by Vince Beiser
In several cases, mining companies that found the rules in a given county too onerous have convinced towns with more lenient environmental attitudes to simply annex the lands they want, enabling them to operate with fewer restrictions.20 The council of the city of Arcadia, in Wisconsin’s Trempealeau County, pulled this maneuver in 2012.21 Meanwhile, the board of the adjacent town of Arcadia handed out permits to more than a dozen mines in a few short years. Locals were so outraged that in 2015 they voted the entire town board out, replacing them with a slate of explicitly anti-sand-mining candidates, including Donna Brogan.
The most important regulatory body in Wisconsin charged with monitoring air and water quality is the state Department of Natural Resources. As of 2014, the department had cited twenty sand mining companies for various rule violations.22 The department’s many critics, however, insist it’s too inclined to give businesses the benefit of the doubt. It is certainly under pressure from pro-business interests: In his 2010 campaign, Governor Scott Walker slammed the department for its “out-of-control” enforcement of environmental rules, which he charged were squelching job growth. Walker cut dozens from the department’s staff, including at least eighteen senior scientists.23
The authorities in neighboring Minnesota, which also has large deposits of frac sand, have taken a much more cautious approach. The state has allowed only a handful of mines to open up so far.24 In Minnesota’s Winona County, just across the Mississippi from Trempealeau County, dozens of protesters were arrested for blocking sand trucks in 2013; the county recently banned frac sand mining and processing altogether.25
It’s easy to cast the issue in a familiar light: homespun farmers versus land-raping corporations, friends of the earth versus the henchmen of big oil. That’s certainly how it looked to a lot of the anti-sand-mining folks in Chippewa. “It’s hard not to see a sand mine as an obscenity—a big scar on the landscape,” said Gebben, the potter. “They’re tearing up the forests and trees to get at the last bits of oil. It’s a crime against future generations.”
But the issue looked very different from the kitchen table of the Chippewa County ranch home of Dennis and Darlene Rossa. Five generations of Rossas have lived and farmed on their 700 hilly acres, growing crops in the fields and hunting in the forests. The couple’s sliding glass back door looks out on rippling fields of corn rolling away to dense woodlands. Dennis and Darlene’s three kids and four grandchildren all live on adjoining farms on the acreage. They all love the land. And in 2013, Dennis and Darlene leased 140 acres of it to a sand mining company.
“We did it for our kids,” says Darlene, a redoubtable woman stout of voice, body, and manner, over a piece of homemade pumpkin pie. “It’s their future.”
“There’s no money in farming anymore unless you’re really big,” Dennis explains, his graying hair neatly combed over the top of his head. Commodity prices are low and competition is fierce; that’s why family farms are disappearing all over the country. The Rossas have stayed solvent partly because they’re willing to experiment. They’ve tried raising cattle and hogs, and a few years ago set up a chicken-breeding operation that now produces around a million birds per year.
“At the end of the day, sand is just another commodity, like corn or beans or cattle,” Dennis says. In fact, he’s expecting the mine to leave the land in better shape than before. “Some of the land they’ve got is just a knob with trees on top. They’ll clear it out, and then we’ll have lower, more level land to farm.”
Dennis and Darlene aren’t greed-blinded corporate patsies. They’ve just looked at the evidence and their own situation and reached a different conclusion than Trinko or Schmitt. “So many studies have been done,” says Darlene. “They haven’t got one documented thing to show one person got silicosis from working in these mines.” (This is true, although as scientists are fond of saying, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.)
“We looked into all the health issues,” Darlene continues. “Precautions are always taken. As long as you do that, it’s fine.” She hauls out a white three-ring binder stuffed with maps, documents, and declarations—all the paperwork they had to file to get a permit for the mine. “There’s a dust control plan, a high-capacity well plan,” she points out, leafing through the heap. “These companies are concerned about water and dust, just like us.”
