Dr. David Kessler, 58, says that when he looks at a huge plate of French fries, he knows that if he starts eating them, he won’t stop until he’s wolfed them all down. Yes, even the former head of the Food and Drug Administration, who once oversaw the nation’s health, struggles to eat well like the rest of us.
In his new best-selling book, “The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite,”
Kessler, a San Francisco Bay Area pediatrician, explains why certain foods loaded with fat, sugar and salt exert such a pull, despite our best intentions to avoid them. As he discusses the biology that leads to scarfing down a plate of fries, he delves into such puzzles as why the French fry binger is more likely to remember the pleasant stimulation of the fries’ salt, fat, texture and flavor than the stomachache and self-recrimination that follow it.
The former dean of medical schools at Yale and the University of California, San Francisco, Kessler, who is also a lawyer, contends that the American food culture, including our mores about when, where and how often we eat, plays a large role in fostering what he calls “conditioned hypereating.” He argues that the government, food industry and individual diner all have parts to play in combating that plate of fries. While Kessler is not offering a weight-loss solution or proposing some chimerical healthy eating plan, his book strips away the allure of some of the most appetizing and unhealthy foods. I spoke with Dr. Kessler about why so many of us can’t eat just one.
What do you think is the biggest misconceptions about why people overeat?
That it’s a matter of willpower, that you can just use self-control. I think a lot of people don’t understand why it’s so hard to resist food.
What is going on in the brain when you start thinking about a very desirable food, like a potato chip or a chocolate-chip cookie?
The power of food comes not only from its taste but from that anticipation. That anticipation is based on prior experience, learning and memory. Something’s going to set off that anticipation, those thoughts of wanting.
When I’m flying into San Francisco airport, as soon as the plane hits the ground, I start thinking about Chinese dumplings at the airport food court because I’ve been there before. It creates that arousal, that slight anxiety. And what does that do? It grabs our attention. It occupies our working memory. Our brains get activated. We can now look at the imaging of which circuits and areas of the brain get activated, and we see in millions of people that anticipation results in excess activation of the amygdala, part of the brain’s reward circuits.
What happens once you start eating?
In people who have a hard time controlling their eating, their brain circuits remain elevated and activated until all the food is gone. Then the next time you get cued, you do it again. Every time you engage in this cycle you strengthen the neural circuits. The anticipation gets strengthened. It’s in part because of ambivalence. Do you ever have an internal dialogue? “Boy, that would taste great. No, I shouldn’t have it. I really want that. And I shouldn’t do it.”
That sort of ambivalence increases the reward value of the food. It increases the anxiety, it increases the arousal, it keeps it in working memory. We’re wired to focus on the most salient stimuli in our environment. For some people it could be alcohol or illegal drugs or nicotine or sex or gambling. For many of us it’s food.
Are you saying if you give in to the craving and eat whatever the desirable food is, it’s more likely that you’re going to do it again?
It’s basic learning. When you get cued, the brain gets activated. There’s an arousal. There’s increased dopamine. That dopamine focuses your attention. It narrows your focus. Of all the stimuli in the environment, why does that chocolate-chip cookie have such power?
We’re wired to focus on the most salient stimuli. What do I mean? If a bear walked in right now, you’re going to stop focusing on this interview. It’s part of being human. It’s what’s made us successful as a species. You make food hyper-palatable with fat, sugar and salt. It’s very stimulating and it becomes the most salient stimuli for many people.
What makes a food hyper-palatable? Even if you like apples, you’re probably likely to eat one and not gorge yourself on four more. Where if you like nachos, you might eat way more than you had intended to when you started. What is the difference between these foods?
It starts with how many chews there are in a bite. If you take a stimulus and you get a sensory hit and it disappears, what do you do immediately next?
You take another bite.
