Spirit in Action
Poi-Sand Mining - A Fracking Business
[music] ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world home ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeat. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service. Hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world home ♪ A crucial and rising issue in my neck of the woods, and probably in many other necks around the USA, is that of frack sand mining. The mining of sand for fracking purposes. Fracking is its own topic for another day. But today, we'll explore just this one piece of the process that feeds what is apparently a shockingly ecologically damaging mode of energy extraction from the earth. So, we'll be talking about frack sand mining, which was the focus of a presentation that my guest, Jerry Lauste, did at the recent Fighting Bobfest North Gathering. Jerry was an ag teacher for 18 years, comes from a family nationally known for the Lauste's Green Meadows Angus cattle that they've bred, and he is on the board of the Save the Hills Alliance. I joined Jerry Lauste at his home in Menominee, Wisconsin for today's Spirit in Action program. Jerry, I'm so pleased you could be with me here today for Spirit in Action. Well, thank you for coming over and visiting. First of all, it was so great to hear you speak at the Fighting Bobfest, the North version. It was quite exciting, all of the things going on there. And your talk in particular drew me there because I felt under educated about the sand mining that's going on around here. I certainly knew a number of people concerned about it, but I didn't know the ins and outs of it. So, thank you for doing that presentation that day. How did you get into your passion, your interest, about sand mining? I got into it. I remember it was a cold December day and some people stuck a flyer in my door. The sand mine was going in, it was scheduled to be permitted between their homes. Two families decided to make a flyer and bring it around and say to everybody you need to go to town meetings and put the dates on there. January 3rd at the Tanner Town Hall and you need to be concerned. I remember the day, the January 3rd day, it was miserable and I was delivering information and materials to some people in Mondovi because of my feed consulting business. I ended up racing from Mondovi to Tanner Town Hall near Colfax. My wife and I own land both in Tanger and Red Cedar and we live in Menominee. So, we have three huge political groups that we need to keep tabs on. So, what was it that motivated you to go to? Why was this of concern to you? Well, the people that left the flyer are good, solid citizens that you wouldn't expect to be activist, to be out handing off flyers. I thought, "My goodness, if these people are doing this, something's up that I need to pay attention to." So, the issue is sand mining. It's digging in hills, taking out sand and that sand goes for fracking. And fracking is its own issue. The sand mines are simply supplies that go to support fracking. So, we'll talk about that later. What's bad about mining? Isn't that supposed to just produce jobs for us? You know, where are you going to mine? Why? What resources are you going to destroy in the process? What are your choices? What are the alternatives? The world's best fraction, some people say, as in Western Wisconsin. But others say it's Brady Texas. Others say it's Volca Texas. Others say it's Ontario, Indiana. Others say it's Calico, Arkansas. Some say it's in Montana, Nevada, and Colorado. To be honest with you, I think the best sand is where you can get at the cheapest. That's from a corporation standpoint, wherever you can get at the cheapest with at least regulations. But there is the issue of jobs. Certainly, in Wisconsin, our unemployment rate is too high. Other places where it's higher. The reporting just recently was that Wisconsin has been leading the nation in job loss. So, I'm sure a lot of people are very sensitized to the idea of jobs. Don't we want mines in so that we can employ more people? Does that help our employment situation? It's a balancing act. Yeah, we want jobs. And I'm sure all 14 people that work at our local fraction mine are very happy to have jobs. That's true. But what do you give up to get those jobs? One real simple example is bloomer, where to get 15 jobs or 20 jobs in bloomer, they would have had to give up 65 jobs in the plastics industry. And the local businessmen said this isn't so keen. The mayor was all for it, and some other people are all for it. But that one is real simple arithmetic. Get 15, lose 60. Is that a good deal? That kind of has to be looked at in every neighborhood. It's hard to argue against creating these jobs if you can find remote isolated areas to do it, especially where jobs are needed intensely. If we were to lose 3M in Menominee with the 1100 jobs because we have 15 at Fairmont Minerals, can you pencil that one out? Is that the kind of math that usually applies? I mean, I'm not sure how big of plots that they take for these sand mines. So if they take 5, 10, 50, 100 acres, is there something better that could be done with that that would give equivalent or a superior number of jobs? You kind of hit the nail on the head or focused on what might be the right issue because here in Menominee, currently 480 acres are scheduled for mining. Of the 480 acres, 260 acres of tall hills will be removed. This is right next to the industrial park. Well, the positive side is we've got highways making noise. We've got a train making noise as close to the railroad. Great place to put it. The downside is there's 480 acres that aren't available for development for other industries. A portion of that is being farmed to a minor extent, but you're not going to see the development of a labor-intensive or highly productive farm when you know it's going to be removed within a few years. Wisconsin law says that land has to be reclaimed after mining. And reclamation is a man I listened to recently. It's a farce because you can reclaim land for farming. The problem