The Bakkan Debacle & Iowa Water

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IMAGINE, IF YOU WILL ALLOW, the construction of a 1,134 mile [1,825 km] long pipeline carrying very volatile toxic crude oil through fifty counties in four states, under and over two of the greatest American rivers, and significant rivers such as the Des Moines River, as well as lesser branches and small streams, and through the most fertile soil on Earth.  Crude oil flowing from shale formations around the country—not just North Dakota—are full of volatile gases that make it tricky to transport and to process into fuel. So the misleading argument becomes one of piping it to avoid exploding it in train and truck transport.  The pipeline will have a potential to pump a million + gallons per hour.  Monitoring of leaks will come from Sugarland, Texas and require significant time to turn off the flow of crude oil.  Everything leaks at some point or is affected environmental conditions such as lightning and on and on, and many leaks go undetected for a long time in all industrial processes be they oil or chemical or hogs or chickens.  These problems have already occurred recently in pipelines, and well documented in the past. 

Does this sound like a good long term idea?  

Even with a price tag estimated to be 3.8 billion dollars for starters, will exquisite construction give intense attention to land and water, assuring for a complete return to the preexisting soil and river and stream conditions?  Currently, quality-watchers do not seem to be present even to assure for worker safety concerns such as ditch collapse. How many skilled landscape engineers will be present during the actual construction, and who do they serve should they appear? 

Unquestionably, the draw is jobs, but not forever for the majority of those in initial construction, and then there is the perpetual right of access/control by private corporations, with states having to fund monitoring of the monitors, and you can imagine how well that is going to work or be a financial priority. 

But what kind of jobs? Singer-songwriter Dave Moore once characterized Iowa’s rural economy as being based on the three Ps:  pigs, poker and prisons.  While we will continue to need jobs and will look everywhere for them, there is a sense that just as it is, the Iowa landscape has incredible economic value on a world-scale of value.  The rights of the landscape are not in conflict with human rights.  The Iowa landscape is “sustainability,” stabilizing and improving the health and economic future of those inhabiting that landscape.  What if the landscape could dictate direction rather than be a resource that is being degraded en masse? 

It is not only threats to soil and water, but also water tables/aquifers and toxicity that continues to be discovered after the fact, such as earthquakes, radiation release from fracking.  While Iowa is not a fracking mecca, can you imagine the forces that be really resisting the opportunity if available not matter the environmental cost [that in the long run of things becomes a very costly economic cost to restore to get further economic value out of it.

Because of a disregard for long-term issues in most environmental projects to extract resources or create recreation or even mitigate environmental damage, there ends of being a very economically costly technology is required to even partially correct the situation, and typically when there is little funding available to do so. Further, once the problems begin to arise, they need to be corrected again and again.

Any reasonable view of the Bakkan project that looks long term, be it from either a liberal or conservative perspective, has to see the short term economic gain and the long-term ecological loss.  This long term ecological loss is not just an aesthetic loss but rather a deep economic loss.  What is fundamentally missing is this long view and a misinterpretation of landscape as a fallow resource to be of value only when used. 

Appreciation for landscape as already economically productive and as complex beyond our ability to measure it well could take a strong lesson from the resistance of the Lakota nations against the Bakkan pipeline.  Why just them?  Our wisdom at work here in allowing the Bakkan debacle?  NOT.  We are the fallow and shallow force that is selling out.