An Appeal to the Stakeholders in Huerfano County's Natural Wonders

I wrote this as a response to the Summer Visitors Guide published by a local newspaper:

 We discover anew the wonders of this area in the just-released colorful Signature Visitor's Guide. But we have a huge task to preserve all this natural beauty and opportunity for adventure. From Greenhorn Mountain to the Spanish Peaks, industrial oil and gas has a more sinister view of western Huerfano County. Greedy landmen have already solicited the U.S. Forest Service to lease the San Isabel National Forest at the base of the Spanish Peaks and around Cuchara for industrial oil development. What is more, 100,000s of acres have been leased in the awesome Yellowstone Road area and north to Gardner. In a conversation with a former EPA official last week, I learned that 3000 bore holes could be horizontally drilled beneath leased lands in Huerfano County. Each of these requires truck traffic in the thousands of trips to bring in water, silica substances, and fracking chemicals, and take away waste water to remote disposal facilities (if we are lucky).

The county needs help from the population segments represented  in the Signature special edition. If you are a hiker, hunter, fisherman, photographer, pilot, artist, quilter, musician, writer—the list goes on, you need to get involved in your special way, through your organizations or creative works, to protect the land from which you receive your recreation and inspiration. It is really very simple. Two photographs could tell the entire story. One of the area as it appears now and the other of a trashed industrial gas/oil field, barren well pads, and dusty, traffic-filled access roads. I can't think of a greater peril than the one we face in western Huerfano County. We need to protect our air, our water, our natural wonders, and our liberties by using our various gifts and talents to alert all our visitors and residents to what is at risk. Remember, with 3000 wells and tens of thousands truck trips, as well as high-pressure drilling pipes and escaping underground gases, it takes only one accident in the allowable 500-foot setback to severely damage a child's or elderly person's health and leave a permanent, stinking, oil-soaked stain on the earth. And there will inevitably be such accidents. That is the risk. And the reward will come by eliminating dangerous industrial activities in this artistic, sports, and vacation paradise.

Property Rights and Property Wrongs

Fracking traffic is a big risk in a small town:


If you grew up in the 1950s the landscape was more empty and free. Though the population is stable or diminishing in rural areas, population distribution has changed significantly.  Land owners find they can subdivide property for people seeking a home in the countryside.  It is a win/win situation.  But now some of us find ourselves stuck in the 1950s. I once bought a wood lot in Maine and encountered all sorts of regulatory restrictions. The last straw was when I was told by a forester that timber harvesting is restricted because the land has a deer wintering area.
Fast forward to La Veta and Huerfano County. The land is no longer empty and free to do anything we like.  Our property rights may become property wrongs if our neighbor's health is threatened by the spill-over from activities on private land.  Take for instance the traffic situation in a small town like La Veta.  If the gas and oil frackfields in the shale underlying our fair valley were to be developed to their full potential, it could require tens of thousands of truckloads passing through the streets of La Veta.  We would all suffer from inconvenience and worst, the danger of 18 wheelers at all hours congesting Highway of Legends, Oak, and Main Streets. Those of my mindset or age have to consider the new circumstances. Fracking equals heavy trucking activity, but pray it not be on the streets of La Veta where residents, visitors, children, and many retired people enjoy the clean peaceful country setting on trips to and in town. In short, we can't have it both ways.  Welcome to 21st century reality.

Nothing in Fracking Benefits These Essentials.

We took a weekend trip north. Here are my observations:

Some here admire a northern county's gas and oil boom. They should take a closer look. Flat and with dirty skies, this particular county is no Huerfano County in terms of scenic wonders. Brown tanks and black burn-off stacks virtually line the highways there. It is just two years into a fracking boom and grass and crop lands are growing more and more barren due to service roads and well pads.  Will fly-by-night drilling companies post adequate bonds to heal the land in Huerfano County?  Who is minding the store? It is very understandable to collect a sign-on fee to lease your mineral rights, but seller's remorse may be settling in when you think about the damage to come. What to do? There is nothing in mineral leases protecting drillers when informed public opinion brings second thoughts. It is entirely reasonable, after looking at places where fracking has marred the landscape, to affirm that we have the right and the duty to protect our livestock, our water, our landscape, and our loved ones from a similar fate. With Shell leaving, there are already signs that the boom has become a bubble.  Boom, bubble, bust.  If Huerfano County were to be fracked to the limit, it would fuel the United States for around 20 days.  That isn't much of a trade-off. I get kind of a sick feeling when I think about Huerfano County looking like a  wasteland for the rest of my life. And remember, healthy livestock, like healthy people, require clean air, clean soil, healthy nutrition, and good water. Nothing in fracking benefits these essentials.

