Frack Check WV » culture

New Book in Preparation: The Art of Waste: Narrative, Trash, and Contemporary Culture

Duane Nichols — Sun, 06 May 2018 15:54:59 +0000

How much plastic is in our garbage?

WVU English professor awarded prestigious Carnegie fellowship

From the Press Release, WVU Today, April 25, 2018

West Virginia University English professor Stephanie Foote has been named one of the 2018 Andrew Carnegie Fellows for her work related to cultural production in and around the Anthropocene, the geological epoch in which human activity has had a global effect on Earth’s climate and environment.

The Carnegie Corporation of New York awards the high-profile fellowship, known as the “brainy award.” Foote was chosen from among 270 nominees from across the country and is the first WVU professor to receive the prestigious recognition.

The fellowship recognizes “high-caliber scholarship that applies fresh perspectives to some of the most pressing issues of our times, shows potential for meaningful impact on a field of study and has the capacity for dissemination to a broad audience.”

Each member of the class of 31 scholars will receive up to $200,000 in order to devote time to significant research, writing and publishing in the humanities and social sciences.

“Stephanie Foote is the most recent example of how West Virginia University’s faculty are finding creative and exciting ways to address the challenges that face modern society,” said President E. Gordon Gee. “It is an example of the tremendous quality of our faculty research and a reminder of the power that higher education has to transform our state and the world.”

Provost Joyce McConnell called the Carnegie Fellowship “an exciting next step” for Foote, who has already been recognized as a fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, where she is in residence this year.

“Stephanie Foote’s work is both urgent and important to our region,” McConnell said. “More than that, it has tremendous potential to change the way we think about our place in the world.”

For Foote, Jackson and Nichols Professor of English in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, the fellowship will support her research in the emerging field of environmental humanities.

She will complete her third book, “The Art of Waste: Narrative, Trash, and Contemporary Culture,” which argues that garbage, perhaps the most ubiquitous feature of contemporary life, is the richest, most powerful text of our time.

By paying close attention to garbage, we can trace the histories of the global and local circulation and transformation of raw material, the human costs of making, using and discarding commodities and the intense anxiety about personal responsibility toward environmental toxicity embodied by trash.

Further, these stories allow us to grasp the ethical challenges driven not only by physical consequences on the world, but also by our investments in the material world.

Foote looks at social, medical, psychological, industrial, historical, literary and statistical evidence. For example, she analyzes a broad range of data from how garbage circulates globally, to records of how it is burned, buried, salvaged or resold, to psychological models about the intensity of our relationships to objects and how it expresses our cultural values.

“I use the stories garbage tells and the stories that we tell about garbage to explore a broad range of cultural narratives about human choices and environmental degradation,” Foote said. “If literary creation is the sign of human civilization, garbage is the visible sign of its costs.”

In addition to completing her book, Foote is planning to use the fellowship to fund the establishment of a public humanities website and the formation of a working group to where scholars can collaborate on issues related to the environmental humanities.

She will also organize a symposium in which scholars, activists and citizens from the Appalachian coal-producing region can exchange ideas about the global and local circulation of garbage.

-WVU-

History of Dunkard Creek and the Mason-Dixon Line

Duane Nichols — Thu, 20 Aug 2015 21:56:22 +0000

Red Barn @ Mason Dixon Park

Preserving & Promoting Mason-Dixon History and Culture

Friday, August 21^st, 7 pm to 9 pm – Native American flute music blended with other musical instruments. Cody BlackBird Band, Mason-Dixon Historical Park, 79 Buckeye Road, Core, WV 26541. $10 adults, children free under 12. This location is on Dunkard Creek, Monongalia County, WV at Brown’s Hill and Greene County, PA.

Saturday & Sunday, August 22^nd & 23^rd, 10 am to 5 pm – POW – WOW & Cultural Festival, Native American arts and culture; regalia, drumming, singing, story telling; style crafts, jewelry, clothing. Auctions at 2:30 pm. Native American fry bread, Indian tacos, other foods and drinks. $5 adults, children free under 12.

Contact: Phyllis Bruce on 304-662-6496 (leave a message).

