The North Dakota Oil Fracking Boom Creates Clash of Money and Devastation

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/environment/north-dakota-oil-fracking-boom-creates-clash-money-and-devastation?akid=9441.277129.Bvo65u&rd=1&src=newsletter715277&t=1



NEW TOWN N.D. --When the black gold rush began, no one on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation expected it to take down Main Street.

A modest strip of one- and two-story buildings framed by undulating plains, Main Street doubled as the reservation’s community hub, in the tradition of small towns. Neighbors caught up at the Jack and Jill grocery, elders strolled to the library, children rode their bikes on the streets.

No one imagined tanker trucks barreling up and down Main Street, back-to-back like freight trains, seven days and nights a week. No one predicted construction zones that grind traffic to a halt as far as the eye can see, the deafening clatter of semis, the dust kicked up by 10,000 vehicles pulverizing the two-lane road every day or the smell and taste of diesel. No one anticipated the accidents, two or more a week on Main Street and all over the rutted reservation roads, costing lives and shattering families.

In fact, Fort Berthold, home of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, or Three Affiliated Tribes, did not reckon on a lot when North Dakota invited the energy industry to Drill Baby Drill. No one knew that energy companies in search of housing for their workers would buy private property and evict some of the reservation’s poorest residents from their homes. No one planned on police and fire calls multiplying. No one guessed that on a reservation of nearly one million acres, all the deer would disappear.

[hedgehog]

1. What happens the day after the boom is over?

Ever wonder where ghost towns came from?

[xchrom]

2. i think that's what we all 'know' and it's sad

that such a predictable outcome was the 1 'chosen'.

[femrap]

3. The Rich......

[pscot]

5. It's traditional

If it was good enough for Washington and Jefferson, who are we to complain.

[CRH]

10. How the hell to they invade and Indian Reservation, ...

and ruin it??? With the help of tribal leaders.

snip ~~

To make sure they would not miss out this time, the tribe made two moves. It struck a deal with North Dakota to lower the taxes companies would pay the state and the tribe for leases on tribal land and it lobbied the Bureau of Indian Affairs to set up “one-stop shops” to streamline the permitting process.

end excerpt ~~

With slightly over fifty percent percent of tribal members receiving a check, resistance is greatly quashed. But if you are one of the other 45+% not sharing the wealth, life doesn't seem to fair right now, or in the past.

snip ~~

Fort Berthold children learn early, in school and at home, that United States policies have betrayed the tribe again and again.  The U.S. government broke the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, which set the reservation’s borders, to seize millions of acres of reservation land to establish Montana and expand railroad lines.

Then, in the late 1940s, the federal government decided to damn the Missouri River to create hydroelectric power and Lake Sakakawea. The project flooded river bottomlands that the tribe had so assiduously cultivated and that provided its major source of income. Over one-fourth of the reservation’s total land base was inundated by water. By 1954, nearly 80 percent of the tribe had relocated and almost all of its crop and grazing land, 94 percent, was lost.

The reservation now comprises just under a million acres. Only about half of that is tribal land, either owned by the tribe or tribal members whose families received allotments under an 1887 federal act that sought to privatize Indian lands. The rest of the land is either privately owned, largely by those whose ancestors settled in the Plains when the federal government gave away “unclaimed” Indian lands to homesteaders (beginning with the first Homeststead Act, in 1862) or public land, as in national park land.

end excerpt ~~

[Frustratedlady]

4. What a sick/sad story.

If the Pugs get in, we'll have fracking all over the fricking country.

Knock down wind towers/solar fields (clean energy) and allow this crap. I'm so sick of hearing about oil, I could scream. Look what it's done to the world.

[limpyhobbler]

7. "If the Pugs get in, we'll have fracking all over the fricking country. " .................... ?

Don't we have that now? Isn't fracking a central piece of the President's energy plan?

[Frustratedlady]

8. I hope not. If so, I missed it.

I thought with the tremors, they put a hold on fracking.

[Nihil]

9. That was only with one side of their mouth ...

> I thought with the tremors, they put a hold on fracking.

The other side was busy going "Drill baby drill!"

[pscot]

6. Same thing is going on from Texas

to Alberta. The locals are rolling in dough. The managers of the public lands are in link with the companies, because that's what people want. It's Milo Minderbinder capitalism. Give everyone a taste and they'll go along with about anything.