Children exude hope, even under the most terrible conditions, and that must inspire us as our conditions get worse. Hopeful patients recover better. Hopeful test candidates score better. Hopeful builders construct better buildings. Hopeful parents produce secure and resilient children. In groups, an atmosphere of hope is essential to shared successful effort: “Yes, we can!” is not an empty slogan, but a mantra for people who intend to do something together — whether it is rescuing victims of hurricanes, rebuilding flood-damaged buildings on higher ground, helping wounded people through first aid, or inventing new social structures (perhaps one in which only people are “persons,” not corporations). We cannot know what threats we will face. But ingenuity against adversity is one of our species’ built-in resources. We cope, and faith in our coping capacity is perhaps our biggest resource of all.
Mutual support. The people who do best at basic survival tasks (we know this experimentally, as well as intuitively) are cooperative, good at teamwork, often altruistic, mindful of the common good. In drastic emergencies like hurricanes or earthquakes, people surprise us by their sacrifices — of food, of shelter, even sometimes of life itself. Those who survive social or economic collapse, or wars, or pandemics, or starvation, will be those who manage scarce resources fairly; hoarders and dominators win only in the short run, and end up dead, exiled, or friendless. So, in every way we can we need to help each other, and our children, learn to be cooperative rather than competitive; to be helpful rather than hurtful; to look out for the communities of which we are a part, and on which we ultimately depend.
Practical skills. With the movement into cities of the U.S. population, and much of the rest of the world’s people, we have had a massive de-skilling in how to do practical tasks. When I was a boy in the country, all of us knew how to build a tree house, or construct a small hut, or raise chickens, or grow beans, or screw pipes together to deliver water. It was a sexist world, of course, so when some of my chums in eighth grade said we wanted to learn girls’ “home ec” skills like making bread or boiling eggs, the teachers were shocked, but we got to do it. There was widespread competence in fixing things — impossible with most modern contrivances, of course, but still reasonable for the basic tools of survival: pots and pans, bicycles, quilts, tents, storage boxes.
We all need to learn, or relearn, how we would keep the rudiments of life going if there were no paid specialists around, or means to pay them. Every child should learn elementary carpentry, from layout and sawing to driving nails. Everybody should know how to chop wood safely, and build a fire. Everybody should know what to do if dangers appear from fire, flood, electric wires down, and the like. Taking care of each other is one practical step at a time, most of them requiring help from at least one other person; survival is a team sport.
Organize. Much of the American ideology, our shared and usually unspoken assumptions, is hyper-individualistic. We like to imagine that heroes are solitary, have super powers, and glory in violence, and that if our work lives and business lives seem tamer, underneath they are still struggles red in blood and claw. We have sought solitude on the prairies, as cowboys on the range, in our dependence on media (rather than real people), and even in our cars, armored cabins of solitude. We have an uneasy and doubting attitude about government, as if we all reserve the right to be outlaws. But of course human society, like ecological webs, is a complex dance of mutual support and restraint, and if we are lucky it operates by laws openly arrived at and approved by the populace.
If the teetering structure of corporate domination, with its monetary control of Congress and our other institutions, should collapse of its own greed, and the government be unable to rescue it, we will have to reorganize a government that suits the people. We will have to know how to organize groups, how to compromise with other groups, how to argue in public for our positions. It turns out that “brainstorming,” a totally noncritical process in which people just throw out ideas wildly, doesn’t produce workable ideas. In particular, it doesn’t work as well as groups in which ideas are proposed, critiqued, improved, debated. But like any group process, this must be protected from domination by powerful people and also over-talkative people. When the group recognizes its group power, it can limit these distortions. Thinking together is enormously creative; it has huge survival value.
Learn to live with contradictions. These are dark times, these are bright times. We are implacably making the planet less habitable. Every time a new oil field is discovered, the press cheers: “Hooray, there is more fuel for the self-destroying machines!” We are turning more land into deserts and parking lots. We are wiping out innumerable species that are not only wondrous and beautiful, but might be useful to us. We are multiplying to the point where our needs and our wastes outweigh the capacities of the biosphere to produce and absorb them. And yet, despite the bloody headlines and the rocketing military budgets, we are also, unbelievably, killing fewer of each other proportionately than in earlier centuries. We have mobilized enormous global intelligence and mutual curiosity, through the Internet and outside it. We have even evolved, spottily, a global understanding that democracy is better than tyranny, that love and tolerance are better than hate, that hope is better than rage and despair, that we are prone, especially in catastrophes, to be astonishingly helpful and cooperative.