“If there was really something to be concerned about, we wouldn’t be doing it here, with our grandkids living here,” Dennis chimes in.
Chad Losinski at Mississippi Sand feels much the same. He’s lived in Arcadia his whole life, except for the four years he spent at college in La Crosse. Back in 2012, one of Losinski’s friends leased his land to another mining company and told Chad he should try to get a job there; the pay was better than the house building he’d been doing.
Losinski didn’t know anything about mining, but he was hired anyway. “We start at seventeen dollars an hour, with no skills required, and it goes up from there,” he says. That’s considerably better than the pay at the local furniture plant, the other big employer in Trempealeau County. As for farming: “Unless you’re a big commercial farmer, you can’t make it on a small dairy farm. Commodities are worth nothing, and the price of land and everything else is going up. Especially around here—it’s a great hunting area. A lot of the land, when it comes for sale, some rich doctor from Green Bay or Milwaukee buys it for hunting.” Losinski grew up on a dairy farm, spending his summers baling hay. A couple of years ago, his father sold their herd and came to work at the mine. “He was the hardest-working guy we had,” Losinski says. “The money he saved on health insurance alone made it worth it for him to come here.”
As for environmental issues: “If there were anything truly concerning in my eyes, I wouldn’t be in the industry,” Losinski maintains. “I’d probably be sitting on the other side. But I know that we’re regulated strictly by DNR for water quality and air, and OSHA for the mining. They’re here twice a year for employee safety, to make sure everything is done right. I think it’s perfectly safe.” What about his neighbors who insist it isn’t? “There’s just no compromising with them. They just don’t want the industry, and that’s that.”
Indeed, it’s just as easy to caricature the anti-sand-mining forces (as some on the pro-sand-mining side do) as a contemptible alliance of paranoid, elitist NIMBY types and local farmers jealous that their own land has no frac sand.
A lot of the complaints about sand mines are that they are a nuisance: they’re ugly, they’re loud, they spoil the view, they disrupt the peaceful, bucolic feeling of the area. (One woman who lives in a lovely house on a forested hilltop was most upset because a sand mine several miles away spoiled the otherwise perfect rural view. “We haven’t entertained on our deck all summer!” she moaned.) All of that is true. But it’s also true that those quality-of-life damages come with just about any new kind of economic activity. Every factory, every paved road, every city ever built was birthed amid dust and noise and disruption of whatever patterns of life were there before it, and forever changed the landscape it sat in. For that matter, the lovely farms of Chippewa and Trempealeau counties have been there for only a little over a century. The land they sit on used to be forest. The vast tracts of white pine that once covered much of the state were clear-cut for timber26 and to make room for agriculture.
That’s the course of human history. Cities, highways, factories, modern civilization require tearing up land and displacing people and other living things. It’s impossible to get the resources we need to live as we do without disturbing at least some people and doing some harm to—or at least changing—the natural environment. Civilization disrupts the natural world. We disrupt the natural world. But we’re not going to go back to living in caves. We’re not going to stop cutting down trees or damming rivers or, least of all, digging up sand. The challenge is to figure out ways to do those things that are responsible, sustainable, and limited. We have to do
as little of them as we can get away with.
In the specific case of frac sand, though, there’s a valid argument to be made that we shouldn’t be doing it at all, because fracking itself is especially fraught with serious environmental hazards. There are plenty of reports of fracking operations contaminating aquifers and even causing earthquakes, as well as possibly elevating the risk of cancer and silicosis among people living near them.27 What’s more, society doesn’t necessarily need the oil and gas it yields. In an ideal world, it could be replaced with solar and wind power.
That’s not an option with other resources, however, especially sand. For its most important uses—concrete and glassmaking—there just isn’t a viable alternative (as I’ll explain later).
In the meantime, fracking isn’t going away, and neither is the demand for Wisconsin’s sand. No matter how laughable some of the complaints of Chippewa County homeowners may be, nor how sanguine the sand miners themselves are, there are legitimate reasons to be concerned about the potential for the frac sand industry to overuse groundwater, pollute surface water, and cause silicosis.