with that is it will produce eventually up to 80% of what it would have produced pre-mining, but it requires a lot of fertilizer, chemicals, and irrigation that it may not have required before. So, yeah, it's reclaimed, but not really because it's only partially productive. Most, the vast majority of lands in the United States that are reclaimed are for grass. It will support a few cows, not per acre, but maybe a cow per 10 acres because you get some grass growing. Or it's okay for hiking paths and things like that. Or maybe you could plant wildflowers and make a park out of it. But there's a limit. Indiana that's been mined big time for coal. Almost everything has been reclaimed for grass. Well, there's not a ton of money in low productive grasses. And in the case of Indiana, forests are a big money maker in the mining areas. I just read an article yesterday, the Some American Forestry Society, saying that they've lost, I think, maybe it was $7 billion per year from the forestry and the forest related industries in that state. Because the reclamation, the land wasn't reclaimed back to forestry, it was reclaimed to growing grass. And so, over a long period of time, it's taking a big toll on, you know, the guy growing the trees, the guy that cuts the trees, the sawmill that saws the lumber, the factory that builds the furniture, the salesman that sells the furniture. Economic studies really need to be made before jumping both feet into this thing, because what's lost, let's say in the forestry industry, is a lot bigger than we think. Those are established jobs that have been going on for a hundred years, and they can go on for hundreds of years into the future. Another thing about forestry is, it takes about 120 years for a forest to be at full capacity if you did a fantastic job of reclamation. If you don't do a good job of reclamation, I read one study where it'll be 1200 before Mother Nature makes a complete reclamation of a piece of land. 120 years is a long time for most of us, and 1200 years is a little beyond our comprehension. So what I think you're saying is that oftentimes these jobs that are promised by sand mining are pennywise and pound foolish. Yeah, we'll get a couple jobs now, but look what we'll lose over the long term. Yes, it's very true. In Wood County, Wisconsin, there was an economic study, and it made the sand mine look like the one sand mine was going to create 700 jobs. Well, I showed that to an economist, and I said, "What do you think of this study?" And he says, "Well, the results are pretty, but I'd really like to see the data." And there was no data. And the study was paid for by the people that were concerned about the success of the sand industry. We sat in my house a few days ago, a group of us, and we thought, "Well, let's hire an economist." And yes, we can find economists to show that the sand industry is going to cost us billions of dollars. Will anybody believe him? He's probably accurate, but is he on the same plane as the economist hired by the sand company? It kind of pulls me apart. I'd like to have some unbiased information, and there's not much of it out there. There's no economic studies really being done as the sand industry moves into Western Wisconsin. I'm going to ask you a loaded question here. Are you an unbiased source of information? Of course, even a person who is biased would say they're unbiased, but can you give me an idea why we should trust what you have to say? That's tough. I grew up very poor and a very small farm. My father was an environmentalist in the '40s and '50s. A third-grade education, but he placed great value on how the land sustains us. And what you learn from your dad is a big deal. It's emotional, and I wish I was a stern attorney that can speak straight and not let emotions enter this. I certainly, in some of the meetings I've gone to, it's very difficult to contain emotions when you talk about destroying what we've been given. Like I said, my dad with his third-grade education was an environmentalist. He believed in saving the environment when he saw soil erosion, he was just flabbergasted. And he did start restoring an 80 acres of totally destroyed property in the '40s, and now it's a beautiful forest, and I can go look at it from time to time. I hear that one of the motivations for you is real concern for the land, concern for creation. That's how I'd say it. Is this a moral issue for you? Is it a technical issue? Is it a numbers issue? Where do you cite the heart of the issue from your point of view? It's all, but on the other hand, one of my neighbors who is a Vietnam war vet who was sacrificed much for our country has led me to believe that it's a moral issue. People didn't fight to protect our country and then to destroy it from within. That's not where we ought to be going. Maybe if we talk about some of the facets of what effect sand mining has, it'll be clear why it is a moral issue. I suggested in a meeting that you held recently that maybe we need a good phrase to describe this sand mining. We need something that will be as evocative as death panels. And I suggested poise hand mining because a lot of poisons are involved in doing this mining. You want to talk about the ins and outs of what actually goes into removing the sand mines. A lot of us think of a quarry where everybody could have a quarry in their neighborhood and it's all fine and there's no problem. There's no such thing as typical, but if you were to define a typical frack sand mine, it would harvest 10 acres of tall hills, remove about 100 feet of silica sandstone, a layer about 100 feet thick. It would take the 10 acres, it would produce 600,000 tons of finished product per year, and it would just move on and on and on. We learned that people in the sand industry thought 140 sand mines would fit nicely into western Wisconsin. We learned that about six years ago. Well 140 sand mines and if they were all average would consume 1400 acres of our tallest hills, plus another 80 acres surrounding this site would be occupied by machinery