See also an article from last year: Mason-Dixon Line celebrated on 250th anniversary

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The Future Looks Brighter for Dunkard Creek

From the Editorial, Washington PA Observer-Reporter, August 10, 2015

Six years ago next month, toxins from an algae not common to Southwestern Pennsylvania killed fish, mussels, salamanders and other aquatic life along a 30-mile stretch of Dunkard Creek in Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

The algae was later identified as golden algae, which state and federal environmental agencies investigating the kill described as an organism normally found only in southern coastal waters with high levels of salt and minerals. The agencies agreed what created the conditions for the algae to thrive in Dunkard Creek were the very high levels of chlorides and other contaminants from mine water discharges at Consol Energy’s Blacksville No. 2 Mine.

Last week, the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission reported it had reached a tentative settlement in a lawsuit it filed in West Virginia for damages it claims were caused by the mine’s polluted discharges. Though Consol was named in the suit, the liability has been assumed by the Murray Energy Corp., which in December 2013 purchased Consol’s northern West Virginia mines.

Details of the agreement were withheld pending finalization of the settlement. However, in stories published on the proposed agreement, John Arway, Fish and Boat Commission executive director, said any money that may be included in the settlement will be used to help further the recovery of the creek. The creek is coming back, he said, and any money received through the settlement would be used to hasten its return.

As part of an earlier settlement for Clean Water Act violations with federal regulators, Consol also had agreed to pay a $5.5 million civil penalty and construct a water treatment plant to treat chlorides discharged from its mines in northern West Virginia, including the Blacksville No. 2 coal mine.

That treatment plant in Marion County WV went on line in 2013 and should help ensure another fish kill, at least from golden algae, won’t happen again. It also will help ensure any money invested in the creek won’t go to waste.

All of that should be good news to local fishermen, who once reported catching 40 and 50 inch muskellunge in the waters of Dunkard Creek before the September 2009 fish kill.

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Subject: Dunkard Creek Fish Kill and Recovery, August 11, 2015

I have just read the Editorial from the Washington PA Observer-Reporter about Dunkard Creek and the settlement pending for damage from the 2009 algae bloom that killed over 40,000 fish and thousands of other creatures.

The article is reminiscent of catching big muskie in Dunkard Creek. Well, the fact is that BIG muskie are thriving at this time in Dunkard Creek’s feeder streams. The rapid reappearance of adult muskie (36 inches and up) is explained by WV-DNR as “they came up from the river.” As many as nine of the big fish have been identified in a half-mile stretch when the water was low and clear, 30 miles upstream from the Monongahela River.

Initial fish population recovery was fast and the fishing was good even a couple of years after the kill. It was easy to catch bass and bluegill. But now the muskie seem to be keeping those populations in check. WV-DNR should promote Dunkard Creek as a muskie stream.

See the interesting and comprehensive historical summary on the Dunkard Creek fish kill entitled “What Killed Dunkard Creek?”

Betty Wiley, Dunkard Creek Watershed Association

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NOTE: Marcellus shale drilling and fracking continue on hilltops overlooking Dunkard Creek. Dunkard Creek continues to be at some risk from such operations. Marcellus shale drilling pads in Monongahela County include the Beach, Boggess, Campbell, Coastal, Eddy, Jenkins, Kassay, Statler, and Yost Pads with multiple wells present in most cases. The WV-DEP Office of Oil & Gas maintains an on-line database for these natural gas wells.

Also, the Dunkard Creek water quality continues to be spoiled by the legacy underground & surface coal mines that contribute acid mine drainage, i.e. sulfuric acid dissolved in the water and ferric hydroxide as a finely divided suspension resulting in a yellow-orange precipitate which can be seen along the lower (eastern) section as the flow joins the Monongahela River in Greene County, Pennsylvania.

Time to End Oil & Gas Company Town Culture in West Virginia

Duane Nichols — Mon, 13 May 2013 21:33:18 +0000

: David McMahon, Esq.

Guest Commentary by David McMahon, Page 2-D, Morgantown Dominion Post, Sunday, May 12, 2013

The vast wealth of the Marcellus shale is something beyond our state’s collective experience and requires new thinking. Most importantly, it means that our state needs to create and use our new wealth without making the same mistakes we made with coal.