Yes. We’re eating, in essence, adult baby food. Twenty years ago the average chews per bite was about 20, now it’s two or three. The food goes down in a whoosh and it’s very stimulating. It’s layered and loaded with fat, sugar and salt. It’s as if you have a roller coaster going on in your mouth. You get stimulated, it disappears instantly and you reach for more.
Of fat, sugar and salt, which is the most potent in this way?
I published a paper called “Deconstructing the Vanilla Milkshake” with my colleagues at Washington State University. We asked: Is it the sugar, is it the fat, is it the flavor? Sugar is the main driver, but when you add fat to, it’s synergistic. So it’s more potent.
But it’s not any one substance. Nicotine itself is only a moderate reinforcer. But add the smoke, throat scratch, crinkling of the cellophane pack, color of the pack, imagery that was created 40 years ago that it was cool to smoke, emotional gloss of advertising, and what did we end up with? We ended up with a deadly addictive product.
So I give you a package of sugar and say, “Go have a good time,” you’re going to look at me and say, “What are you talking about?” But I add fat, I add texture, I add temperature, I add color and I add flavor. I put it on every corner and say, “It’s socially acceptable to eat any time.” I say, “You can do it with your friends. You can do it at the end of this day. You can relieve any tension.” We’re eating in a disorganized and chaotic fashion. And we’re being bombarded with the cues.
We make food into entertainment. We make it into a food carnival. Go into a modern American restaurant: the colors, the TVs, the monitors, the music. You do it with your friends. We’ve taken sugar and added all these multiple levels of stimuli. What do we end up with? Probably one of the great public health crises of our day.
Doesn’t fat make food easier to swallow without much chewing?
Absolutely. It also enhances the sensory aspect in multiple ways. I used to think that I was eating for nutrition. I was eating to satisfy myself, to sustain myself. We’re eating for stimulation.
How has the scientific understanding of overeating changed in the last few decades?
Many people still think the reason that they keep on gaining weight is their metabolism. There may be some contribution of metabolism to body weight but it’s relatively small. What’s really driving consumption is what’s going on in your brain.
Going back through the 1960s, weight was relatively stable. It was flat over an adult lifetime. You gain a few pounds from ages 20 to 40. You level off. You’d lose a few pounds in your 60s and 70s. But weight was relatively flat throughout your adult years.
Now, decades later, weight continues to increase, even in the adult years. But what’s most striking is that you enter your adult years — just look at the weight of 20-year-olds — when you begin your adulthood, you’re much, much bigger on average.
We used to think our bodies would regulate our weight, that there was a set point. That’s why if we went on a diet we would gain it back, because we had a predetermined weight. But if that were the case we wouldn’t all be getting bigger and bigger.
There may be what’s called a settling point. But a lot of that settling point is driven by how your brain reacts to these cues and how sensitive you are to responding to your environment. The availability of food affects your settling point. There’s no predetermined genetic set point.
Why are diets so prone to failure?
The reason diets don’t work in the long run is if you have that old circuitry, that old learning, and you respond to those cues. Sure, I can take you out of your environment. I can give you meal replacements, or you can white-knuckle it, and for 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, resist eating a lot of food, and you can lose weight, no question about that.
Now your diet’s over. I put you back into your environment. You still have that old learning, that old circuitry. What’s going to happen? You’re going to get bombarded with the cues again and you’re going to gain it back if you have not laid down new circuitry and new learning on top of that old circuitry.
What do people who struggle with overeating have in common?
Loss of control in the face of palatable foods and a hard time resisting foods; a lack of feeling full and a hard time stopping eating; a preoccupation or thinking about foods between meals. Even when you’re eating certain foods, you’re thinking about what you’re going to eat next.
Do those people who experience what you call conditioned hyper-eating experience more pleasure than other people?
No! That’s interesting. It’s not that there’s greater pleasure. It’s just that they have greater sensitivity to the cues, greater thoughts of wanting, and that stimulates and activates their brain.
So their anticipation is greater?
Yes. Absolutely. And it’s much harder for them to resist. They don’t taste food any differently than anyone else but they have a much greater struggle with the anticipation of food.