and sand piles and all of that. But we'd lose 1400 acres of our tallest hills. We learned that a meeting, one farmer, one flatlander said, "Well, won't you be happy to get rid of those ugly bald hills?" And just recently a young man and it just shocked me, stated about the same thing. I'll sure be happy when those hills are gone. I think hills mean a lot. There's a lot of textbooks that talk about the merits of the hills, a lot of spiritual publications. There's references to the hills. You're on the board of the Save the Hills Alliance. What's that organization about? Is it specifically about frax and mining or does it cover other issues too? And again, is the moral compass at the center of it this regard for the creation around us? It's hard to define what the main motivation is for people to participate. Save the Hills Alliance evolved. First of all, Save Our Hills was a Dunn County group that formed and had about at least 50 to 80 meetings leading up to a board of adjustment in Dunn County that turned down a sand company that would begin removing a long range of hills which basically passed through Hoffman Hills, state recreational area. Obviously, it was never going to be mine, but anybody with a knowledge of the sand industry knows that yeah, it was going to be. In fact, Wisconsin laws as a group in case law indicates that Wisconsin is a state where miners have the right to keep mining without new permits, without rezoning, as long as they stay in the same asset that's called the law of diminishing asset. So if you start mining at one end of a 10 mile patch of hills, you can keep going till you get to the county line as long as you can keep buying the land or leasing the land. This thing is kind of a little bit like an infection. Once it starts in a row of hills, we don't have much legal standing to stop the miner from buying the next 40, the next 40, the next 40 till the whole asset has been harvested. From the point of view of people living out on the plains or other regions, they might say, so what's the big deal? Hills aren't that important. Are there other environmental considerations that maybe would convince them that this is something really to be thought about carefully? Hills have unique environmental features. Basically, these hills are 500 million years old. They were at the bottom of the sea. Layers of sand were deposited and they became a solid known as sandstone. And a sandstone can be cut apart and you can build brownstone buildings on Wall Street, which is exactly what happened. What the hill does is the water drops on the top of the hill on the plants. It's absorbed by the top soil, which people call black dirt. It soaks into the subsoil, which is the unconsolidated sand and other debris. And then once you get down anywhere from three feet to 30 feet, as you dig this little pit out in the hill, you get to the sandstone. That sandstone is a huge sponge, so the water has been filtered by the top soil, but it's stored in the sponge. Sand is a filter used all over America as filters. The hills hold this water, and then when you drive through sandy agricultural neighborhoods, the hillside fails. It's sandy soil, but you see lush crops. Why? Because the water soaks out of the hill all summer long and it irrigates these contour strips that you see throughout Wisconsin. So Mother Nature has a marvelous little irrigation system going on here. Mother Nature has a place to store large quantities of very, very pure water. Out of these hills bubble the springs that lead to the creeks that end up in the rivers, and that's the source of many of our streams throughout Wisconsin. Not all of them. We have unglatiated area, which is the sandstone hills, and we have the glaciated area, which is basically unconsolidated sand. The miners don't want unconsolidated sand, because, well, sand and gravel people do, the frack miners don't, because the yield is low. Up to 80% of a sandstone hill is the product the miner wants, whereas maybe it's only 10% in an outwash area along the river, but that might make a good construction grade sand. But backing up to what your question, the hill then is a water storage water filtering mechanism. The soil that's on the hills over the course of 100 to 1200 years can produce huge quantities of forest products. But it's also a unique biodiversity with thousands of animal and plant species on it. When it's reclaimed hills, even if you make Walt Disney style hills that look like hills, you'll never have the same biodiversity. You can't repeat that. So when they come in with the sand mines, they remove a hill, essentially flatten it out. Is it just a question of coming in with some machinery, scraping out some sand and leaving? It doesn't otherwise affect the ecology of the area? First of all, the topsoil of the black dirt, by Wisconsin law, it has to be pushed on a separate pile, but if you've ever tried to separate the topsoil from the subsoil, it's not a perfect science. The topsoil is a living organism. The vast majority of the topsoil is a living organism. It's all kinds of funguses and bacteria, plants and animals. Just unbelievable. It's a whole course different subject, but it's a biological biodiversity. You push it in a pile and you kill it. It's dead. Now you can bring it back out ten years later, and it looks like black dirt, but it's dead. And it's going to take a long period of time. I don't foresee that it ever returns to what it was before. And as far as putting back the subsoil in the topsoil, the subject of soil physics or pedology, we have very few experts on that subject left in the United States, and most people really don't care. Because you can call a chemical company, and you can apply soil amendments, and you can buy modified seeds, and you can add water, and whoopee, you grow crops. But it's not what you had before. It's never going to occur. As far as using chemicals, chemicals, of course, are used after reclamation if you want to return land to become crop land, but during the process, it takes huge quantities of water to wash