We may even have begun to share an understanding that while the dark times may continue for generations, in time new growth and regeneration will begin. In the biological process called “succession,” a desolate, disturbed area is gradually, by a predictable sequence of returning plants, restored to ecological continuity and durability. When old institutions and habits break down or consume themselves, new experimental shoots begin to appear, and people explore and test and share new and better ways to survive together.
It is never easy or simple. But already we see, under the crumbling surface of the conventional world, promising developments: new ways of organizing economic activity (cooperatives, worker-owned companies, nonprofits, trusts), new ways of using low-impact technology to capture solar energy, to sequester carbon dioxide, new ways of building compact, congenial cities that are low (or even self-sufficient) in energy use, low in waste production, high in recycling of almost everything. A vision of sustainability that sometimes shockingly resembles “Ecotopia” is tremulously coming into existence at the hands of people who never heard of the book.
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Now in principle, the Big Picture seems simple enough, though devilishly complex in the details. We live in the declining years of what is still the biggest economy in the world, where a looter elite has fastened itself upon the decaying carcass of the empire. It is intent on speedily and relentlessly extracting the maximum wealth from that carcass, impoverishing our former working middle class. But this maggot class does not invest its profits here. By law and by stock-market pressures, corporations must seek their highest possible profits, no matter the social or national consequences — which means moving capital and resources abroad, wherever profit potential is larger. As Karl Marx darkly remarked, “Capital has no country,” and in the conditions of globalization his meaning has come clear.
The looter elite systematically exports jobs, skills, knowledge, technology, retaining at home chiefly financial manipulation expertise: highly profitable, but not of actual productive value. Through “productivity gains” and speedups, it extracts maximum profit from domestic employees; then, firing the surplus, it claims surprise that the great mass of people lack purchasing power to buy up what the economy can still produce (or import).
Here again Marx had a telling phrase: “Crisis of under-consumption.” When you maximize unemployment and depress wages, people have to cut back. When they cut back, businesses they formerly supported have to shrink or fail, adding their own employees to the ranks of the jobless, and depressing wages still further. End result: something like Mexico, where a small, filthy rich plutocracy rules over an impoverished mass of desperate, uneducated, and hopeless people.
Barring unprecedented revolutionary pressures, this is the actual future we face in the United States, too. As we know from history, such societies can stand a long time, supported by police and military control, manipulation of media, surveillance and dirty tricks of all kinds. It seems likely that a few parts of the world (Germany, with its worker-council variant of capitalism, New Zealand with its relative equality, Japan with its social solidarity, and some others) will remain fairly democratic.
The U.S., which has a long history of violent plutocratic rule unknown to the textbook-fed, will stand out as the best-armed Third World country, its population ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-educated, ill-cared for in health, and increasingly poverty-stricken: even Social Security may be whittled down, impoverishing tens of millions of the elderly.
As empires decline, their leaders become increasingly incompetent — petulant, ignorant, gifted only with PR skills of posturing and spinning, and prone to the appointment of loyal idiots to important government positions. Comedy thrives; indeed writers are hardly needed to invent outrageous events.
We live, then, in a dark time here on our tiny precious planet. Ecological devastation, political and economic collapse, irreconcilable ideological and religious conflict, poverty, famine: the end of the overshoot of cheap-oil-based consumer capitalist expansionism.
If you don’t know where you’ve been, you have small chance of understanding where you might be headed. So let me offer a capsule history for those who, like most of us, got little help from textbook history.
At 82, my life has included a surprisingly substantial slice of American history. In the century or so up until my boyhood in Appalachian central Pennsylvania, the vast majority of Americans subsisted as farmers on the land. Most, like people elsewhere in the world, were poor, barely literate, ill-informed, short-lived. Millions had been slaves. Meanwhile in the cities, vast immigrant armies were mobilized by ruthless and often violent “robber baron” capitalists to build vast industries that made things: steel, railroads, ships, cars, skyscrapers.
Then, when I was in grade school, came World War II. America built the greatest armaments industry the world had ever seen, and when the war ended with most other industrial countries in ruins, we had a run of unprecedented productivity and prosperity. Thanks to strong unions and a sympathetic government, this prosperity was widely shared: a huge working middle class evolved — tens of millions of people could afford (on one wage) a modest house, a car, perhaps sending a child to college. This era peaked around 1973, when wages stagnated, the Vietnam War took a terrible toll in blood and money, and the country began sliding rightward.
In the next epoch, which we are still in and which may be our last as a great nation, capitalists who grew rich and powerful by making things gave way to a new breed: financiers who grasped that you could make even more money by manipulating money. (And by persuading Congress to subsidize them — the system should have been called Subsidism, not Capitalism.) They had no concern for the productivity of the nation or the welfare of its people; with religious fervor, they believed in maximizing profit as the absolute economic goal. They recognized that, by capturing the government through the election finance system and removing government regulation, they could turn the financial system into a giant casino.