FOR Huerfano County

The Importance of Children's Health:

It is always surprising to learn of the depth of experience of some of our elected officials.  Art Bobian, who is chairman of the Huerfano Board of County Commissioners, is one example.  I have found that he: "...retired in 2002 from the American Cancer Society where he held a variety of positions including National Field Representative covering 15 states in the western part of the nation. He also held the position of Assistant Vice President for Internal Communications for the National Home Office in Atlanta, and finished his career as a Regional Vice President for Southern California.  Art has also served as President of La Plaza de Los Leones, an organization devoted to providing scholarships to Huerfano County students while promoting awareness of Hispanic contributions to the area."http://spcf.net/about-us.html.  Therefore  I want  to assemble copies of articles mentioning carcinogens that appear on the victims list website, http://pennsylvaniaallianceforcleanwaterandair.wordpress.com/the-list/, printed and in a folder for Art Bobian to read.

I also want to introduce an idea here that to gain maximum support in the county, we combine lease map information with household locations to form an alert to have present state of children's health documented in locations within 500 feet of potential drilling.

Our concerns have much in common with the Hispanic community and Catholic Church, and their children's health could be a crucial element in a campaign for fracking danger awareness in Huerfano County.

I think it is important  to be seen as strongly FOR Heurfano County, and for us to be respectful and caring in our attitude towards even those with whom we now disagree because they presently favor Shell's designs on our county.  Education of parents on fracking dangers is essential.

BOOM YIKES! Exerpts From NPR

The following comments are from a discussion on National Public Radio.  The people that called in were from various areas of the United States, and their experience was pretty much similar as you will read here:

When you only have 6,000 people in that kind of space, and when you suddenly double and triple the population, it has a huge impact on absolutely everything: our schools, our medical clinics, our streets, our housing. And it was a very stressful time.  The infusion of cash doesn't come without complications. Outsiders double or triple the population. Service industries include prostitution and drugs. The air and water can suffer. And then what happens when the wells run dry? There's a tremendous amount of usually men coming to the community from different parts of the country, you're not sure you want your daughters walking all over town at any time.  We were paying our teachers very, very high salaries.  The downside was those teachers were really earning absolutely every extra penny they were earning because the classroom setting was perpetually changing. Every week there were new kids coming in, other kids leaving out. The growth was exponential, the traffic was frightening.  Along with the boom, came a lot of environmental damage.  That was probably the hardest for us locals to accept. There is the immediate doubling of the population that was scary enough to deal with, but you could try to at least handle that. But when it really got scary for many of us is when our air quality became very, very poor. In fact we had ozone levels that matched really the poorest of inner city like Los Angeles. And it was very dangerous. And we didn't quite know how to handle it. Do you not let your kids go to ski practice because breathing in this air is very bad when we live in these pristine mountains?  We're in the most pristine environmental part of the world, and yet we were horrendously impacted in the environment because of all this drilling.  The roads are terrible. The chances of accidents are very high. The hospitals are overburdened with accidents between 18-wheelers and passenger cars. So there's a - it's a mixed bag, but basically you can make good money there driving.  The degradation that I saw, there was a 13-to-one ratio of men to women with the man camps that came in.  There was a huge - we called it big brown cloud that just, as I think was mentioned, the pollution that just never went away. The intrinsic beauty of the place was to me being raped and pillaged. Every day I watched an oil rig, another one, go up in the mesa and the roads and the trucks. And it was endless and ceaseless. It never stopped.  It was all for, I imagine, making money or the good of the country, but I who lived there did not feel that, and I left because it was not the place I knew it to be, and it would never return because once you take nature, once you tear it apart, you just can't get that back. It won't come back.  But that also became a huge burden for people like my husband and I, who have cattle ranches there, because we couldn't begin - we weren't getting any more for our cattle, and we couldn't begin to compete for wages with what the gas fields were paying. So we were very labor-starved. We couldn't begin to compete with the gas companies when it came to getting parts for our tractors, or if our trucks broke down, we couldn't afford - now the mechanic that used to be $50 an hour was now $200 an hour, and he was plenty busy with work out in the gas fields.  That is true in spades up in North Dakota. The schools, the hospitals and the police and ancillary service workers cannot compete in the wage market created by an oil field. So teachers are being recruited in there and being housed - the last time I was up there, there was discussion of the schools buying housing for their teachers so that they could actually live there.  Police come in there, they've been recruited from academies across the country, they get there, and they discover they can make a lot more in the oil field than they can driving in a cruiser, and they leave. And in the hospitals, the support workers who, you know, do all the scut work in a hospital, the hospitals can't compete. It's a really difficult situation in terms of wages.  I worked in Williston on a frack crew for the last - for nine months last year. I was - went out in the field every day. It was 110 hours per week, two weeks straight, one week off, lived in a man camp. Two weeks ago, we buried one of my co-workers, died out there in a frack accident.  You do have a lot of gun permits being issued up there, particularly to women. It's a little rough. The male versus female proportion is way out of balance, so it gets a little rough for women up there.  One of the things I wanted to mention is that there's a lag, there's a revenue collection lag between the beginning of production and when the revenue starts flowing, and that doesn't match the impact on these local small towns. They don't get any revenue for two, three years. And so the impact piles up and you're trying to catch up afterwards, and that's still happening in North Dakota, and there's no guarantee that that money that's coming into the state gets back into the local towns that are being impacted because the states really have to go hat in hand, I mean, the towns - I'm sorry, have to go hat in hand to with the states to get special grants to mitigate the damages to their roads and everything else. 