the crushed sandstone to get rid of the silt, get rid of any organic matter, and the separating process of separating out the large round silica particles that are needed for fracking. In Menominee, we do have a plan to join Menominee that did get permitted well before people figured out what was going on. It's next to our industrial park. In some respects, it's a good location because it's already in a noisy place, a place that is going to be developed sooner or later. That's the good side. The downside is the land isn't on the market, and it's not involved in commerce and trade and development, and so not a whole lot of money's coming out of it. This company was permitted to ask for 600 gallons a minute, which isn't a huge, you know, that's a high capacity well, but it's not a huge high capacity well. In the end, they were allowed to drill two smaller wells yielding and given a permit to harvest 450 gallons of water per minute. Of that, they're only using 275 now. What happened was when they started their plant, it wasn't going so good. Their end product wasn't clean enough. And so the company, without any permits, proceeded to put in a chemical treating facility so that they could recycle more water using flocculants to separate and clarify the water so they could recycle the water more frequently quicker. The reason the 450 gallons a minute wasn't enough is because you need water for processing and you need water for keeping the piles wet so the sand piles don't continually blow away and blow to the neighbors. But now, with water recycling, they're only using, I think, 275 gallons a minute on average. That's all year long, so that's a lot of water. Multiply that times the number of minutes in the year, and you get big numbers. Flocculants are a scary subject. They use them at factories to separate the solids from your water before they bottle it and sell it to the consumer. So, flocculants can be used safely because the flocculants stick to the solids, not to the liquid. Of course, the consumer doesn't buy the solids, at least I don't when I buy a bottle of spring water. A byproduct of flocculants is monochrylamide. Monochrylamide is a neurotoxin. Well, in theory, it sticks to the solids. So, the industrial waste from this washing process is buried, pushed in a hole, a water-filled hole, and covered up, and it's legal in Wisconsin. Nobody really knows whether those, some of those monochrylamide will survive for a long period of time and get into the water system. We're not going to know for a few decades, but it's our water supply. Dunn County has only one aquifer, one big tank of water, many thousands of acres, 400 feet thick. How long does it take to pollute it? We don't know. I truly wish some studies were made, and a little more caution was being taken with the acrylamides. And then, if in your neighborhood they build a resin plant, polyurethane. Products of that nature are used to coat the sand particles. Anybody that's put varnish on realize that most of it evaporates into the air. Those are called volatile organic compounds. The plant that was talking about coming to Menominee next to our sand mine was talking about using 23 tons a week of polyurethane. How many tons of that were going to be in the air? What effect would that have? We have a 3M plant in Menominee with roughly 1,000 to 1,200 workers, and they use those types of products. They've been a good neighbor, but even a big established company with lots of employees has a hard time controlling the total amount of emissions of volatile organic compounds. What are the health effects? Well, I don't know the details at this moment, but it doesn't take long to find out in this modern age where you can access a library from your computer. So, two big chemicals are the resin coating plants. I certainly wouldn't live next to one. I understand there's two of them there, Maryland, Wisconsin. There's one at Arcadia, or I'm sorry, Blair, I believe. There's going to be one in the bloomer township. I wouldn't want to live next to one. I don't want to find out. So, you've got two groups of chemicals that are commonly used. There may be others. One thing about the chemicals is the companies often use proprietary chemicals. For example, instead of using polyacrylamide or monocrylamide, they use polydachmic. Well, polydachmic is a proprietary chemical, so you don't get to know what it is. I don't like using chemicals. My neighborhood scientists can't find out what the ingredients are and what impact. Getting back to polyacrylamide, when it's used in the laboratory, if you buy 10 ounces, you have to account for 10 ounces. It's a highly toxic substance, but when a mining company buys a truckload every week, all of a sudden it's not so dangerous. That causes a great deal of consternation. Yes, these companies are trying to be responsible. They're trying to be good neighbors. I feel bad being so suspicious of them, but it's a pretty new industry. Many of the companies that get into frack mining are incorporated three to six months before the mine is established. In the good old days, when you started a business, your name was on the front door. Now it's ABC LLC. Somehow, that doesn't inspire great confidence in my mind. You're listening to Spirit in Action. I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeet, for this Northern Spirit Radio production. Our website is northernspiritradio.org. Come to the site and you can find our production of the last seven years. You can find links to our guests. You'll find links there, for instance, to the Save the Hills Alliance that Jerry Lauste is a part of. He's on the board of it. You also find a place where you can make donations. You find a place where you can leave comments. And we love to hear from you. We need your direction to do our job well. So please let us know what serves your needs and what doesn't. We're talking today with Jerry Lauste. He is a board member of Save the Hills Alliance. He's a retired ag teacher. He did that for some 18 years. And since 2006, he's been studying