Little by little, they hollowed the country out, until it was helplessly dependent on other nations for almost all its necessities. We had to import significant steel components from China or Japan. We came to pay for our oil imports by exporting food (i.e., our soil). Our media and our educational system withered. Our wars became chronic and endless and stupefyingly expensive. Our diets became suicidal, and our medical system faltered; life expectancies began to fall.
And so we have returned, in a sort of terrible circle, to something like my boyhood years, when President Roosevelt spoke in anger of “one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-fed, ill-clothed.” A large and militant contingent of white, mostly elderly, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant right wingers, mortally threatened by their impending minority status and pretending to be liberty-lovers, desperately seek to return us still further back.
Americans like to think of ours as an exceptional country, immune through geographical isolation and some kind of special virtue to the tides of history. Through the distorted lens of our corporate media, we possess only a distorted view of what the country is really like now. In the next decades, we shall see whether we indeed possess the intelligence, the strength, and the mutual courage to break through to another positive era.
No futurist can foresee the possibilities. As empires decay, their civilian leaderships become increasingly crazed, corrupt, and incompetent, and often the military (which is after all a parasite of the whole nation, and has no independent financial base like the looter class) takes over. Another possible scenario is that if the theocratic red center of the country prevails in Washington, the relatively progressive and prosperous coastal areas will secede in self-defense.
“Ecotopia” is a novel, and secession was its dominant metaphor: how would a relatively rational part of the country save itself ecologically if it was on its own? As “Ecotopia Emerging” puts it, Ecotopia aspired to be a beacon for the rest of the world. And so it may prove, in the very, very long run, because the general outlines of Ecotopia are those of any possible future sustainable society.
The “ecology in one country” argument was an echo of an actual early Soviet argument, as to whether “socialism in one country” was possible. In both cases, it now seems to me, the answer must be no. We are now fatally interconnected, in climate change, ocean impoverishment, agricultural soil loss, etc., etc., etc. International consumer capitalism is a self-destroying machine, and as long as it remains the dominant social form, we are headed for catastrophe; indeed, like rafters first entering the “tongue” of a great rapid, we are already embarked on it.
When disasters strike and institutions falter, as at the end of empires, it does not mean that the buildings all fall down and everybody dies. Life goes on, and in particular, the remaining people fashion new institutions that they hope will better ensure their survival.
So I look to a long-term process of “succession,” as the biological concept has it, where “disturbances” kill off an ecosystem, but little by little new plants colonize the devastated area, prepare the soil for larger and more complex plants (and the other beings who depend on them), and finally the process achieves a flourishing, resilient, complex state — not necessarily what was there before, but durable and richly productive. In a similar way, experiments under way now, all over the world, are exploring how sustainability can in fact be achieved locally. Technically, socially, economically — since it is quite true, as ecologists know, that everything is connected to everything else, and you can never just do one thing by itself.
Since I wrote “Ecotopia,” I have become less confident of humans’ political ability to act on commonsense, shared values. Our era has become one of spectacular polarization, with folly multiplying on every hand. That is the way empires crumble: they are taken over by looter elites, who sooner or later cause collapse. But then new games become possible, and with luck Ecotopia might be among them.
Humans tend to try to manage things: land, structures, even rivers. We spend enormous amounts of time, energy, and treasure in imposing our will on nature, on preexisting or inherited structures, dreaming of permanent solutions, monuments to our ambitions and dreams. But in periods of slack, decline, or collapse, our abilities no longer suffice for all this management. We have to let things go.
All things “go” somewhere: they evolve, with or without us, into new forms. So as the decades pass, we should try not always to futilely fight these transformations. As the Japanese know, there is much unnoticed beauty in wabi-sabi — the old, the worn, the tumble-down, those things beginning their transformation into something else. We can embrace this process of devolution: embellish it when strength avails, learn to love it.
There is beauty in weathered and unpainted wood, in orchards overgrown, even in abandoned cars being incorporated into the earth. Let us learn, like the Forest Service sometimes does, to put unwise or unneeded roads “to bed,” help a little in the healing of the natural contours, the re-vegetation by native plants. Let us embrace decay, for it is the source of all new life and growth.
Frac sand piles up at a processing plant in Chippewa Falls, Wis. (Credit: AP/Steve Karnowski) 
A coal mine owned by Arch Coal Co. (Credit: AP/Matthew Brown) 
(Credit: cristapper via Shutterstock) 
