“Someone needs to explain to me why wanting clean drinking water makes you an activist and why proposing to destroy water with chemical warfare doesn't make a corporation a terrorist.”

That’s a pretty damn good question, posed by Winona LaDuke, an activist, environmentalist, economist, and writer. In our hearts, were we to fully understand what’s going on, we’d all be activists but it’s too much trouble and there’s simply way too many things to be pissed off about.

So, we leave it to others like Winona and quietly thank her for her efforts on our behalf, if we notice at all. But the question remains.

There was a time (and I remember it) when corporations took what advantages they could, but were not criminals

I made the acquaintance of a retired banker living in France, a man who still had his hand very much in the game. We were introduced by my Brit friend and spent a lively and interesting afternoon at  his luxurious country estate. I’d made a reference to Wells Fargo, my favorite criminal bank, listing some of their more egregious offences.

A broad grin spread across his handsome face and he leaned forward. “But Jim,” he said, “you don’t understand. That’s what bankers do. We have whole departments dedicated to just that, to separating our depositors from their money.” He took a sip from his afternoon sherry, a product of the nearby vineyard. “Of course that doesn’t happen a couple of flights upstairs where our monied clients bank, but it’s very much the norm for our commercial customers.”

The subtle difference between ‘client’ and ‘customer’ was not lost on me. He was a handsome, warm, friendly and fascinating man with a worldview not all that far from mine and I knew the moment I met him that if I lived in that area of France we would become close friends.

But Winona LaDuke’s concern, among others, is water. We can weather the abuse of banks if we must, but cannot live without water clean enough to drink

(Wikipedia) Winona means "first daughter" in the Dakota language and LaDuke was born in 1959 in Los Angeles, California, to Betty Bernstein and Vincent LaDuke (later known as Sun Bear. Her father was Ojibwe, from the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, and her mother of Jewish European ancestry from The Bronx, New York. Talk about your street-creds, that’s pretty hard to beat.

The corporate side of water management and its protections are pretty bleak and, much like the long, slow degradation of environmental laws over decades, has much to answer for. The recent West Virginia v. EPA ruling by the Supreme Court signals a future in which no one in power has the ability to tackle the biggest issues society faces. The Congress has been weakening the Environmental Protection Agency for decades now and with this ruling we may just as well send everyone home.

How that squares with the deadline for saving humanity from extinction is anyone’s guess, but then no one ever guaranteed that the Supreme Court would deliver justice. Justice is said to be blind, but a majority of the justices are deaf and stupid as well.

Fracking is an example

Fracking uses pressurized fluids to fracture a rock layer in order to extract oil and gas that is otherwise unavailable by standard drilling techniques. Fracking is widely heralded as a way to make America energy independent.

Way cool, what’s not to love?

First of all in the what’s not to love department, the companies that frack refuse to tell us (or anyone else) just what chemicals they’re pumping into the ground, claiming they are trade secrets. Which I guess would be okay if it weren’t for the fact that the tap water from some aquifers nearby fracking sites smells and tastes horrible as well as occasionally catching fire. Cancer rates, miscarriages and childhood disabilities are up in most areas and clusters of small earthquakes often occur.

And so what? We need the energy and people affected can bloody well move elsewhere, they’re all poor anyway 

Paraphrasing my banker acquaintance, “Of course that doesn’t happen where our monied clients live, but it’s very much the norm for our poorer citizens who populate fracking sites.” But the cluster earthquakes are a concern.

A major fracking area adjoins Yellowstone Park. Now that’s not disturbing the buffalo and elk, but most of us are unaware (as I was) that underneath Yellowstone lies an enormous molten magma that, if disturbed by a major earthquake, would fill an area the size and depth of the Grand Canyon, making most of the American southwest uninhabitable.

No shit?

Yep, actually a great deal of shit

But the beat goes on because Americans (particularly right-wing Republicans, anti-vaxers and anti-science types on the internet) have become disenchanted with science and many continue to believe that the 2020 election was stolen and the earth was created 6,000 years ago.

Flat earth anyone?

The Colorado River, Lake Mead, Lake Powell and the Great Salt Lake are all in serious decline and the California acquifers supporting agriculture and drinking water to the West are so low they are in danger of seawater penetration.  

Interestingly, that has already happened in Australia. Dryland salinity, which occurs when vast underground salt deposits rise to the surface with groundwater tables, could leave the productive farm lands that inhabit more than half of the country desolate and barren.  

Oh, and the pipelines. We dare not forget the pipelines

The Keystone XL—a here today and gone tomorrow project, depending upon who is in the White House--is the best known and most controversial of these. It extends from the Canadian Tar-Sand Reserves down and across America to the Gulf Coast, where it won’t even benefit America, but will be shipped internationally. The very name tar-sand brings to mind a picture of how gluey and energy-expensive this crap is to turn into a flowable viscous fluid.

But its controversy is elsewhere. It crosses American Indian territory, cutting through burial mounds and other historic features of numerous tribes (but who cares, they’re only Indians, check it out with my banker).

The Keystone XL crosses more than a thousand rivers and creeks. The Missouri and Milk rivers merge just downstream from the Fort Peck Dam in northeastern Montana and the XL is proposing to run almost a half mile of 36-inch diameter oil pipeline beneath the two rivers. The pipeline would cross 333 waterways in South Dakota alone, including such notables as the Little Missouri, Cheyenne, Bad and White rivers. Pipelines are notorious for leaks and they crisscross the nation.

Incidents at U.S. oil and biofuel pipelines (so far as we know) resulted in 43,157 barrels being spilled accidentally in 2020

Incredibly, this was a decrease from the previous year, the greatest spillage occurring in 2016, when over 60,000 barrels went missing. The Wikipedia list of pipeline accidents in the United States in 2019 alone will send chills up your spine, but these are only surface instances. No one really knows how much toxic fuels are lost merely from unreported  leakage.  Who would know? And if there was a substantial difference from what comes in and what comes out, who would want the public to know? 

Well, Winona LaDuke might want to know and possibly me, but so far it’s an uphill fight against The Supreme Court, Big Oil and the United States Congress.

As a side note, I see that Joe Biden just this week opened 81 million acres of the already dying Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas drilling

Winona LaDuke wouldn’t approve and I’m not pleased, but Joe Manchin must have told Biden it was okay.