A Poetic Response to Writer's Support of Fracking - John Rotto Letter-to-Editor

About last week’s letter on freezing 
without fracking, I hope he was teasing. 
I think it is clear, 
don’t dig frac sand ‘round here 
or we all may be coughing and wheezing.

The dust blows around in the air. 
The well water goes bad, is that fair? 
Who wants silicosis? 
I think we should know this: 
Once it’s corporate owned, they don’t care.

Mr. Engelhardt thinks anti-frackers are fools. 
The big corporations should have all the tools 
that they need to keep taking 
the oil that is making 
the lifestyle that gulps fossil fuels.

With corporate business, he’s really impressed 
just the fact that it’s spreading, he says, makes it best. 
But it’s like a disease, 
cancer, if you please. 
It’s time that this issue’s addressed.

You see, corporations don’t serve human need. 
It’s much more important for them to serve greed. 
It’s simply a trait. 
It requires blind faith. 
“Just consume, and your soul will be freed!”

If we don’t find a way to keep greed well in check, 
the imbalance it makes in our world raises heck. 
To pretend that today 
there is no other way 
makes our future a pain in the neck.

If we vote to just let it keep growing
with the carbon monoxide we’re blowing 
plus the CAFOs and spray, 
with our health we will pay. 
Don’t you think, maybe, we should get going?

Because, isn’t it true, 
don’t we know, me and you, 
that living in poison is worse than the flu? 
How can we be happy 
when the earth is all crappy, 
and the air, it all smells like dog doo?

Now I’m stuck in this rhyme. 
Yes, it happens sometime. 
It’s a feeling. I wouldn’t quite say it’s sublime. 
But isn’t life good? 
Can’t you see that we should 
save ourselves, and that not to’s a crime?


Jon Rotto
Rural Decorah

(Submitted to Decorah Newspapers)

A Movement to Expand Rights - Liz Rog Letter-to-Editor

Dear Editor:

The Community Rights movement is gaining more national attention these days than ever before. This is an exciting and democratic response to powerful industries that claim a corporation’s right to make millions of dollars trumps our right to a healthy environment and democracy.

Community Rights is working in places like the quaint college town Oneonta City, N.Y., metropolitan Pittsburgh, PA, and rural Mora County, N.M.

During a recent County Board meeting, Supervisor Thompson was quoted as saying “claiming a right doesn’t make it a right.” But if we don’t, who will? Our most basic rights as Americans have been enumerated by people standing up and claiming them. The U.S. Constitution of 1787 did not contain the Bill of Rights. These first 10 amendments were added four years later in 1791 due to intense unrest and pressure by the citizenry. We certainly don’t want to give up now the right to freedom of speech, press, religion, association, arms-bearing militias and others claimed in service to future generations.

Abolitionists found it was their duty to claim that blacks had the right to exist free from bondage of white masters. Woman suffragists claimed their right to vote was inherent. If these brave souls had not claimed rights that then did not exist, we would still live in a nation where only property-owning white men could vote; where blacks could be born into and die in slavery; where women were seen by law as the property of their husbands, and blacks as the property of their masters.

The 10th amendment to the U.S. Constitution states “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Our Board of Supervisors are elected by and represent the people of Winneshiek County. They have constitutional authority to claim basic rights when they are not yet recognized.

Therefore, it is our neighborly obligation and patriotic responsibility to once again step forward and claim basic rights for We the People, here in this beautiful and prosperous place where we live. If you have not yet read the Winneshiek County Bill of Rights laid out in the ordinance to ban frac-sand extraction, please do at communityrightsalliance.org.

Our Supervisors need to know that citizens support this effort to expand fundamental rights for living, breathing citizens.

Liz Rog
Rural Winneshiek County

David Cavagnaro Letter-to-Editor

Dear Editor:

Regarding the Community Rights Alliance proposed ordinance establishing a community bill of rights to protect our environment, Supervisor Dean Thompson was quoted as saying “it serves to have the federal and state constitutions nullified when inconvenient.”

First of all, a court challenge to the law, should an ordinance opposing frac-sand mining come to that, can hardly be described as an effort to nullify a constitution. Would Mr. Thompson have considered the corporate challenge which led to the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, which granted corporations all the same rights as individuals, an effort to nullify the federal constitution? Or would he judge as such an effort instead the national outcry over that decision, and a nation-wide effort underway to amend the constitution? It just so happens, Mr. Thompson, that neither is. This is how a democracy works.

