What will feed the hungry frac sand mines?

So here's the thought that's keeping me awake right now:

With all the new and proposed frac sand mines and processing plants planned in northwest Wisconsin, will the next step be a new nuclear power plant to feed this insatiable beast? This industry sucks a lot of energy to get oil out of the ground - will this be our next fight?

Nothing is planned, and I'll do whatever is in front of me when it's there, but this is an important piece of the continuing, desperate End of Empire.

Cesium is not Iodine, and it's still not safe to eat

This is a decent informative article from NaturalNews.com about radioactive cesium vs. iodine. While the tone is a little alarmist, the information is accurate.

When you hear about "radiation levels" at Fukushima, you're mostly hearing only about radioactive iodine, which decays much, much faster (i.e., days rather than years) than all the other radioactive isotopes one could measure there today. Cesium takes 30 years to decay by half. A tiny bit of radioactive cesium eaten in the body of a contaminated fish caught from the Pacific Ocean - or seaweed grown there - is infinitely more dangerous to you than a particle floating around the atmosphere.  

An illustrative example, from the link:

"A speck of radioactive dust that's one meter away from you, for example, is twice as dangerous as that same speck four meters away. But if you eat that radioactive speck (because it's part of a fishyou're consuming, for example), then suddenly it'sinside your body. So now it might only be a millimeter away from your internal tissues, meaning you've decreased the distance between you and the radiation source byone thousand times. Because if the law of the inverse square of the distance, you have now magnified the radiation intensity byone million times(because one million is the square of one thousand)."

This is the real danger of cesium and other radioactive isotopes - once you eat them, they emit radiation from inside your body, in your muscle tissue or bones or heart or wherever. 

"[Y]ou quickly become a walking radioactive dirty bombfrom the inside."

Rare Earth Minerals, Murder by Technology

The continuing tidal wave of ripping stuff out of the earth keeps on rolling. This time, under the Pacific Ocean. Rare earth minerals, tons of them, have been "discovered" by Japanese "explorers". 

"Rare earth metals have emerged as one of the most sought after resources in [the] commodities boom. Minerals present in the mud include gadolinium, lutetium, terbium and dysprosium." Some of these are used in the manufacture of those eco-friendly hybrid cars. Here is a handy image with notes about which minerals are used in the Prius, created by Lee Allison, state geologist and Director of the Arizona Geological Survey. Gadolinium is used in x-ray systems, CDs, and nuclear medicine.

The "commodities boom." Does that include frac sand? The excitement and anticipation of profits by scooping tons of mud off the ocean floor makes me sick. To what lengths will we continue our pillaging of the very body that bears us and makes us human? We are all complicit, here in the privileged West. I am sick to death of new solutions and technologies that are really assassination attempts. While we consume the death of the oceans and the forests and the ecological systems that continue to get in the way of our lifestyles, we lose more and more of our humanity.

It all seems part of the end of Empire and it's a long way down yet.

Love, Critically

Recently I was having a little vacation with old friends, some of whom had never met my partner and husband, C. When asked to describe him I was kind of dumbfounded; we've been together for almost twenty years, where the heck do I begin? I tried by saying he's kind of tall, a little geeky, interesting... and then it just all seemed inadequate. That conversation mercifully didn't go anywhere, but it left me feeling kind of dumb.

What I meant to say was this:
That C. has heart. That everything he does is important, and with his whole self. That he is funny and attentive and loving and tolerant and flexible when I need him to be, inflexible when it's important. That he is an amazing parent, and I love how he loves me. His heart is as big as our world needs right now, and I'm glad I share it with him. He's persuasive when he wants to be, and a great person to have around when you're trying to reframe something important. He lets you remember the things that are essential and sacred, including my own peace and spiritual connection. He's not intimidated or afraid of gay or anything else. Thank god. That he's a radical thinker, a devoted partner, and an inspiring lover. That I am a better person in his shadow, and that he casts no shadow under my Sun. We are, as someone said long ago, a matching pair. I'll never be bored.

That should cover it.

1000 Acres

According to a reliable source, there are plans for 140 frac sand mines in northwest Wisconsin right now, with some as large as 1000 acres.


1,000 acres.


These are plans to strip the land of its hills full of sand, add chemicals and water, and leave the wreckage of our water and air to all of us who have to live here, with untold and unchecked profit for a few. I am astonished and very, very pissed.  A banker wrote in an open letter recently: "Eventually the sand mine will return to farmland, and, 50 years from now, no one will remember that there had once been a hill where the flat, fertile farm now lies." It's all nostalgia to him; progress is the real value, and all of us emotional environmentalists are out to harm the community with our misplaced and unpatriotic outrage.


So what do we care about those unprofitable hills anyway? We're just a bunch of emotional wackos who don't want to buck up and provide the country with this valuable and necessary resource. 


Unless of course, we are just people who have educated ourselves about frac sand, mining, and processing plants and the permanent divisions they create in community and safety, and sincerely want to protect our children and all our descendants from this latest end-of-empire devastation. Not any of us stand to make any money from frac sand and all it entails, and none of us think any profit should be made off of the suffering of others. 


Duh.


This is a good time to remind you check the Hay River Frac Watch for updates.