the sand industry because he lives in a town, Menominee, Wisconsin, where there is a sand mine going on. This is frack sand. This is the sand that's used to do fracking. I'm told that a lot of people across the United States know about Lauste green meadows because they've been breeding Angus cattle for some number of decades. And so he's had his fingers in a lot of pies because he was an ag teacher. He did study the quality of the soil. He had to teach science courses related to this. So even though he's a lay person, he's not a PhD, he's been face-to-face with the environment in Wisconsin. So again, Jerry, you were just talking about some of the environmental side effects, I guess, involved in the process of sand mining. The water that's used, which, you know, of course draws down from our aquifer, the chemicals that they use to facilitate the process. You haven't mentioned anything about the silica that it kicks into the air. You mentioned, Jerry, that there's a monitor right here in Menominee that keeps track of particulates. Large and small. And I guess that some of the small ones are the ones we have to be concerned about. Could you fill me in about what the science of that is? If someone goes out in Google's Menominee monitor, they're going to see the results online, constantly, that show us how many particulates are in the air. And I guess this is mostly because of the sand mine that's right nearby? Yes. When the first sand mine came to Menominee, we were promised lots of things, and one of them was an official air monitor. Well, it never happened. The company struck a deal with the DNR, and there is no air monitor. DNR, for the most part, doesn't monitor the air. In fact, I think there's three official air monitors in Wisconsin, one in Osceola, one in Appleton, and one in Milwaukee. And then everything else is simply calculated on a computer. Well, that doesn't exactly pinpoint the pollution sources throughout Wisconsin. DNR has some systems for monitoring air, but mostly they're monitoring visible. And in fact, I encourage people, if you see big visible clouds of dust going into the air, please, please, please report it to the DNR. People that work at the DNR are very well intended, but there's few of them, and they don't have a lot of laws that help them enforce big pollution spells of dirt into the air. But to be more specific about your question is that no matter where you live, there's particulates in the air. But if you look at Minneapolis, St. Paul, and you go east to Menominee and Eau Claire, we're in a particularly dirty part of the state. And then on the east side of the state, I understand it's pretty dirty, and of course, Milwaukee area, the air quality is pretty bad. How much is too much? That's kind of a good question. I think the EPA says of the small particulates, three micrograms per meter squared is the maximum tolerable amount, which pencils backwards to about 300,000 particles per cubic foot of small particulates. Now small particulates, you can't see, in bigger particulates, you can see. The big ones, your nose and your mouth, the moisture, and your body filters them out and you expel them into a handkerchief. Organic compounds, for the most part, are biodegradable, if you do breathe them in. But silica is a mineral, and the fine particulates are a dagger shape, they're very sharp. And they're so small that your body doesn't filter them out, and they do go into your lungs, and they do affect your life in the form of damaging your lungs. And they actually penetrate into your bloodstream, and small particulates are proven to have a negative impact on the autoimmune diseases. So there's a biochemical, physical biochemical relationship there. And for one person who's, you know, myself, I've had autoimmune problems my whole life, that attracted my attention. And of course, for the advent of internet, a guy can do a lot more studying than we could a few years ago. So the Menominee Monitor shows small particles and large particles. The large ones are the ones you see, the small ones are the ones you don't see, the small ones are the bad guys. In this part of the state, the level of small particulates in the air, on average, is very close to the EPA's maximum, to the point where the EPA would come and say, "Hey, your community needs to take some measures to reduce small particulates in the air." I have so many people tell me, "Oh, I love living in the Midwest. We have such pristine air." Well, sorry to burst your bubble, but you go from the Twin Cities east a few miles and you go to these industrial hubs, it's not that good. You know, the companies make efforts to suppress dust and to control silica. But silica, being totally non-biodegradable, is cumulative. The amount you breathe in accumulates. A lot of laws protect people now that work in industries where they're exposed to small particulates in silica in particular. But there aren't any laws to protect you if you live outside of a silica plant. You get what you get. And of course, the wind blows different directions on different days and I often compare it to a snowstorm. You know, one neighborhood's got two inches of snow and on the same day the next neighborhood's got three feet piled up. You really don't know where particulates deposit themselves. From that perspective, I think some neighborhoods are being dumped on and others are getting by just fine. But when we keep pushing what's considered the maximum safe level, we're not doing our best to protect the welfare of our residents and our kids, our future generations. And for the people that live right next to one of these silica mines, these frack mines, I think they're just being guinea pigs. Thirty years from now, we'll know how bad the situation is. Well, maybe it's all just fine that I don't think so. Actually, I've got two questions for you now, Jerry. So, Jerry Laustad was ag teacher. You did that for 18 years. Obviously, when people are out there digging up the lands for agriculture, they're kicking particulates into the air. So, one question I