Diane Wilson's blog

EPA’s Scott Pruitt: The Great Disruptor

Diane Wilson — Sat, 04 Mar 2017 01:14:53 +0000

On January 17, 2017, a congressional hearing to confirm Scott Pruitt, Donald Trump’s chosen appointee to head the Environmental Protection Agency, was held in Washington, D.C.

Now, anybody who knows anything about fracking or oil well drilling knows that wherever there’s a roomful of well-dressed executives, oil probably ain’t far behind. So, I figured there was going to be a lot of oil in that room just listening to themselves talking to each other. I also thought they needed a little education from someone who also knows a lot about oil but from a somewhat different perspective. Namely, me.

Wearing a BP (British Petroleum) jumpsuit and a white hard hat, with a black rubber hose slung over my shoulder, I entered the confirmation hearing. I used yellow crime tape to mark off my dirty oil claim, and then I attempted to set up a ‘fracking operation’ within the hearing.

While I succeeded in disrupting the congressional hearing of Scott Pruitt to become the head of the EPA , I didn’t get very far. I was arrested and taken to jail while Pruitt went on to be confirmed to lead the very agency he has spent years trying to dismantle.

A few days after Pruitt’s February 17 confirmation, over 6,000 pages of his emails were made public. They proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the new head of the EPA had been working hand-in-glove with big oil and gas producers, electric utilities and political groups with links to the billionaire Koch brothers to gut environmental regulations.

For me, this affront is personal. Here’s why.

I am a fourth generation shrimper, born and bred in a small Texas fishing village. For the last twenty-five years, I have been tracking the comings and goings of the oil and petrochemical industries impacting my small Calhoun County.

In 1989, Calhoun County was Number One in the country, as documented by the EPA Toxic Release Inventory, for industry generated toxic waste. My county had half the toxic waste in Texas - more specifically, in a landfill near Lavaca Bay. A couple years later, Matagorda Bay (adjoining Lavaca Bay) was considered the largest underwater mercury Superfund site in the United States. Alcoa’s personal internal documents reported approximately 1,200,000 pounds of mercury was ‘lost’ to the environment.

In 2001, Texas A&M studies documented DNA damage in the local oysters and the cattle downwind of our petrochemical industry. In the interim years, an entire community was bought out by a petrochemical giant, and my own fishing community that once supported five fish houses and 120 shrimp boats was reduced to two shrimp boats and zero fish houses.

The devastation wasn’t limited to just Calhoun County. Similar sacrificial communities on the Gulf Coast have been inundated by the chemical and oil industries.

Try to wrap your mind around these sobering facts: Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) reported 4,800 Americans are killed every year by industrial accidents, and another 55,000 die from occupational diseases. In addition, the US has about 90 facilities—including chemical factories, refineries and water-treatment plants—that, in a worst-case scenario, would pose risks to more than one million people. About 400 other facilities could pose risks to more than 100,000 people.

Now, this is a lot of trust to place in an EPA head who doesn’t see the value of regulations and who used most of his energy as Oklahoma’s Attorney General fighting the very agency he is now leading. He repeatedly sued the EPA during the Obama administration, challenging the agency’s legal authority to regulate toxic mercury pollution, smog, carbon emissions from power plants, and the quality of wetland and other waters.

He has proudly described himself as “a leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda.”

I have no illusions about Pruitt doing the right thing. I may have disrupted his hearing, but he has consistently used his power to disrupt and destroy our communities and the environment. Thanks to all the Senators who are also beholden to big oil, Pruitt is now poised to do even more damage. It will take a lot more citizen disruptors to stop him.

Who’s with me?

