Two days before he lost the presidential election, John Kerry made a campaign appearance at Shiloh Baptist Church in Dayton, Ohio. It was the fifth time in five weeks that Kerry had stopped at an African-American church in Ohio, but that doesn’t mean he was comfortable in the setting. As the church choir rocked through a long number that morning, Kerry sat stiffly in a chair near the pulpit, looking lost. Do I clap? Do I tap my foot? Do I sing along? And when Kerry rose to spoke — when he invoked the Book of James and talked of the emptiness of “faith without deeds” — he came across not as a fellow Christian but as a politician visiting a foreign land, trying to win over the locals with a few words in their native tongue.
While the importance of “moral values” in the 2004 election has surely been overstated, Democrats take it on faith that they’ve got to do better next time with people of faith. The problem: So few of them seem up to the task. For every Bill Clinton or Barack Obama — “We worship an awesome God in the blue states” — there’s a John Kerry or a Howard Dean, who famously put the Book of Job in the New Testament during his presidential run and now quotes Scripture as if he’s writing speeches with a list of the “10 Most Famous Bible Passages” sitting next to his yellow pad.
Can Democrats do better? Jim Wallis says they have to. Wallis, the evangelical Christian who founded the religious social justice group Sojourners, has spent the last three months on an extended book tour in support of “God’s Politics,” and he says he has seen signs that the right’s one-sided conversation about religion is finally over. Americans are ready to hear a different, more progressive dialogue about the role of faith in public life, but they’ll listen only if the Democrats’ messengers can speak with religious authenticity, Wallis says.
“It’s so transparent when somebody is being inauthentic about religion,” Wallis says. “There are millions and millions of moderate evangelicals and moderate Catholics who are simply not in the pocket of the religious right. And yet Democrats haven’t got a clue as to how to speak to them. They have no idea! And Kerry gave them nothing to vote for.”
Wallis says that Democrats have to begin a discussion with voters about how faith drives their public policy ideas beyond the confines of abortion and gay marriage. And he says the party needs to find candidates who can talk about God — or at least spirituality — more generally, in ways that don’t sound as phony to Christians as Ronald Reagan’s invocation of Bruce Springsteen sounded to rock ‘n’ roll fans.
Salon spoke with Wallis last week as he traveled from his home in Washington to Philadelphia for another stop on his book tour.
The subtitle of your new book, “God’s Politics,” is “Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It.” What’s the “it” that Democrats don’t get?
The left, the progressive side, has conceded the entire territory of values and religion to the religious and political right. That’s the biggest mistake the left has made in years. It allows the right to define religion and values any way they want to, and that’s what they do. That’s what you saw on Justice Sunday. When only one side is doing the defining and the talking, when one side talks about what God says and the other side doesn’t want to use the G-word, it’s clear who wins the public debate.
The right can take an issue like the Democrats’ opposition to a handful of George W. Bush’s judicial nominees, turn it into this huge religious spectacle, and then argue that the Democrats’ views are somehow an attack on people of faith. And instead of being able to engage on the religious level, all many Democrats can say is, “No, wait, this isn’t about faith.”
If the first time Democrats ever talk about faith is to say, “Oh, this isn’t about faith,” if you haven’t been talking about faith for years and years, the [public's response is,] “How do you know it isn’t about faith?”
You know, Martin Luther King Jr., in “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” responded to white clergy who were criticizing him for what he had done [in the civil rights movement]. But he never said they weren’t people of faith. In arguing on behalf of racial justice on the basis of faith, he assumed integrity on their part, and he appealed to the best of their own traditions. Now you have leaders of the religious right saying, “Anybody who disagrees with us on the filibuster is not a person of faith.”
When the other side speaks in such outrageous terms, there has to be a real counterpoint. The Democrats were vitally connected to the civil rights movement, [which was] led by black churches. So how is it that they are now successfully portrayed as a so-called secular party and a party hostile to faith?
How can Democrats provide that “counterpoint” on something like the nuclear option? If you were advising Senate Democrats on their strategy in fighting Bush’s judicial nominees, what would you tell them about getting their own conceptions of morality into the debate?