When you talk about this being conditioned, do we know if some people were born with this capacity, or if it was just created over time by their environment, or are we not really sure?
We don’t know which one weighs more heavily, genetics or the environment. But if you look at 2-year-olds, they compensate for their eating. If you give them more calories at lunch, they’ll eat fewer calories for the remainder of the day. By the time these kids are 4 and 5, they lose the ability to compensate. Given the exposure to fat, sugar and salt when they’re 3, 4 and 5, the reward pathways of the brain take over and hijack the normal body’s homeostatic mechanism to regulate itself. It used to be that 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds compensated, and fewer of them compensate today. That kind of change suggests environmental forces, that learning has a profound consequence.
When you think about it, we’re conditioning the brains of millions of our kids and that conditioning, that neural circuitry laid down after exposure to highly palatable foods, lasts a lifetime. It has profound consequences not only for the individual but also for public policy.
Why do you think there’s so much guilt, shame and blame when it comes to talking about overeating? Because people don’t understand their own behavior?
I didn’t understand my own behavior and I was commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. I regulated food. I was trained as a physician. I didn’t realize: Why does that chocolate-chip cookie have such power over me? Is it something about that chocolate-chip cookie? Or is it how my brain encodes that representation of that chocolate-chip cookie?
What do you think the government should be doing to regulate the food industry to create a better food environment?
The government has two major roles: greater education and certainly greater disclosure. When you recognize that the food that’s being sold is hijacking the brains not just of adults but of kids, that has implications for school lunches, for vending machines in schools and farm subsidies.
What part of that is up to the individual?
I think individuals have to protect themselves. You have to understand your brain’s being activated. You have to understand when you walk down the street that you’re being bombarded. You have to understand that these are false signals. It’s going to seem like you’re hungry all the time.
The thoughts of wanting to eat overwhelm you, whether or not you’re hungry?
Absolutely. Those thoughts of wanting are very real to me. My brain’s being activated, the raw pathways to the brain are sending : You know you want that food!
This might have been a good adaptive strategy in the past. But now it’s backfiring, right?
Those who can focus on the most salient stimuli for food when there was a scarcity of food would remember the location, they would remember the cues, they would be able to get the food to survive. Just think about it: Take a bird, an insect. How are they going to find the food? The location, the cues, being able to have their brain wired so that those cues trigger where the food is. That’s very much an adaptive strategy for survival.
Do people of all sizes and weights have this tendency to overeat?
Absolutely. Our data suggests that a greater percentage of obese individuals and overweight individuals have this. But a significant percentage of lean people have it. If you say to them — “Do you have a hard time resisting? Do you think about foods? Do you have a hard time stopping?” — a significant percentage of lean people say, “That’s me.”
The question is, how have they stayed lean? For many of them the fact is, they’re in torment. It’s a constant struggle. Others have laid down new learning, and that’s made it easier. They develop rules for themselves that they follow. Then, you’re not constantly eating in a chaotic, disorganized way. You’re not constantly being cued. Your brain’s not being constantly activated. But those rules have to be unambiguous, and they’re not easy to follow.
In the end, they have what’s called a critical perceptual shift. They look at food differently. How do you really cool a stimulus? How do you decrease the anticipation of the food, the power of the food to activate, to grab attention? The answer to that is you view the stimulus differently.
If you look at a huge plate of fries and say “That’s my friend, that’s going to make me feel better, I want that,” that’s only going to increase the level of anticipation. You look at that huge plate of fries and say, “That’s not my friend, that’s going to make me feel pretty crummy in 20 minutes. I don’t want that,” and you internalize that, then you can decrease the anticipation.
But if you have any doubts, if you have this back-and-forth debate in your head — “Boy that’s great. I shouldn’t have that” — that only increases the anticipation more.