Tags:

EPA

oil and gas industry

Environmental Justice

Coalition of Oystermen, Injured Workers and Waterkeepers Wins Hearing on Formosa Plastics’ Discharge into Lavaca Bay, Texas

Diane Wilson — Thu, 28 Jan 2016 03:38:55 +0000

Austin, Texas – A coalition of groups consisting of the and

Tags:

texas

oytermen

Remembering Bhopal

Diane Wilson — Sun, 27 Apr 2014 16:16:46 +0000

Climate and Environment

Disaster, Response and Renewal

Gender and Sexuality

Health and Wellness

There's a lot of people who are disturbed about the picture of the young child on my Facebook profile. I am writing this, on the eve of April 28, , showed up at my doorstep in Texas. He had been involved up to his neck with on human rights and industrial hazards. That was it. Ward Morehouse gave me the pamphlet to the event where I was speaking. I read on the back that the tribunal was based on the idea that the world had ample experience of industrial and environmental hazards and lessons had to be learned from these experiences so that those who died and suffered didn’t do it in vain. In other words, learn from the past so that a better world was possible. The best part of it was that the Permanent People’s Tribunal was not a government or an official document; it was a people’s statement that came from their experience of being forced to live with the consequences of industrial hazards and it was very very fitting that the tribunal was talking place near the heart of industry’s greatest darkness: Bhopal, India.

Every morning all of us delegates hopped a dusty bus from a rambling hotel and took a ride to an enormous beige conference center where huge black and white pictures of Gandhi hung on every wall and rioting bougainvillea spilled into the streets, up and down pathways, and over towering trellises. Between the heat, bougainvillea, chilies burning on the fire, and the wide-open skies I thought I was back in Texas. The governments were certainly alike.

 Things changed on the sixth morning. Oh, we had our dusty ride on the crowded bus, all right, but that morning a tiny man in white shirt and shorts chased the bus down the road. He was hollering something with a high British accent and he was so close to the bus that it sounded like he was hollering right in my ear. I was taking it a little personal so I turned at the open bus window that was scoured with dirt and grime and a million fingerprints on the bottom half, but from the top half I could see him just fine. At that exact moment he decided to leap. For a second I thought he was going to bop me on the nose with his hand but instead, a knotted handkerchief flew through the window and hit me in the head. A white, neatly knotted handkerchief tumbled into my lap. I sat a moment, fingering the place on my head where the handkerchief had hit, and then I swung around to find that little man.  The man was standing stock still in the middle of the dusty road and getting smaller by the second. I whirled around to see if anyone had noticed my brief moment with the jumping man. Apparently not; it was just him and me in a brief one-on-one. So I unknotted the handkerchief, smoothed out the four corners, and then I flipped over what looked like a stack of photos. There were ten black and white photos of ten dead babies lying on white sheets smeared with blood. The babies were young. Very young. Maybe they were newborns. I looked closer. Did my babies look like that when they were born? Were they ever that small? Who were these babies and why were they so bloody? I looked around the bus and showed the pictures to a woman sitting next to me. There was a long silence. The woman turned her head and refused to look at the pictures. Finally, a man leaned across the seat from me and said that the night of the poison gas, women lost their unborn children as they ran. Their wombs spontaneously opened in bloody abortions. “These are those unborn babies,” he said. “They are the lucky ones. “  I found out soon enough who were the unlucky ones. They were sitting beside me in the conference center, sometimes filling the aisles and the hallways, and almost always, sitting on the steps when I went inside. They wore bandages and scarves around their heads and covering their eyes, but the ones with charred lungs and poisoned kidneys had no bandages. They simply pulled their shirts, scarves, and shawls tight around their bodies and resigned themselves to misery while, I supposed, the bureaucrats and corporate dogs fattened themselves on skullduggery and dirty deals.

I didn’t leave India lightly because there was no forgetting those babies. I felt like I had been hit with a train or maybe that old man in the white shirt and shorts had hit me in the head harder than I thought. I didn’t know for sure. All I knew was that those dead babies with their frail arms flung across the white sheets seemed a whole lot like my own sleeping babies in their cribs at night and when I got back to Texas, their tiny fists pounded me in my dreams and railed against me forgetting. I will never forget. Those ten dead babies are permanently branded in my brain. My thoughts and heart is forever with the survivors of Bhopal and the 25,000 who died. You will not be forgotten. 

Originally posted on Facebook on April 25th, 2014.

Tags:

bhopal

Places:

Texas