There’s a much broader context. The right gets it wrong by saying there are only two moral-values issues, only two: abortion and gay marriage. Now, those are important issues, and we need a better, deeper moral conversation on all sides on those issues. But to go along with the idea that there are only two moral-values issues is to give away the whole discussion.
I’m an evangelical Christian, and I’m bound to a Bible where there are 3,000 verses on the poor, which means fighting poverty is a moral-values issue, too. Protecting the environment, otherwise known as “God’s creation,” is a moral-values issue. And the ethics of war — whether we go to war, when we go to war and whether we tell the truth about going to war — these are profoundly religious matters. So you’ve got to broaden the conversation.
You can’t just dive in to talk of religion in the middle of the feud about the filibuster.
There is no religious position on the filibuster. The filibuster is a Senate procedure, and we all know that it has been used for good and for ill. But it’s gotten caught up in this battle over judicial nominees. And that battle is about more than abortion because judges [also] rule on things like workers’ rights and human rights and environmental regulations and political representation and voting procedures. A lot of pretty important issues are at stake here.
The issue the Bible talks about most often, over and over again, is how you treat the poorest and most vulnerable in your society. That’s the issue the prophets raise again and again, and Jesus talks about it more than any other topic, more than heaven or hell, more than sex or morality. So how did Jesus become pro-rich, pro-war and only pro-American?
There’s a major distortion going on here, a major misrepresentation of Christian faith. It’s almost like our faith has been stolen. And it’s time to take it back.
The Republicans have made faith into kind of a wedge, a weapon to divide us and destroy us. Bridges, not wedges, is what we ought to be providing.
But can Democrats get voters to start thinking that there’s more to religion than abortion and gay marriage — that something like poverty is a religious issue and that the Republicans aren’t doing much about it? In his first inaugural address, Bush invoked the Gospel of Luke, saying, “When we see that wounded traveler on the road to Jericho, we will not pass to the other side.” And nobody jumped up and shouted, “Hypocrite!”
I would argue that when we’re having over 2,000 people come out every night in every city [on the book tour], a lot of people do see the hypocrisy in such a profoundly religious matter. The Zogby poll right after the [2004] election asked voters what the greatest moral crisis was in the nation, and 64 percent said either materialism and greed or poverty and economic justice.
So there is a resonance there. What if we had a political leader who ever spoke to it? I mean, my goodness, when did we have John Kerry talk about poverty as a fundamental moral issue or lift up the plight of the poor as a high priority? John Edwards did for a short period during the primary campaign season, and bless his heart for doing so, but he and that issue got put on a shelf. You didn’t hear about “Two Americas” ever again.
When you talk [to young Christians] about poverty as a test of faith, you receive a standing ovation every single time. So there is a deep resonance out there, but Democrats aren’t really talking about this as a profoundly moral question.
Bush did that, at least to a degree, when he ran as a “compassionate conservative” in 2000.
That’s why he won. Exactly.
I met with him before he came to Washington, in Austin, on poverty and faith-based initiatives. He had about 20 people there, and he knew that a lot of us hadn’t voted for him. He came up to me at one point and said, “Jim, I don’t understand poor people. I’ve never lived around poor people. I don’t know what they think or how they feel. I’m just a white Republican guy who doesn’t get it. How do I get it?”
I said, “Well, you have to listen to poor people and those who live and work with poor people.” And he said, “Mike, Mike, come over here,” and [speechwriter Michael] Gerson came over, and Bush said, “Write this down, write this down.” And then, in his inaugural, he said, “Many in our country do not know the pain of poverty, but we can listen to those who do.” That came right out of that conversation.
If you look back at that inaugural address, it talked more about poverty than anyone had done in years. But there have been no resources [provided]. I wrote a memo to Democrats in January, and I told them: “You’ve got to frame the budget in moral terms. Do a moral audit on the budget, talk about it as a moral document.” When the president says, “I’m for faith-based initiatives,” but then has no resources and no program, no domestic policy beyond tax cuts for the wealthy, it [turns the promises] into a photo op.