The natural gas in the “active” Marcellus shale areas is worth $80,000 — an acre — according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That is assuming a market price of $3 per MCF and the current market is above $4 per MCF. In so called “wet gas” areas the ethane and other liquid hydrocarbons that come with the gas are worth just as much as the gas. So that means the gas in the land that produces Marcellus shale gas is worth at least $80,000 — and up to $160,000 — an acre.

One well pad with six of the new horizontal wells draining 640 acres is therefore worth $51 million to $102 million to the driller. (Contrast that with the conventional vertical wells that we are used to here in West Virginia. A conventional gas well to the Big Injun Sandstone produces gas worth $15,000 an acre, and the Berea Sandstone is worth $9,000 an acre.)

The comic strip philosopher Charlie Brown said, “I love mankind; it’s people I can’t stand.” The oil and gas industry is the opposite. I like almost everyone I meet in the industry, and they can do amazing things, but the industry as an entity, when corporate and industry dynamics kick in, is a monster. Make no mistake about it. If we as a state give away our wealth again, if we as a state let the oil and gas industry do to us what the coal industry has done to us in terms of land use and the environment, then the industry will take it and do it. The industry will run over top of us.

There is enough money in the ground to pay for environmental controls such as closed loop drilling, safe disposal of cuttings in the right kind of landfill, recycling and safe disposal of flowback, and containment of air emissions. There is enough money in the ground to escrow some of the income from the well so we know the well will get plugged when it is depleted, and not add to the 13,000 unplugged wells we already have.

There is enough money to at least start to plug those wells that an irresponsible, industry has left behind with no current owner. There is enough money to pay modern lease rates to mineral owners rather than send frack fluid into their land from neighbors without paying them, or threatening to do so in order to get unfair lease terms.

And most importantly to surface owners, there is enough money in the ground to pay surface owners the amount that the land is worth to the drillers to produce $51 million or more worth of gas from the pad on the surface owner’s land, not what it was worth to the surface owner as a pasture before the driller showed up.

If a new divided, four-lane, controlled-access corridor highway was put through a farmer’s pasture, and an exit was placed for the lane on the edge of the pasture; and if Exxon came along and wanted to put in a fancy filling station and convenience store in the farmer’s pasture; then how much money should the farmer be paid? Should the farmer be paid the amount of money it was worth to the seller/farmer as a pasture, or should the farmer be paid the amount of money it is worth to the buyer/Exxon, for a gas station?

Of course, a wise West Virginia farmer would insist on getting paid what it was worth to Exxon as a gas station. And if Exxon cannot satisfy the farmer on the preferred corner, there is surely a farmer on another corner of the intersection who will take that much money. Therefore, if XTO, now owned by Exxon, wants to put a well pad in a farmer’s field, Exxon should pay that farmer what the land is worth to Exxon, not to the farmer, or move on to another part of the 6 million acres of Marcellus shale. That is how our free market economy is supposed to be allowed to work.

West Virginians need to understand the value of the gas and the value of their ownership of land when negotiating leases, etc., and making all the decisions they make regarding the Marcellus shale. Our courts need to rule that the huge, long-lasting surface disruption of the new shale drilling technology was not contemplated when old leases were signed or when the minerals were sold off from the surface a century ago — or even five years ago. It is clear that your surface could not be used for a pipeline to transport gas produced from neighboring mineral tracts without paying you for that right.

Our courts need to decide that, for the same reasons, the driller cannot use your land to construct a massive, long-lasting, well pad and impoundment to drill horizontally into a thousand acres of mineral tracts that do not underlie your property. The Legislature needs to understand that in rejecting unfair pooling legislation, it more than anything demonstrates the industry’s arrogance plus a sense of entitlement unlike that attributed to any other segment of our society.

As a state, as citizens, as judges, and as legislators we need to understand this new wealth. We need to grow out of the company town mentality that our history has made part of our culture.

DAVID MCMAHON is a lawyer and a co-founder of the West Virginia Surface Owners Rights Organization. He lives in Charleston. This commentary should be considered another point of view and not necessarily the opinion or editorial policy of The Dominion Post.