Port of Olympia Supplies Fracking on Great Plains Tribal LandsBy Zoltán Grossman Hurricane Sandy and the Great Drought of 2012 have finally focused public attention on climate change. But any efforts to curb greenhouse gasses will become moot if the fossil fuel monster continues to expand. Now, our own local public port is implicated in opening up new oil and gas fracking fields in North Dakota, endangering the health of that region and our entire planet. Despite the enormous scale and reach of energy corporations, their operations are actually quite vulnerable to social movements. The climate justice movement has identified the Achilles Heel of the energy industry: shipping. The industry needs to ship equipment into its oil, gas and coal fields, and to ship the fossil fuels out to the global market via rail and pipeline. Every step of the way, new alliances of environmentalists, farmers, ranchers, and Native nations are blocking plans to extract and ship the carbon. Washington citizens have become aware of plans to ship huge trainloads of coal from Wyoming and Montana to China, via Northwest ports. We are perhaps less aware of the Alberta Tar Sands, which necessitate new oil pipelines from Alberta to the coasts, and a "Heavy Haul" of gargantuan extraction equipment trucked from Northwest ports (via Spokane) to Alberta. The Port of Olympia is now involved in a similar "Heavy Haul" to a new fossil fuel frontier zone - the Bakken shale formation in northwestern North Dakota, around the new boom town of Williston. In a story by Rolf Boone published on October 28, 2012, The Olympian newspaper documented how the Port is shipping supplies for use in hydraulic fracturing of the bedrock, or "fracking," to release oil and natural gas. The process has been criticized for contaminated groundwater supplies with oil, releasing chemical-laden wastewaters, and even causing local earthquakes. The North Dakota region had previously gone through boom-and-bust cycles, but the new technology enables the industry to blast open previously unreachable deposits. According to The Olympian story, the supplies that have arrived at the Port of Olympia are 1.5-ton "super sacks" of proppants, which consist of a sand-alumina mixture coated with ceramics. The proppants literally prop up the weight of the earth so that underground oil and gas can be released in the fracking process. The Port has a two-year contract with Houston-based Rainbow Ceramics to ship the proppants from China. Three ships have made deliveries this year (including the Star Dieppe, which delivered 6,500 metric tons worth in October), and three more are expected this year. Once the rail cars are loaded with proppants, they leave Olympia, head to East Olympia, and connect with Burlington Northern railway lines in Dupont. The rail cars take seven to ten days to travel (via the Columbia Gorge, Wenatchee, or Yakima) to Spokane and on to North Dakota. Fracking On Tribal Lands Up to 7,000 wells have been drilled in the Williston area (at an annual rate of up to 1,300), and the state has a capacity for 63,000 more. About 400 oil and gas service companies (including Halliburton) operate in the area. This area of North Dakota is the homeland of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara people, the Three Affiliated Tribes that now live on the Fort Berthold Reservation. Tribal member Kandi Mossett explains that her people are "already experiencing disproportionate environmental fallout from oil development" and from the burning of lignite coal in seven power plants that surround their lands. She notes that "several community members, including myself, are tired of being sick and are tired of seeing everyone, even babies, dying from unprecedented rates of cancer. We are taking a stand and fighting back, not only for our own lives but for the lives of those who cannot speak for themselves, and we will not stop fighting until we have a reached a true level of environmental and climate justice in our Indigenous lands." When she was a 20-year-old college student, Mossett discovered a pea-sized sarcoma tumor on her torso, which grew to the size of a walnut within six days, and had to be removed with five surgeries. The cause of her cancer was unknown, but she had also known three fellow high school students who had developed brain cancer. She is convinced that the oil wells and refinery near the Reservation are to blame. Her experience led her to become the campus coordinator with the Indigenous Environmental Network and its energy justice program, and she has spoken at protests and United Nations conferences around the world, and testified to Congress on fracking and climate change. The Environmental Protection Agency has been examining the impacts of fracking, and may release a draft report by 2014. But the presidential debates, in which both candidates competed in their praise of fossil fuels, and failed to even mention climate change, should give us few illusions for a federal solution. Like the communities opposing coal trains and tar sands pipelines, we now have a way to think globally, but act locally, to help roll back climate change. Olympia citizens in Port Militarization Resistance blockaded our port in 2006-07, to keep Stryker armored vehicles from enforcing the occupation of Iraq, which secured profits for oil companies. Now, our public port is supplying the same oil companies with equipment to run roughshod over the rights and health of occupied peoples closer to home, and to do so in our name. Citizens of Olympia can demand that our Port ship in more wind-turbine blades, rather than fossil fuel equipment that will hasten climate change and rising seas--which, ironically, threaten to inundate the Port itself. For more information, see the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) Energy Justice Program athttp://www.ienearth.org/energy.html and Kandi Mossett's moving testimony at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSEEHt6FhbA Dr. Zoltán Grossman is a member of the faculty in Geography and Native Studies at The Evergreen State College. He is co-editor of Asserting Native Resilience: Pacific Rim Indigenous Nations Face the Climate Crisis (Oregon State University Press, 2012).
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