All of that is an issue not just for Wisconsin, but for many other parts of America as well. Smaller amounts of frac sand are already being mined in Canada, Texas, and several other states, and there are major deposits in many others. Several other countries are looking into fracking their own shale oil and gas deposits.28 China has enormous reserves and is expected to start tapping them and mining fracking sand in the coming years.
Dan Masterpole, one of the county officials tasked with making sure government regulations are being followed, is almost painfully diplomatic about the controversy. He’s big on “on the one hand this, on the other hand that”-type answers to questions about sand mining’s risks to streams or aquifers. Finally, I ask him to just bottom-line it: Should people be concerned, or not?
“People should be concerned because we don’t have a significant track record on what the issues are,” says Masterpole. “We really have very limited experience. And some of these mining companies also have very limited experience. We’re at the beginning of a very long journey.”
INTERLUDE
An Incomplete List of Surprising Practices Involving Sand
As facial treatment: Tired of those wrinkles on your forehead and crow’s-feet around your eyes? Here’s an easy fix: sandblast your face. That’s basically what happens with microdermabrasion, a popular treatment in which a spray of extremely fine silica crystals removes the topmost layer of dead skin cells.
As forensic evidence: The shape, size, and color of sand grains are unique to the geographic area of their origin. Finding out which grains come from where has helped criminal investigators for more than a century. A Bavarian chemist solved a murder in 1908 by identifying the origin of the sand on a suspect’s shoes. In 2002, police investigators in Virginia extracted a confession from a suspected killer when they showed him how the sand on his truck matched grains found at a murder scene.
As a replacement for water: The Qur’an instructs observant Muslims to pray five times a day, and to wash themselves each time in a ritual called wudu, or wet ablution. Finding water was often tricky, though, in the desert lands where Islam was born—but there was never a shortage of sand. So if there’s no clean water to be found, Muslims are permitted to purify themselves instead with a ceremonial dusting of earth or sand, a work-around called tayammum, the dry ablution.
As gigantic works of art: At the annual International Sand Sculpture Festival in Antalya, Turkey, artists from around the world mold some 10,000 tons of sand into towering re-creations of everything from the Sphinx to Shrek. Only sand and water can be used, but since the grains from the local beach can be hard to work with, the festival also provides smoother sand from rivers and mountain streams. Antalya’s festival is just one of several such around the world, including the US Sand Sculpting Challenge in San Diego. Several hotels in Florida also offer custom sand sculptures as wedding decorations, for as much as $3,000 a pop. Because nothing says “everlasting love” like something made of sand.
CHAPTER 7
Miami Beach-less
It may be the bones of buildings and a tool of the oil and gas industry, but mention the word sand, and the first thing most of us flash on is the beach. Who doesn’t love those idyllic stretches of coast where the land meets the sea? They’re where vacation memories are made and photos taken, where kids build sand castles, teenagers check each other out, lovers stroll in the surf, and indolent adults sip margaritas. They’re the global symbol of paradise.
Beaches are also a multibillion-dollar industry. On shorelines around the world, in countries rich and poor, supine armies of sand offer themselves up as tourist attractions that generate livings for millions of people.
That includes most of the residents of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It’s been one of America’s prime beach vacation destinations for decades, at least since the 1960 film Where the Boys Are made it synonymous with spring-break fun in the sun. But for a place that depends on sun-and-sand-seeking tourists, Fort Lauderdale has a big problem: its beaches are disappearing.
The city has been fighting a defensive battle against nature for many years. The sand that lines its shores is constantly being swept out to sea by wind, waves, and tides. In the natural course of things, that sand would be replenished by grains carried by the Atlantic’s near-shore southward-moving currents. That’s what used to happen. Today, though, humans have cut off that supply of incoming sand. So many marinas, jetties, and breakwaters have been built along the Atlantic coast in the last hundred years that the flow of incoming sand has been blocked. The natural erosion continues, but the natural replenishment does not.
