Submission to UCB’s Hydraulic Fracking Review: Ian Sherman, Inverness, CB, April 10, 2014
I first became aware of unconventional hydraulic fracking for gas and oil in 2006 through media
interviews with a broad spectrum of rural residents in the American Southwest. These included a
conservative ranching family who lost their cattle to toxic waste water on government leased land and
families who suffered adverse health effects from well head emissions that settled as toxic smog in low
lying areas.
Over the past eight years these anecdotal reports have mushroomed as the fracking of shale
formations has intensified. Industry downplays anecdotal evidence as having no scientific basis despite
the fact that companies provide bottled water to affected residents. It’s crystal clear that, in the rush
toward full scale development, corporations have not been required to prove fracking safe beyond any
reasonable doubt.
Submissions to UCB’s HF Review to date have included a number of health studies
commissioned by local communities that have documented credible risks to water and air from fracking
operations. Predictably, having restricted access to both their operational sites and documentation of
the chemicals used at those sites, industry once again disputes the findings as unscientific and not
worthy of present concern or future study.
Shamefully, state and provincial governments where fracking is taking place have been
deliberately remiss in not funding comprehensive health studies of their own. Pennsylvania actually
deleted funds set aside for a state wide health registry which would have tracked health issues related
to fracking. And PA Bill 13 as drafted required that medical personnel sign confidentiality agreements
not to disclose knowledge of fracking fluid chemicals they requested in treating injured workers.
In Canada a huge loophole in the Hazardous Products Acts allows corporate interests to conceal
fracking chemical recipes as “trade secrets”. The Province of NB was extremely reticent to release an in
depth study on fracking from its Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Eilish Cleary, in which she repeatedly
underscored “significant data gaps that limit the ability to thoroughly address risks to public health”.
Her expressed concern was that we cannot effectively regulate a technology shrouded in secrecy with so
many unknown variables relating to long term effects on the environment and human health.
In 2008 the City of New York, concerned about potential fracking in its Upstate watershed,
engaged independent geologists who concluded that upward migration of injected fracking fluids can
plausibly pollute aquifers leaving residents chronically exposed to carcinogenic and mutagenic
chemicals. Since then, there has been widespread documentation of earthquakes associated with
fracking. Industry dismisses these earthquakes as having only minor effects at surface level. However,
the fact that significant earthquakes are initiated by the fracking process further shatters their argument
that underground rock layers are impervious to the upward migration of fracking fluids.
This potential threat to water sources will never be confined to one identifiable place – the tar
ponds, an abandoned mine site, a leaking tank, a chemical spill along a highway. The documented
presence of toxic heavy metals (including radioactive elements) and volatile organic compounds
(including the known carcinogen benzene) in typical shale gas and oil formations demands that we
consider the landscape beneath our feet as beyond regulatory control once it has been disturbed by
fracking – regardless of what chemical mixtures are used in the process.
The list of recommendations Dr. Cleary makes for regulating the nascent fracking industry in NB
is staggering. They stand as testimony to the boom and bust nature of industrial development with its
potential to cause socioeconomic disruption through cumulative, long lasting damage to ecosystems
and, accordingly, the health of those who live within them. Disruption to the human endocrine system
is a preeminent concern given the rising incidence of chilling health syndromes in a world where
industrial contaminants are now significantly present in the Arctic and in human breast milk.
The first section of Dr. Cleary’s report, Guiding Principles for Protection of Public Health, includes
the following quotation: “Ethics are as fundamental to public health practice and professionalism as is
evidence-based decision-making. Public health ethics are a standard of care as well as a duty of care.
They are the values and principles that guide actions intended to improve, promote and protect health,
and they must be relied on particularly in the face of uncertainty and controversy.”
She states further that “The practice of public health is always a balancing act. Decisions often
need to be made in the face of scientific uncertainty and without clear research evidence of benefit or
harm. However, the failure to act may produce even greater risk to health.” In May of 2012, frustrated
that requests for information went unanswered by a government in Halifax that was actively promoting
fracking as an appropriate technology for use in the Lake Ainslie watershed, Inverness County Council
passed a by-law prohibiting chemical (slick-water), hydraulic fracturing, otherwise known as high volume
hydraulic fracturing (HVHF) or fracking, to extract methane gas or petroleum.
Unlike a Town of Gaspe by-law prohibiting fracking which was recently ruled jurisdictionally
invalid by a Quebec court, the Inverness by-law adopted a “rights based” appeal to Section 7 of the
Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms which guarantees an individual’s security of person. Its legal
basis extends from a NS municipality’s right to pass a by-law protecting community health to a Supreme
Court ruling that affirmed the right of Hudson, Quebec, to adopt a preventative by-law based in part on
International Law’s Precautionary Principle” – that being, should an action be plausibly harmful when
considering both known and unknowns from a scientific perspective, then don’t take it.
No human mind or heart can fully encompass what we as a species have done and continue to
inflict upon one another, our fellow species, and the biosphere in general - the legacy of unfathomable
environmental debt we’re very likely leaving to our children’s progeny. Measured, reassuring corporate
and government PR spin should serve as a reminder of how economically inconvenient it is for any of us
to act responsibly.
Those at the forefront of opposition to fracking oil and gas are highly concerned that mutagenic
effects will manifest within a population only over time, thus leaving a longstanding pall of uncertainty
hanging over communities exposed to fracking chemicals, either through water or air. And given the
acknowledged threats posed by climate change, we cannot ignore those studies that have equated the
full ecological foot print of fracking with that of the coal industry. They put lie to industry’s claim that
fracked gas is a clean energy transition fuel.
There’s a growing awareness here in Inverness County of the strides that individuals and
communities are making toward developing sustainable economic ventures. Polluting boom and bust
industrialization is not compatible with efforts to create resilient local economies in rural municipalities,
especially considering that tourism is highlighted in every community development plan. Dr. Cleary’s
report and the Inverness County prohibitory by-law speak both to that point and to the larger ethical
considerations so critical to community health.