Whose Water Is It?

• Published date: 01 May 2016
• Date: 01 May 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12153
• Author: Hilary A. B. Lambert

Whose Water Is It?

By HILARY A. B. LAMBERT*

ABSTRACT. Legal protection of the USA’s water resources was reduced

during the Bush-Cheney Administration (2000–2008), facilitating coal, oil,

and gas development at the expense of clean water. The “Halliburton

Loophole” in the 2005 Energy Act exempted all oil and gas development

activities, including fracking (hydraulic fracturing), from the Clean Water

Act, Clean Drinking Water Act, and other federal statutes. Two U.S.

Supreme Court rulings weakened the Clean Water Act’s protections of

headwaters, streams, wetlands, and other water bodies. In New York

State, communities faced with the imminent prospect of fracking by

energy companies organized. From 2008–2014, they prevented fracking

in New York. Water protection played a major role in energizing

community response, In 2015, a fragile, but resilient, ban was declared

statewide. In Kentucky, 150 years of coal mining resulted in pollution of

many waterways, with hundreds of stream miles buried beneath

mountaintop removal debris. Kentuckians have been pushing back since

the 1930s to protect communities, farms, and water quality. They remain

hopeful in the face of great odds. Urban populations making daily use of

cheap, clean water and fossil-fuel-powered energy sources have little

knowledge of these struggles. In rural America, the fight to protect

communities, lands, and waters from energy exploitation is lifelong.

Introduction: Loss of Water Protection

Water quality is a concern of both urban and rural residents. However,

in most cases, the threats to water quality occur in rural watersheds, far

*Executive Director/Steward of the Cayuga Lake Watershed Network, a watershed

protection and educational NGO in central New York State. AB, anthropology, Brown

University; MA, PhD, geography, Clark University. Taught at Rutgers University, Miami

of Ohio, University of Kentucky. Former editor of FOCUS (American Geographical

Society of New York). Associate Director of the Kentucky Waterways Alliance. Com-

munity organizer on behalf of the environment for many years in Kentucky and New

York State.

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 75, No. 3 (May, 2016).

DOI: 10.1111/ajes.12153

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C2016 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.

from big cities. As a result, the burden falls on rural residents to fight

the companies that drill, mine, and clear-cut the land surfaces and

pump chemicals into the ground. Although the residents of cities reap

the benefits of the work carried out by rural activists, the latter receive

little support from theformer.

This article focuses on threats by private interests to the quality and

quantity of water in rural New York State and the Commonwealth of

Kentucky, where the author has personal and working experience. The

adjacent states of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, and Michigan have

been equally impacted by widespread seizure of natural resources for

use by the energy industry and related interests. The American West

has been dealing with energy development for decades, intensively

since the “fracking revolution” commenced in 2000. This nationwide

frenzy to develop oil and gas in U.S. territory at all costs was permitted

by legal and regulatory actions of the Bush-Cheney Administration and

a compliant Congress (2001–2008). Most U.S. states have numerous

groups fighting to protect clean water and air, starkly relevant in an era

of climate change and water shortages.

The question across rural America is not simply, “Whose water is it?”

but also “Whose life is it?” When private companies appropriate clean

water and leave behind water contaminated with chemicals, this poses

a threat to the health of natural systems and to the people who rely on

them.

In many places, the oil and gas energy industry has freely expropri-

ated the “quiet enjoyment” of land, air, and water that rural Americans,

including Native American tribes, have long relied on. The energy

industry and its mega-developer cousins seem to operate on the basis

of “act first, apologize later,” exploiting rural America as a free or low-

cost natural resource fiefdom, with little fear of negative consequences.

Land, water, air, minerals, ecosystems, and human communities are all

cheap fodder for the energy machine. The single biggest form of

destruction in recent years is hydraulic fracturing as a method of

extracting natural gas in shale formations. This process is better known

as “fracking.”

In Pennsylvania’s rural, once farm-dominated Susquehanna County,

stalwart anti-fracking activist Vera Scroggins (2015) reports: “1300 gas

wells, 45 Gas Compressor Stations, hundreds of miles of high-pressure

The American Journal of Economics and Sociology682

gas lines just in my county of 800 sq. miles ... and still counting ...

over 1,000 DEP [Department of Environmental Protection] violations

racked up in my county by the seven gas companies ... since 2008”

(Scroggins 2015).

That is the experience of just one county. A 2013 review by the Wall

Street Journal of data covering 700 counties in 11 gas-producing states

found that at least 15.3 million Americans had a natural gas well within

one mile of their home, drilled since 2000. By 2012, people living and

working near fracked gas wells had filed over 1,000 complaints regard-

ing tainted water, severe illnesses, livestock deaths, and fish

kills (Guynup 2012; Valentine 2013; Center for Media and Democracy

2015).

Nonetheless, rural Americans have been able to organize and push

back against overweening private interests, though often only after

social and environmental damage has been done. The anti-fracking

movement has come too late for many rural residents of Colorado,

Wyoming, Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania (among other U.S. states and

countries), whose land, air, water, and health have been permanently

impacted by fracking, pipelines, and compressor stations. Hope for

others has been signaled by success in New York State, with a July 2014

high court ruling that small towns have the right to ban fracking, fol-

lowed by a December 2014 statewide ruling that prevents fracking in

New York State for the time being (Hoff2014; EarthJustice 2014).

A longer, wearier road to effective pushback is being traveled by resi-

dents of the central Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia and Ken-

tucky. Their land and water rights were pulled out from under them in

the years 1875–1910 by charming, unscrupulous landsmen, who

obtained signatures on broad form deeds that allowed complete

destruction of overlying land, water, homes, towns, and cemeteries in

order to extract the coal, oil, and gas beneath (Caudill [1963] 2001). By

the time federal environmental protection laws were passed inthe early

1970s and a measure of control was regained over the broad form deed

in 1988, Appalachia’s coal companies had over 50 years of doing what-

ever they wanted: the horse was long gone from the barn; and the

chickens were being guarded by foxes in Kentucky county offices, the

statehouse, and regulatory agencies (Brosiand Hardt 2005; Kentuckians

For The Commonwealth2005).

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