For decades, Broward County, in which Fort Lauderdale sits, solved its vanishing beach problem by replacing the sand swept off its shoreline with replacement troops dredged up from the nearby ocean floor. But by now virtually all of its accessible undersea sand has been used up. For that matter, the same goes for Miami Beach, Palm Beach, and many other beach-dependent Florida towns. Nearly half of the state’s beaches are officially designated as “critically eroding.”1 Nicole Sharp, Broward County’s natural resources administrator, summed it up: “We are running out of sand in Florida.”
Florida isn’t an anomaly. Beaches are disappearing all over America and around the world, from South Africa to Japan and Western Europe. A 2017 study by the US Geological Survey warned that unless something is done, as much as two-thirds of Southern California’s beaches may be completely eroded by 2100.2
To understand why, you first need to understand how sand gets to the beach in the first place. It usually comes from a combination of sources that vary depending on the local geography. In places with steep mountains close to the shore, like much of the west coast of North and South America, and in deltas like the Mekong in Vietnam, rivers carry sand straight to the shore. On flat coastal plains, like those in the eastern United States, Brazil, and China, some of the sand is left over from ancient river estuaries.3
If there are bluffs or cliffs near the water, waves erode them, gnawing off grains that feed the beach. Many beaches also contain biogenic sands—shards of crushed-up shells, corals, and skeletons of marine creatures.4 That’s what makes some beaches pink or extra-white. (Among its many oddly colored beaches, Hawaii boasts a particularly rare one on the island of Kauai called Glass Beach. Much of its sand is made up of millions of colorful pieces of long-eroded glass.) Waves push sand from the ocean bed ashore in some places. And all beaches are fed at least in part by currents traveling along the coast, bringing sand from other areas.
Human beings are interfering with practically all of those processes. Massive coastal development—marinas, jetties, ports—blocks the flow of ocean-borne sand. In many countries, including the United States, river dams also cut off the flow of sand that used to feed beaches. Southern California’s beaches have lost as much as four-
fifths of the sediment that rivers used to bring them, thanks to dams.5
(Human intervention is also changing the flow of sand in ways that reduce territory farther inland. Louisiana loses an estimated sixteen square miles of wetlands every year—a crucial natural defense against hurricanes—because levees and canals on the Mississippi have reduced the flow of sediment that used to replenish them.6 Egypt’s Aswan Dam has done a similar number on the shore of the Nile Delta. China’s colossal Three Gorges Dam project is expected to have an even greater impact.)
Sand mining makes the problem worse. Dams combined with upriver sand mining are decimating the supply of replenishing sediment to Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, home to 20 million people and source of half that country’s food supply.7 In South Africa, researchers believe sand mining has slashed by two-thirds the flow of river sand that feeds the beaches of the city of Durban. Dredging of near-shore sand to build a railway in Kenya may be eroding some of that country’s finest beaches. And in the San Francisco Bay, massive sand dredging may be starving nearby beaches; environmentalists have been battling to stop it for years.
Then there are the places where the beach itself is being hauled off. Illegal beach sand mining has been reported all over the world. In Morocco and Algeria, illegal miners have stripped entire beaches for construction sand, leaving behind rocky moonscapes. Thieves in Hungary made off with hundreds of tons of sand from an artificial river beach in 2007. Five miles of beach was stripped down to its clay foundation in Russian-occupied Crimea in 2016. Smugglers in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Cambodia pile beach sand onto small barges in the night and sell them in Singapore.8 Beaches have been torn up in India and elsewhere by miners seeking rare minerals like zircon and monazite that are found in minute quantities amid the quartz grains. Even farmers in Scotland and Northern Ireland have been known to steal beach sand to improve the quality of their soil.