What’s the great success with tobacco? Did we change the product? No. We changed how the product was perceived. It used to be perceived as something that was glamorous, something that people wanted to do that was cool. We changed the perception, the social norm. It’s now viewed as a deadly, disgusting, addictive product. Where it was once positively valenced, as scientists call it, we made it negatively valenced.
But isn’t the problem with that comparison is that it’s the quantity of food that makes it bad for your health. If you could just eat a few bites of nachos, it wouldn’t be that bad. So how can you look at a plate of nachos like it’s a cigarette?
You’re exactly right. You can’t demonize food. We need food. So how do you control it? Tobacco was easy compared to food. Some people — and I’m not advocating it — become vegetarian. That makes it easier. They look at animal fats and proteins and say, “I don’t want that.” Some people look at food and say, “That’s highly processed, I don’t want that. I want real food.” Some people look at large portions and say, “I don’t want that, that looks disgusting.”
I’m not a food purist. Don’t get me wrong. If you want to go into Kentucky Fried Chicken and have three chicken strips, that’s fine. If you want to eat a hamburger and it’s 500 calories, that’s fine. It’s when you take that 500 calories and make it into 1,000, 1,500 or 2,000. That’s where the real damage is done.
But how is laying down new learning or creating rules any different than the call to have willpower?
Rules can help calm down the brain activation. If you say to a smoker, “You can’t smoke for the next four hours. It’s impossible,” that’s calming. On a plane, no smoker opens the emergency exit mid-flight and says, “I need a cigarette.” It’s because they know it’s impossible. It cools down the stimuli.
I got to the point where I said, “I’m not going to eat French fries because I know if I eat them, I’m going to finish all of them.” There’s just no way I’m going to be able to resist. And now when I look at French fries I don’t have thoughts of anticipation. My brain doesn’t get activated, because I’ve been able to internalize that rule and I follow that rule and it becomes automatic.
Is that the best way to make super-tempting food lose its power over you?
It’s a very important question. Now that we know the brain is becoming activated and hijacked, the question is, What’s the best way to cool off the stimulus? Do you want to take away the cue entirely and not expose the person? Or do you want to expose the person and say you can’t eat it, and decondition that way? We don’t have the science yet on what’s the best way, the most effective way, to cool the stimulus.
It also depends on what kind of state you’re in. Once that old circuitry is laid down, if you stress me, if I’m fatigued, if I feel deprived, and you put that chocolate-chip cookie in front of me, I’m going to eat it.
Other times, if my super cortical control, my frontal lobes are working, I’m not stressed, I’m not fatigued, I’m not deprived, that old circuitry is not going to show its head. It’s part of being human. We haven’t explained that to people. There are times when we’re going to fall off the wagon and we’d be less than human if we did not.
And that’s OK?
It’s the way it’s going to be. It’s not perfect. Once you have that old circuitry, that old learning there, it’s going to show its head sometimes. And we just have to recognize and accept that there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just the way our brains are designed. When we’re stressed, when we’re cued, the reward value of food increases. In some instances, we’re eating just to calm ourselves down. It’s very real.
What people need to do is to recognize what’s driving their behavior. It’s not that they can be perfect and never engage in that behavior, but if they know what’s driving that behavior, then they can at least take steps to plan for it and make it less harmful.
Isn’t the food industry’s entire business model built on catering to, and encouraging the kind of hyper-eating you’re describing? Can we really expect them to change any of their practices?
It does go against their business model. But where I think that it crosses the line, where we can expect and should expect them to show some corporate citizenry, is to control portion size. The fact is, once your brain gets stimulated, you’re going to eat everything in that package. As they make the package bigger, we’re going to consume more. Knowing that, at least they can put some brakes on.
The other thing is greater disclosure. Just taking fat, sugar and salt and putting it in a lot of different forms, a lot of different colors, and selling it constantly, doesn’t contribute to the nutrition of the nation. Maybe that’s asking for more than we can expect. You know the joke in the industry: “When in doubt, just add bacon and cheese to it.”
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) 