Vaccines, another look

There are a lot of articles and opinion pieces out there questioning the safety of vaccinations. Most of them go right for the aborted fetus/genetically modified/population control conspiracy stuff right at the get go. But this article rocks my world by managing to avoid all conspiracy theories and focus on the science. The author doesn't provide alternatives to vaccination, but the thorough description and analogy of what vaccines do in the body to the immune system is really good. It's a bit long, but worth the read - especially if you've never considered the whole spectrum of vaccination's effects in the body.

Vaccines as "Cluster Bombs"

The Cost of Information

Tonight the owner of the sale and lease of land being negotiated with the mining corporation will be hosting an informational meeting to discuss local ramifications and who knows what else. Isn't it interesting that the owner - not the mining company - is being so helpful to the corporation? What a sweet gesture of compliance and sharing she has shown to the Company. What a helper! What a community member!

I may be pissed, but it's true; the mining companies don't need to do PR when the locals will take - and generate - all the heat for them.

In 5 years, when the landowner has been screwed by they mining company (a very common thing, evidently), I wonder what kind of regrets won't be discussed in an informational meeting. When the wells dry up, and the air is filled with carcinogenic particulate that gives my children and the children attending school in town asthma and increased risk for lung cancer, what kind of info meeting will she be hosting? When the trucks have wrecked the county roads and cracked the foundations of old farmhouses and killed dogs and cats and many other mammals haplessly crossing roads that used to be deserted, what kind of info meeting will we attend then? When the relatively toxic farming practices used to monocrop GM corn and soy are exchanged for hundreds of known carcinogens leaching into the groundwater after the sand processing plant is finished, and we are all drinking unknown and untested chemicals in our water, what kind of info meeting will be hosted then? And when all the farming families and folks I know don't move because we can't afford to, and we have to work outside in a toxic stew to grow our food, what kind of info meeting will I be attending?

The cost of civilization and colonization is not information. It is destruction and risk and suffering. Only human-scale community will endure because only we can ask the questions that remind everyone else of our shared humanity and the connections to our individual webs of life and living. I'm rooting for life, but in the mean time I'm fighting as best I can against destruction.

Hay River Frac Watch web site

There is now a very informative web site so you can follow the frac sand mining that is set to devastate the land base here in my neck of western Wisconsin: Hay River Frac Watch.

I understand that beside the developments planned 3 miles northeast of my home there are a total of 9 mining companies eager to make a profit off of our sand. Unfortunately all this is targeted to help fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, a toxic process used in the US to suck natural gas out of the earth a mile underground. Unfortunately, I suspect this is a relative flash in the pan: 5-10 years of ecological wrecking and human greed and then lots of people grieving for our past.

A group of thoughtful, smart community members are working to stop it here. We can beat the mining companies, but we have to be united and work fast. Stay connected, learn more, speak out!

Who Needs Leaders?

I firmly believe it's all going to get worse before it gets better. I believe that as the profiteers desperately move through our earth's body to make more and more money for fewer and fewer people, that those of us outside the cities will suffer. But I do believe radical change is possible; I don't believe that destruction is inevitable; I don't believe we have to lose our humanity in defense of our land base; I also don't believe the lack of humanity in the actions of a few mining or nuclear energy companies mean we are doomed to desperate living (no, not John Waters-style, you smart asses).


In a recent article in the Economist of all places (Who Needs Leaders?), I read this quote:


"THE earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident that struck Japan three months ago have revealed something important about the country: a seam of strength and composure in the bedrock of society that has surprised even the Japanese themselves. Not only has this resilience helped the hundreds of thousands suffering from the loss of families, homes and livelihoods to cope with their suffering, despite the self-absorbed dithering of their national politicians in Tokyo. By reminding Japan of the hidden depths of its local communities, especially compared with the shallowness of central government, it has also provided a sense of how Japan could emerge stronger from the crisis, ending years of economic drift."


Depth of local communities. Shallowness of central government. 


Isn't it true?

Japanese elders offer to help clean up Fukushima

Even though it is little reported in the US news media, the meltdowns at Fukushima's nuclear power plants continue to deteriorate. There is much, much work to do; each unit must still be cooled and contained, and the kilometers around Fukushima will remain contaminated for a very long time. Work demands workers. Who will volunteer, under full consent, to help clean up this corporate and governmental disaster?


A group of elders has stepped forward to offer their services. 


The complete negligence and greed of TEPCO and the disinformation of the IAEA and the Japanese government has doomed not only the land and environment of Japan and its people to dramatic increases in cancer and death and toxic food and economic devastation. It will now also lose cherished grandparents to nuclear power.


"Kazuko Sasaki, 69, the co-founder of the group, says she has a number of personal reasons why she wants to work at the plant. 'My generation, the old generation, promoted the nuclear plants. If we don't take responsibility, who will?'"


In the face of Ms. Sasaki's responsibility, I ask again: Where are the designers, builders, and owners of these nuclear power plants? Why are those who are truly responsible not volunteering their time to clean soil, dump water, and fix leaks? As always, the failure of a few to experience real connection with the land base and their communities cost the lives and well-being of many. What can we learn, here? Who is next?