I sincerely hope that the supervisors by now, in their fact-finding mission during the frac-sand moratorium, have come to fully understand just how ineffective our regulatory system has been in controlling this, as so many other environmental degradations going on in America today. 

In 2010, Wisconsin had only 10 mining and processing facilities. Today it has 132, with 100 more in the planning stages. Since 2012, Wisconsin has found two dozen of these operations in violation of air and water pollution rules, yet anyone living with the 24-hour-a-day traffic, light, air and noise pollution rampant in their neighborhoods has testified that little has changed. Indeed, given the nature of frac-sand mining and processing, little can change.

According to a lengthy article March 17 in the Christian Science Monitor Weekly on this topic, frac-sand production in the U.S. now exceeds 30 million metric tons, most of it coming from the upper Midwest. “The national Institute of Occupational Safety and Health issued a ‘Hazard Alert’ after a study of 11 fracking sites in five states found levels of crystalline silica that consistently exceeded occupational health standards, sometimes by as much as 10 times. In September, OSHA proposed cutting in half the permissible levels of exposure to crystalline silica at work sites.”

So does this mean regulation works? Even if this “proposal” is actually adopted, and remains unchallenged under interstate commerce laws, would we next be able to get any regulatory agency to put a limit on how much of our precious ground water can be harvested for this hugely water-hungry industry, and would any regulations other than a total ban protect the beautiful landscape which defines our regional quality of life and generates most of our tourist dollars?

Dean Thompson and the rest of the supervisors might be interested to learn, if their fact-finding has not taken them there yet, that in mid-December the Pennsylvania Supreme Court found unconstitutional a law that allowed state government to override local communities’ zoning decisions to limit hydraulic fracturing. In 2013, two New York state courts ruled in favor of towns that have limited industrial gas development through local zoning.  

The Ohio Supreme Court is considering a similar case. These cases obviously relied on constitutions, certainly not nullifying them. The environmental organization Earthjustice has helped support all these cases. They likely would help us, should we find ourselves in a similar situation.

We have the honor of having two families in Decorah who have won important rights before the Iowa Supreme Court, one the right to home school our children if we choose, and the other the right for gay couples to marry if they choose to do so. 

Would our supervisors consider exhibiting as much courage as our private citizens have, should it come to that? I ask of our elected officials, what would you consider spending tax dollars on that is more important, whatever it might cost, than protecting our air, our water, our health, our landscape, our quality of life? 

When you make a final decision on this matter at the end of the moratorium, please have an answer to this question ready for those you represent. 

David Cavagnaro

Decorah

Community Rights Needn't Be Feared - John Klosterboer Letter-to-Editor

Dear Editor:

Winneshiek County is indeed a beautiful and healthy place to live and visit. In fact, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation recently designated Winneshiek County as the eighth healthiest in the whole country. The threat of frac-sand mining on the health and beauty of the county is real, and I am glad to see the supervisors taking this threat seriously.

As they consider their options, it is important to understand that Winneshiek County is more likely to get sued with a regulatory approach of trying to zone frac-sand mining out of the county than if a rights-based ordinance is adopted. This is the case because corporate lawyers are used to attacking regulations that try to stop them, but are much less comfortable with attacking the fundamental rights of citizens.

I can see that the county supervisors are hesitant to adopt a ban on frac-sand mining by including it with a list of the rights of the citizens because it is an unfamiliar path. The fact that it is unconventional is exactly the reason why they need to go this route. 

All over the country, time and time again using the regulatory approach to stop detrimental corporate activities has failed. That deck is stacked in their favor and Winneshiek County has very little chance of winning if the supervisors play their game. No matter how amazingly well the county is zoned with multiple over-laps of areas closed to frac-sand mining, corporations will sue their way into the county.

The other, less familiar option is for the supervisors to declare that the citizens of Winneshiek County have a right to clean water and air, and that frac-sand mines are not allowed here because they will jeopardize those fundamental rights. Luckily, declaring rights is not just unfamiliar to the supervisors, but also to the corporate lawyers, making it less likely that they would attempt a lawsuit.

This new approach needn’t be feared. This ordinance won’t ban anything but frac-sand mining. Several fundamental rights are declared with the community rights ordinance, but it only bans one activity, and that is frac-sand mining. It doesn’t ban anything else, or weaken any rights set aside by the state or federal constitutions.

Just as states can only strengthen rights granted by the feds, the county can only strengthen rights. There are lots of examples around the country where this approach is working and it can also work in Winneshiek County. Ban frac-sand mining, rather than opening the door with the old familiar permitting and regulatory zoning approach.

John Klosterboer  

Rural Decorah