Impact of fracking sand rush in upper Midwest

[Emily]

?Those dunes are to the Midwest what the Grand Canyon
is to Arizona and the Yosemite to California.
They constitute a signature of time and eternity.
Once lost, the loss would be irrevocable.?
?Carl Sandburg

Vanishing Lake Michigan Sand Dunes: Threats from Mining

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2013/07/130703-wisconsin-fracking-sand-rush/

Sand Rush: Fracking Boom Spurs Rush on Wisconsin Silica
Sally Younger in Portage, Wisconsin

For National Geographic

Published July 3, 2013

They look like pyramids in a cornfield, or sea dunes mottled by the summer rain.

But these stockpiles hold one of the secrets to America's energy revolution. The heaps of dozer-hauled, diesel-crushed grains are pure silica sand, and the future of fracking depends on stripping hundreds of millions of tons of it.

Every day since the rush began about two years ago, thousands of laden train cars rumble out of the world's unlikeliest sand castle?Wisconsin?headed for oil and gas wells from North Dakota to Pennsylvania...

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/6811/

Sand County, the Sequel
Bringing the phrase "world of wounds" to new depths
by Sandra Steingraber
Published in the May/June 2012 issue of Orion magazine

[snip]
Basically, Sand County is being loaded into rail cars and hauled away, metric ton by metric ton. Bluffs, hills, coulees. They?re all going.

Every day, at least one full train of mined sand leaves Wisconsin for gas fields in Pennsylvania or oil fields in North Dakota. The number of operating sand mines in the state has doubled over the past five months. Each one is five hundred to one thousand acres in size, which is ten to twenty times larger than the average gravel pit. ?It?s huge,? says a mineral commodity specialist quoted in the Associated Press. ?I?ve never seen anything like it, the growth. It makes my head spin.?

 

[AnnaLisa]

Re: Impact of fracking sand rush in upper Midwest

It's been devastating.

 

[Emily]

Re: Impact of fracking sand rush in upper Midwest

I've visited some of the dunes in the Great Lakes area, so can understand why the destruction of their fragile ecosystem would be devastating. I was shocked to learn about all this happening after reading about sand miners focusing on the Oregon dunes as their next target. It's just something I couldn't have imagined.

Something to consider is that Carl Sandburg was no deep environmentalist in his day. His bio even says that he devoted a considerable body of his work to glorifying industrialization and agriculture - yet he had restraint about the destruction of irreplaceable American landscapes.

Let's hope the awakening he hopes for in the poem below happens soon:

I am the People, the Mob
by Carl Sandburg

I am the people?the mob?the crowd?the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world's food and
clothes.
I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons come from me
and the Lincolns. They die. And then I send forth more Napoleons
and Lincolns.
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand for much plowing.
Terrible storms pass over me. I forget. The best of me is sucked out
and wasted. I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and makes
me work and give up what I have. And I forget.
Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red drops for history
to remember. Then?I forget.
When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the
lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year,
who played me for a fool?then there will be no speaker in all the
world say the name: "The People," with any fleck of a sneer in his
voice or any far-off smile of derision.
The mob?the crowd?the mass?will arrive then.

- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15264#sthash.oV1Mt8Ky.dpuf

 

[AnnaLisa]

Re: Impact of fracking sand rush in upper Midwest

We are losing the beautiful hills and bluffs of the Driftless Region in Wisconsin. I fear that many of our people will develop silicosis related diseases, and that our farmland will be gone and our water used up and forever polluted. I have several friends whose properties are being surrounded by enormous industrial sand mines of 1000 to 2000 acres. They buy the land they want and leave others with no option but to live in a 24/7 industrial zone, surrounded by dust and noise.