So you’re saying that Democrats should actually do the sorts of things Bush said that he would do when he ran in 2000?
Yeah. You’ve got to reframe policy issues in the values context. Don’t start with policies, start with values. Don’t start with programs, start with principles. Let policies flow from values. And those of you who are people of faith, let your faith shine through. Don’t be ashamed of talking about your faith. A lot of Democrats tell me they feel apologetic, marginalized in their own party, for being people of faith, and that’s got to change.
Like I said to Howard Dean, you don’t have to be a person of faith, but if you’re not a person of faith, don’t act like you’re one. The worst thing you can do is to sound inauthentic. Putting the Book of Job in the New Testament wasn’t a good move on his part. Just respect people of faith. Let people of faith in the Democratic Party — Barack Obama, Rosa DeLauro, Blanche Lincoln, Mark Pryor — let them talk.
But is the public ready to listen to Democrats talking about their faith?
You look at these town meetings we’ve been having [about the book], you look at the media coverage, and what’s clear is that the monologue of the religious right is finally over and a new dialogue has begun. Their monologue has controlled the conversation, and a dialogue is all you need to get people thinking, “Well, there’s this point of view [from the religious right], but here are some Christians talking about the environment.”
Did you see the New York Times story a couple of weeks back about the National Association of Evangelicals saying that global warming is a religious issue? That was huge. It changed the politics of global warming in Washington overnight. Until then, the global-warming constituency wasn’t a part of the Bush base, so what did they care? But all of a sudden, there are evangelical leaders saying, “You know, the environment is God’s creation, and being good stewards is part of our responsibility.” And I’m telling you, the same day, they got calls from the White House saying, “What don’t you like about our policies?”
That’s a change within the evangelical right. For Democrats, it seems so much harder. As Democrats begin wrapping their policies in the words of faith and religion, it often sounds like they’re saying, “Hey, look at us, we’re Christians, too!” Dean sounds like he has a list of Bible quotations next to him when he’s writing his speeches.
And that’s the wrong way to do it. It can’t be just language, it’s got to be content. It has to be authentic. It has to be more than words. And do it the way King did it, with your Bible in one hand and your Constitution in the other hand, in a way that’s open and inclusive and welcoming.
The dialogue has begun, and Democrats have to reassess. Some of it will just be crude and shallow demographics — “Oh, I guess we lost that one; let’s throw in a few Bible verses and few hymns and just sing the same song.” That won’t work.
But in “God’s Politics” you suggest that talking the talk will help at least a little. You say there are two ways the Democrats can make inroads. They can start to reassess some of their policies in order to find common ground with more people of faith. Failing that, they can begin to talk about their existing policies in better ways.
You’ve got to have a conversation. I’m just saying that you have to be authentic. Some of the Democrats I talk with about their faith and what it means for politics [are] not just saying, “Give me some lines.” They’re wrestling with it, they’re soul searching, they’re trying to figure out how to talk about it. And I encourage them to just be themselves. Be people of faith — authentically.
Kerry had a hard time doing that. Two days before the election, I watched him campaign at an African-American church in Ohio. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man look less comfortable —
I know, I know. And that just hurts. That’s the worst thing. That’s worse than saying nothing.
But how much of what the Democrats need to do is just a matter of finding a way to talk about this stuff better, explaining that moral values drive their concerns for poverty or healthcare or whatever?
A lot of it. Kerry has a strong environmental record, but we heard almost nothing about that during the campaign — or about how his faith [influenced his politics]. He was just defending himself on abortion and the Eucharist. You know, “I was an altar boy!” But Hitler was an altar boy.
[The Democrats needed a candidate] who simply said, “These are issues of inclusion, fairness, economic equity, justice — 9 million families in America are working hard full time, and they’re not making it. They’re playing by the rules and not making it, and that’s wrong. If you work hard in America full time, you shouldn’t be poor.”