have is, how does that compare to what a sandmine kicks up? Is it better worse? Is it greater in quantity, lesser? That kind of question. The second question is, whose duty is it to enforce this? Is this something that the locality gets to enforce? These pollution concerns, air pollution. Is it the state? Is it the federal government, the EPA or someone? Who's in charge of controlling this air pollution? First of all, talking about the farmers, farmers are trying very hard to control dust. They can't during certain seasons of the year. Much of the dust that a farmer puts into the air is organic, it's biodegradable. Some of the dust is silica dust, but research trials with rats and guinea pigs and other lab animals shows that aged dust, aged sand. In other words, beach sand, unconsolidated sand where gravel pits are located. Much of that dust and the much of the farm dust and road dust, if you live on a dirt road, is about six times less damaging than freshly fractured sandstone. Now, the industry plays on words. Freshly fractured sandstone releases dust into the air that is the most toxic. Not only do you have the small particulates, and they're very, very sharp, but you also release free radicals, which is charges. There are some implications, both pro and con that this is a big deal with our health, free radicals. I'm not an expert on that, and there's been conflicting information, but huge quantities are released into the air. So farm dust and freshly fractured sandstone are not the same thing. There's not much similarity chemically or physically. If we talk about amount of dust in the air, farmers put a ton of dust into the air, but they do it seasonally. They do it very short windows of time. If you live next door to a quarry, that dust is at least nine months a year. Sometimes they slow down when things are really frozen. But that's continuous. So a small amount, 300 days a year, adds up, whereas a farmer putting out a big amount for a few days. And then you got the six to one safety hazard based on laboratory experiments. The farmer is a pretty small player in air pollution. Plus, another thought is farming is pretty essential, and it's kind of debatable whether frac mining is essential. That's very subject to debate. And then where you get this sand in roughly 2005-2006, a U.S. geological survey published articles saying that there were 125 industrial-sized frac, say in mines or industrial-sized silica mines in the United States. And it was getting very difficult to cite new mines because we were just simply running out of unpopulated remote areas to put them. And then in 2007, we built one in Menominee next to a hospital for seniors in a public school. So there's been an abrupt shift in how precautionary we should be about where to put frac sand mines. Pollution laws, enforcement of pollution laws is a real issue. Local health departments can do something, not a whole lot spent on. In Wisconsin, silica isn't a hazardous substance. Now that's a joke. It's a carcinogen, it's a hazardous substance, pretty much everywhere in the United States, but it doesn't hurt anybody in Wisconsin. It's not hazardous in Wisconsin. So that's a weird piece of politics. And you wonder who came up with that idea. So the state, because it's not hazardous, and because the state has sat no limit, basically nothing has been done about controlling fugitive dust in Wisconsin. In our current political climate, nothing is going to be done. And that, you know, you could go into a whole new topic about how much money should be allowed to be spent on lobbying. Well, who's regulating silica sand dust in the air in small particulars? Well, the EPA does to a degree. In fact, within the last few months, the EPA sent a letter to the city of, I think, Minneapolis, saying, "Hey, your average is beyond safe levels," is determined by the federal government. And you guys need to clean things up in the Twin Cities a little bit, or we're going to come in and force you to write a plan to clean things up. So EPA is doing a pretty good job. I know a lot of people have been critical of EPA, but boy, to ignore human health is not smart. A couple of examples of does it make a difference? There's long-term differences and short-term differences. Silicosis is something that might take you 10 or 20 or 30 years to contract it, but it's got awful. Death from silicosis is really bad. It's long, it's slow, and it's just you can't get oxygen. Auto-immune diseases, you contract them, you don't know where you contracted them, or why you contracted them, or was it your genes, or was it what you were exposed to? And you suffer from autoimmune diseases the rest of your life. Examples are arthritis. We all hope that that doesn't hit us till we're old, but it attacks young people, too, and we don't really know what the triggers are. But we do know silica has been implicated. Fine particulates have been implicated in triggering autoimmune diseases. And to come back to Wisconsin, you talked about Minneapolis, which, of course, is our next-door neighbor here. Are you saying, Jerry, that EPA does or doesn't have some role in protecting people in Menominee, Wisconsin, from particulates and particulate silica particles in the air? Do they have a role in protecting us, given that Wisconsin, as a state, does not say that it's dangerous to us? Well, I think the federal does the feds have some power over the state. If the numbers get too bad, the EPA will say you need a program in place. But at that point, it really hasn't been arrived at. And as far as I know, there's only three monitors in Wisconsin, one in Osceola, one near Appleton, and one in southeastern Wisconsin, and the rest is computer models. So is the EPA going to jump in? I don't think they're going to know how bad our problem is. Another thing that comes up is we got one sand mine in Menominee, in Dun County, and one Frank mine in Menominee, or near Menominee. But there's a town of Auburn near New Auburn, which is in Chippewa County, and I believe there's a dozen mines already operating, and