Allan Savory on Cows and Grasslands

Cows to the Rescue:

Spring 2013 I drove through a dust storm in Pueblo blowing in from the eastern plains.  In an instant it went from daylight to a darkness greater than night.  How do we heal a land laid barren by sod-busting, over-grazing, gas and oil pads, and dirt roads.  Allan Savory offers one solution:


So the failure of earlier attempts combined with his estimation that two-thirds of Earth is now desertifying inspired Savory to search for a new approach to protecting and restoring grasslands. And he found it by thinking naturally and looking backward, not forward.

It makes no sense that land that once supported untold millions of grazing animals on massive migrations should be destroyed by the overgrazing of fewer or comparable numbers of livestock in more recent years. And there were areas of the U.S. where cattle had been removed for decades, but the grasslands were still desertifying.

Allan Savory says the key to restoring grasslands is to manage livestock to mimic the role once played by vast migrating herds.  “Clearly we have never understood desertification,” he said. “What we had failed to understand was that these areas developed with huge numbers of grazing animals [pursued by lots of huge carnivores]. Movement kept them from overgrazing.” This way of the past could also hold the key to the future. “The only option left,” according to Savory, is “to use livestock on the move to mimic the ancient herds.” Keeping cattle more densely packed on smaller plots of land and moving them frequently keeps them from exhausting the supply of living plants, turns scattered droppings into a full blanket of high-quality fertilizer, and keeps the repeated trod of untold tons from packing down the dirt. He’s done it for decades, and the results  are impressive.

“Holistic grazing” keeps more plants alive, adds nutrients to the soil, and creates soil conditions that hold and use water instead of letting it evaporate or run off. It is now practiced by thousands on five continents, and is the focus of the work of the Africa Centre for Holistic Management in Zimbabwe, as well as the Savory Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

Allan Savory pointed out a critical part of this story beyond preserving complex grassland ecosystems to sustain livestock, agriculture, and wildlife. The amount of plant life lost through desertification over decades has severely compromised Earth’s ability to take carbon dioxide out of the air. Just as we have increased the amount we’re putting into the atmosphere, we’re reducing the amount we take out.

There is a remarkable upside to this however. With all of the difficulties of maintaining a productive economy while reducing our carbon output, and mitigating the effects of a warming climate, if we can implement holistic grazing on half of the Earth’s grasslands, according to Allan, “we can take us back to pre-industrial [CO2] levels… and feed people.”

It would be wrong to think of changing the way we herd cattle as a silver bullet that will solve all of Earth and humanity’s challenges, but as a key step in promoting the kind of long-term, holistic view that Allan Savory has taken, it could go a long way towards repairing the land and our relationship to it.

Thanks to Winston Churchill

This is just a little fun using Winston Churchill's rallying speech in the Battle of Briton in World War II to rally the anti-fracking movement:

Even though large tracts of the wild and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of fracking and all the odious apparatus of gas and oil rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in Huerfano County, we shall fight on the plains and mountains, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the press, we shall defend our county, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the highways, we shall fight on the drilling grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.