from Root Force
Power lines downed by Hurricane Sandy (Photo: Arlington County/cc/flickr)
The combination of fracking and global warming-driven drought is placing an increasing strain on U.S. energy infrastructure, which depends on water for cooling power plants, the Department of Energy has warned. And that’s not all.
Paddlers charge the iconic Silver River, protesting Adena Springs Ranch. Photo: Matt Keene
By Matt Keene / Earth First! Newswire
Grassfed beef ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Take Adena Springs Ranch, a proposed cattle ranch being developed by billionaire Frank Stronach in Florida. The beef project is expected to span 10,000 acres and, according to their website, hold up to 15,000 cattle. Adena Springs Ranch plans to raise the cattle on a grassfed diet, calling their industrial farming practices “healthier” and “better for the environment.”
This past Saturday, individuals concerned with the proposed ranch gathered alongside the iconic Silver River, a river formed from the discharge of Silver Springs, one of the largest natural artesian wells in the world. Continue reading
by Katherine Cirullo / EcoWatch
It’s officially wildfire season in Colorado; last Tuesday, a fire ignited the Black Forest area of Colorado Springs. It burned 22 square miles, destroyed 422 homes and is still raging a week later. In just half the time, it has surpassed last year’s Waldo Canyon wildfire as the worst in Colorado history. While wildfires in Colorado and throughout the west are nothing new, the magnitude of this year’s Black Forest fire serves as a haunting reminder of the worsening crisis climate change poses. Throughout all this, we can’t help but draw attention to the oil and gas industry’s use of fracking and its impact on climate change, drought and natural disaster. Residents are watching their backyards burn while the oil and gas industry is using up Colorado’s most precious resource—water.
Fire rages in Black Forest, CO. Photo credit: Colorado Black Forest Fire Facebook page
from EcoWatch
“Water in the Anthropocene” is a three minute film charting the global impact of humans on the water cycle. Evidence is growing that our global footprint is now so significant we have driven Earth into a new geological epoch—the Anthropocene.
Human activities such as damming and agriculture are changing the global water cycle in significant ways.
As datasets build upon one another, the film charts Earth’s changing global water cycle, why it is changing and what this means for the future. The vertical spikes that appear in the film represent the 48,000 large dams that have been built.
by Kate Galbraith / The Texas Tribune
photo by Jennifer Whitney
Barnhart, a small community in West Texas, has run out of water.
John Nanny, an Irion County commissioner and an official with Barnhart’s water supply corporation, said on Thursday that the situation was serious. When reached by telephone, he was working on pumping operations and hoped to have a backup well in service Friday morning. A load of bottled water was on its way to the community center, he said.
The town has one main well that serves 112 customers, according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. But the well stopped pumping quickly enough Tuesday evening, and while there is still some water in it, Nanny said, “We don’t want to get down to the mud.”
Nanny said he had checked for a leak but had not found one. The Barnhart area has been hard-hit by drought, he said, just as surging oil and gas drilling activities have increased local water demands. Barnhart was recently featured in The Wall Street Journal owing to the increase in oil boom-related railroad traffic through the town. (Incidentally, Barnhart’s backup water well was drilled by the railroad in the early 1900s, Nanny said.)
by Friends of the Au Gres-Rifle Watershed / EcoWatch
Westerman gas/oil well, Kalkaska County, MI. Photo courtesy of Respect My Planet.
Concerns about the impact to local groundwater by massive water use—on a scale never before seen in Michigan fracking operations—are coming to a head, as the plan for Encana Oil & Gas (USA) Inc. to use 8.4 million gallons of water to fracture a single well has been stymied by a lack of water on site.
Instead, the company is trucking water—nearly 1 million gallons of it in just one week—from the City of Kalkaska’s water system to meet its needs. This one fracking operation today is using more water than Kalkaska is using for all its needs over the same time period.
by Dan Bacher, Cross Posted from Indybay
Missed in the mainstream media coverage of the release of the revised Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) documents on March 14 was the alarming role the peripheral tunnels could play in increased fracking in California.
Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is the controversial, environmentally destructive process of injecting millions of gallons of water, sand and toxic chemicals underground at high pressure in order to release and extract oil or gas, according to Food and Water Watch.
The Yaqui River
Nearly 20 years of drought and little help from the government has forced the Yaquis, a tribe in Mexico, to irrigate their lands with the only water source available – raw sewage.
Over the past decade more than 4,000 hectares of once fertile land has dried up – and now things could go from bad to worse.
The state government is building an aqueduct that will divert nearly 75 million cubic metres of water from the Yaqui river to a nearby town.
The government says the project is crucial, but Yaqui leaders question the decision to prioritise alleviating drought in cities over farming communities.
Al Jazeera’s Rachel Levin reports from Sonora.
Flagstaff, AZ community members “quarantine” Coconino National Forest Service lobby
National Forest Service Announces New Sacred Sites Policy at the Same Time That Flagstaff Peaks Activists Are Targeted with Federal Charges and Arrest Warrants
FLAGSTAFF, AZ — On the same day that secretary Tom Vilsack of the US Department of Agriculture issued a final report on Sacred Sites and an inter-agency memorandum to work towards Sacred Sites protection, the Coconino Forest Service filed federal charges against four Sacred Sites advocates who were part of a protest at the Forest Service offices three months earlier.
Continue reading
Nathan VanderKlippe and Dawn Walton / The Globe and Mail
Gord Johnston surveys the oil-soaked banks of the Red Deer River in Alberta following an oil leak, June 8, 2012. (Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail)
Gord Johnston grew up on the banks of the Red Deer River, at a place his family first settled in 1939. On Thursday evening, just before 7, he returned home to the nauseating smell of crude oil in the air.
Little more than an hour later he was in a helicopter, flying down one of Alberta’s principal waterways, where he saw a wide plume of oil flowing along the banks of a river that had already flooded its banks, running heavy with rainfed spring melt.
The oil, some 1,000 to 3,000 barrels of which spilled from a pipeline owned by Plains Midstream Canada, stretched nearly 10 kilometres up-river from Mr. Johnston’s 57 acres on the Red Deer River. As they flew in the helicopter, the source of the leak was obvious: “You could see it boiling up where the line crossing was,” Mr. Johnston said.
EF! DAM
Ecodefense
Earth First! Newswire 