The Bible says you judge a society by how it treats the poorest and most vulnerable. On healthcare, on housing, you talk that way. You talk about the environment, about being good stewards of God’s creation. You talk about the ethics of war. And then you say, “Abortion is a moral issue. We’ve got too many unwanted pregnancies in America, way too many. Let’s work together, pro-life and pro-choice, to really target this abortion rate. We’re all for that; it should be common ground. This is a tragic choice. We’re not going to give up on the legal option for abortion, but let’s make it rare.” That kind of candidate would have won.
You sound a lot like Hillary Clinton.
Well … [laughs]. That kind of candidate would have won this last election. I’m convinced.
Is there a similar approach to the question of gay marriage?
You know, the right says, “Vote against gay marriage and it proves you’re for the family.” This is a surrogate for saying you care for the family. But this is the wrong surrogate, and the Democrats should have taken that away. They should have said, “Families are in crisis. The breakdown of families is a huge problem, not just for the poor but for all classes. Kids are falling between the cracks.” So you have that conversation, and then you say, “Most who are religious people also support some kind of legal protection for same-sex couples.”
You can be pro-family and pro-civil rights at the same time. You can win with that. But you’ve got to get to it as a fairness question, a civil rights question. You don’t get started by saying, “I’m for gay marriage.”
Energy against gay people is coming from two sources. There’s this very ugly, hateful, homophobic violent attitude — the Matthew Shepard stuff — and that has to be fought against and resisted. The other part is concern from people who are worried about their families, and they’ve been sold a bill of goods that that has something to do with gay people. That piece, we’ve got to disentangle.
You’ve described your book tour as a series of town meetings, and you’ve begun to talk of a “movement” springing up around the ideas in “God’s Politics.” Are you thinking about ways to institutionalize it or build on it? And can that work to the benefit of the Democratic Party?
We’re starting to have some success on the ground in changing the [perception] of faith and politics, and in winning over a lot of moderate evangelicals and Catholics to a very progressive agenda. But the Democrats have to do their part, too, if they expect ever to appeal to these people. We’re doing a lot of things. After [an appearance on] the Jon Stewart show, we reached a whole new kind of audience that had never heard that there’s a progressive religious option. We’ve gotten thousands of e-mails from young people who say, “I didn’t know you could be Christian and care about the poor or care about the environment or be against the war in Iraq. I never knew. Sign me up.” So we’re having some great success out there, and I’m really encouraged.
When it comes to closing the deal with those kinds of people, how important is the candidate that the Democrats run in 2008?
Totally. You saw Bill Bradley’s piece in the Times about how the Republicans have this machine, and how who’s at the top, who’s the placeholder, isn’t that important. The Democrats don’t have a clear structure.
I spoke with a leading Democrat in D.C. — you’d know who it was — and he said, “You know, if the average Democratic canvasser ever went to the front door of a home and was asked, ‘Tell me what your party is for,’ he’d have to make it up. He’d just have to make it up.” So in the absence of that, the candidate becomes crucial. I’m not endorsing, you know, Barack Obama, because he’s probably not going to run for president anytime soon, if ever. But that kind of candidate — forward looking, building bridges, comfortable with the language of faith, speaks in a moral vocabulary … Barack is going to make faith in politics one of his signature issues. Remember when he said at the convention, “We worship an awesome God in the blue states”? That kind of candidate would be very, very appealing to these moderate religious voters.
But it’s hard to think of a Democrat in a position to run for president in 2008 who would have that kind of appeal.
It is. It is. So that’s going to be the issue. On the [positive] side, we’ve really had some success in the last several months in changing the debate in the media and on the ground. We’ve been quite stunned by the success of the book. But it’s not about the book. It’s that the country is really tired of the monologue, tired of not having their voices represented.
Do you think there’s some connection between the success of the book — or the success of the “movement” — and the Republicans’ overreaching on things like the Terri Schiavo case?
Absolutely. These guys are saying you’re not a Christian unless you’re for all of Bush’s nominees. Well, even conservatives think this is nuts. I think they’re overreaching. They’re giving us a gift: They’ve been winning political battles, and now they’re in the White House, that’s true. On the other hand, people are really tired of their definition of religion. There’s such an openness and a hunger for another way to be a person of faith or a Christian or religious. I’m finding it every single night.
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) 