there's going to be more. There's another dozen probably on the way. So you've got neighborhoods like New Auburn, Wisconsin, where you've got maybe a couple dozen plants within three, four miles. What's the cumulative effect of each plant having dust spilling over the top of its berms, being improperly watered, improperly controlled? Who wants to live there? When we look at silica mines and the number begins to grow, if you're a size-minded person, if you read, if you research, and we often when we're young and we're moving, we don't do much research before we move into a neighborhood. But sadly, you wouldn't want to move your children, raise your kids within the view of a sand mine, and you certainly wouldn't if there was 10 or 20 of them. Now, in that region to the northeast of Menominee, to the northwest of Chippewa Falls, you've got beautiful, beautiful rolling hills just peppered with retirement homes. People buy 5 acres, 10 acres, 40 acres, they do a little bit of farming, they got a horse. This was their dream. They brought their hundreds of thousands of dollars to Wisconsin, and they want to finish out their lives. Well, those houses gradually will have little or no value. There won't. There'll be very little development. I think there'll be a huge negative side to the economic equation in those neighborhoods that are heavily implicated into sand mining, involved in sand mining. I guess I want to push you just a little bit here, Jerry, just to make sure. There was a time in the past where mining was great, and whether it was gold mining or silver mining or copper or whatever it was. I don't think there was hesitation. You go in, you dig up your mind, and a whole town fills in around it. So towns would come in. We don't seem to have that approach anymore. We're pretty cautious about our minds. Is there a qualitative difference between the quality of the environment around a sand mine versus a gold mine? Is there a reason to be more concerned about one than the other? For a long time we thought that precious metals, gold, silver, copper, things like that, the metal mines were dangerous, and non-metallic mines were not dangerous. Because acids are produced. There's a lot of pollutants that congregate around a metallic mine. And metallic mines pose a lot of threats that are different, and maybe more serious than sand mines. Sand mines, on the other hand, we just don't know. You take away 80% of a material, well then everything that's left is multiplied times 5. So we get new concentrations that we're not familiar with of arsenic, lead, and other things, in that soil, in that reclaimed site. There's a lot of we just don't know. We use all of that water, and we put these piles with accumulations of metals and chemicals in them. And how long does it take to soak in the ground? How long do they form new compounds, or do they biodegrade? There's just so much we don't know. But as far as silicosis, we know. One example is when they had the Olympics, I think it was in Atlanta, they diverted the trucking around Atlanta. So there were no trucks hauling sand or burning a lot of diesel fuel. And hospital visits declined hugely in Atlanta when the traffic was basically stopped, for what, a week or two? C.L.P.D., heart, autoimmune. Those visits just disappeared for a couple of weeks. So one case does not a study make, but I believe the same thing happened in China. And China's not the Beijing's not the cleanest place in the world. But they had a complete change in hospital visits and office call visits during the Olympics. So there's a lot of conclusions that can be drawn. Big cities have to monitor, if you're over so many, like over a million people, your city has to monitor particulates. And the cities with the highest particulates have the most health problems, the most medical costs. The cities with the lowest particulates have the lowest health problems and the lowest medical costs. And I think there's like 10 big cities that have been compared. It's pretty obvious, but I don't know the answer. I'm not an epidemiologist. Again, we're speaking with Jerry Lauste. He's not an epidemiologist, but he is a retired ag teacher. He did that for 18 years, including teaching science, chemistry, things like that, as well as all of the other ag sciences. Since 2006, he's been studying the sand industry, particularly fracksand mines that have sprung up in this region of Wisconsin. And I'm sure many of you people who are listening across the United States are experiencing this in your neighborhood. These mines coming in, is there something to be concerned about? This question Jerry asks and has gathered a lot of information on... You can find a whole lot of information if you just Google fracksand mining locally here. You might want to check in on a couple different sites and places you might want to check, include fracksandfrisbee.com. Fracksandfrisbee is one of them. If you Google Menominee Monitor, you can see what the particulates are like right here in Menominee, Wisconsin. And maybe that's a monitor that you need in your town. Dun County sand, you'll find, if you Google that, you'll find good connections. Look at the priceofsand.com. The movie is coming out very shortly. On Facebook, you'll find Save the Nap Hills. You can find all kinds of resources about fracksand mining and what its effects are. And there's one thing, Jerry, that I haven't asked you, that I think we need to explore a little bit. We've been focusing on the sand mining, but where this product then goes is for fracking. And that has its own concerns about it. For me, that seems a moral concern. A lot of people don't seem to connect the dots that if I didn't do this, then they wouldn't be doing that now. Admittedly, there's other sources of sand than western Wisconsin where I happen to live. So, I wouldn't want to pose this just as a not-in-my-back yard issue. But I think I always said I'm complicit in whatever I do if I enable it. What are we enabling if we're enabling a fracking operation? I'm sure a lot of your listeners have seen the movie, Josh Fox's movie called Gasland. I was really impressed watching a young man make a movie. Quality is a little questionable at places, but the guy got the job done and it was really cool. I was sharing with Josh Fox when I saw that movie. We should watch it. He traveled around the United States and discovered that after the fracked wells came to people's neighborhoods, the water quality got so bad it was not drinkable. There's a scene in the movie where people are showing lighting their tap water on fire in their homes. And, of course, people talk about the health issues that popped up here and everywhere throughout the United States. So, it's a big argument, obviously. The fracking companies say, well, never once has the oil industry says. Never once has the fracking caused water pollution. Well, they got a monitor on point A and a mile away. They're busy fracking and it didn't happen. But then, over the course of the coming weeks, people's water turns color and it's non-consumable and cows die and things like that. And I think it'll come out that a lot of problems have resulted from fracking. And when these sandmines are produced to fuel that fracking industry, I think we're complicit in the effects on all the local people who experience what fracking brings to the neighborhood. See, one last thing. Before we say goodbye, Jerry, you talked a little bit about your history growing up, certainly on the lower end of the economic totem pole. Farming, your father being environmentalists back in the '40s before it was a fashionable thing to do. Can you say anything more about your religious or spiritual perspective? This is, after all, spirit in action. And I'm just wondering if there's other components of that that are relevant to your outlook. Well, I grew up, basically, Norwegian Lutheran, going to a German Lutheran church, you know, Sunday school, the whole thing, and it was great. And then, as a young man, meeting my wife, decided to join the Catholic Church because the Catholic Church in our community was more vibrant. And just totally blessed that our church has had great priests and great leaders and huge involvement. And just, we're lucky that everybody can say that about their Catholic community. Also, a couple of my idols were Catholics. A couple of ladies, a lady friend of mine, is a nun, and I just totally admire what she's done in her life. Religion's good. It should be. Religious bureaucracies make big mistakes, and we all need to make decisions about how religion fits into our life. I remember the first letter to the editor that I did several years ago about frack mining. I talked about taking care of the land, and I was accused of being a religious fanatic. [laughs] Stewardship, I believe, was the word I used. And boy, did I get criticized for using that ugly word stewardship. And it just kind of blew me over. So, religion has been fantastic asset to the American society. Hopefully, it continues to be an asset in the future. Is your concern about stewardship? Is that rooted in your religious spiritual tradition? Is it something that would be true independently, even if you weren't part of a church? I would say that word tripped my trigger as a great schooler going to Sunday school. Stewardship comes in different forms. Maybe it's tithing, maybe it's something else. But stewardship of the land, that's where my trigger was tripped, and it's had an impact on my life. And your life, Jerry, has had an impact on people here in Menominee in Western Wisconsin. I was so impressed at fighting Bobfest as you spoke. Obviously, it was such a heart for all of the people in this region, and even beyond just Western Wisconsin. I do hope that these words and the information, the kind of research you've done, just as a real person, not as a PhD, not as a mouthpiece for any organization, but as a concerned individual, I hope that your information that you've shared has made this world a better place. And I thank you for joining me for Spirit and Action. Thank you very much. We need to work together. The word needs to get out that there's all kinds of issues that people need to approach. It's not a single issue world, but taking care of environment is one very large issue. As we leave this Spirit and Action visit with Frank Sandmining activist Jerry Lauste, maybe it's appropriate to go out with a song by Bryce Black on the subject. I'll say goodbye to next week as we listen to Bryce Black and Jada performing The Sand Man. When the Sand Man comes, he sprinkles sand in our eyes, drinks me, dreams filled with pretty lies. Well, how dines and nickels might trickle down and we can go to hold in our town. Now 50 trucks a day are rolling down the road, a piece of our heart shut down in every load. And if we love this land, all we ought to make a stand before it's all all the way by the Sand Man. In every town, all around our deck of the woods, there's a sand rush we'd slow way down if we could. But our sands in demand, the Sand Man's a ride, the pricey commands will rule all the life. A hundred trucks a day are rolling down the road, a piece of our heart shut down. It in every load, if we love this land, all we better make a stand before it's all all the way by the Sand Man. All the way, all the way, all the way. Yeah, they're all in it all the way. So they can fracture the ground in some other town, a thousand miles away. All the way, all the way, all the way. Yeah, they're all in it all the way. So they can fracture the ground in some other town, a thousand miles away. We sure don't care for the noise and the dust, the thing that scares us is who can you trust to tell the truth? What's going down our wealth, what's going in the wind, what's growing in ourself? A hundred trucks a day are rolling down the road, a piece of our heart shut down in every load. And if we love this land, all we got to make a stand before it's all all the way. All the way, all the way by the Sand Man. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. And our lives will feel the echo of our healing.