Hydraulic-Fracturing  

The Haudenosaunee consist of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora Nations. The Haudenosaunee Nations and its people have a unique spiritual, cultural, and historic relationship with the land, which is embodied in Gayananshogowa, the Great Law of Peace. This relationship goes far beyond federal and state legal concepts of ownership, possession, or other legal rights. The Haudenosaunee people are one with the land and all that depends on the land, and consider themselves apart of it. It is the duty of the Nations’ leaders to work for a healing of the land, to protect it, and to pass it on to future generations.

The Haudenosaunee know that every part of the natural world is important and interrelated; when humans tinker more and more with the natural balance, we do so at the peril of our grandchildren. The Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force engages in extensive environmental work on behalf of its people and all people, in the hope that it may hasten the process of reconciliation and bring lasting justice, peace and respect among all living beings – animal, bird, fish, plant and people – who live on Turtle Island.

Clean and abundant water is now the highest priority for human survival. The natural world is the distributor of water, according to the great systems that control our earth and its climate. It belongs to no one person, corporation, or nation. Privatization and pollution of water are fundamental violations of our human rights, and the rights of the natural world. The balance of life is predicated on sharing the Earth’s natural resources.

Our ability to live in unity and in balance with the Earth depends on each and every person at every level, from governmental departments, to property owners, to children volunteering to help plant urban trees. To be a human being carries with it a responsibility to understand our impact on the world around us and the future generations, and to act in ways to make the world better, not worse. Finding solutions that work with nature, instead of against her, is the only rational course of action to meet the challenges of our time.

The Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force believes that the process of hydraulic-fracturing will devastate the natural environment over a large area and for many generations into the future. We also understand that even though the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) is able to justify moving forward with this process based on a presumption of the soundness of its written policy, by requiring permits for certain activities and providing regulatory disincentives for violations to its permitting requirements, there will be unintended consequences that DEC cannot prevent.

We need only look so far as the Tully Valley, south of the Onondaga Nation Territory, and we see the unintended consequences of 100 years of solution salt mining on that valley. We look near Parachute, Colorado where a mine sprang a leak, allowing some 1.6 million gallons of fluid to soak into the arid earth. According to state records, the spill migrated underground until it seeped from a cliff side and froze into a gray pillar of ice more than 200 feet tall. When it melted, the fluids dripped into the torrid currents of Parachute Creek and finally dumped into the Colorado River. Colorado state records show that of some 1,500 spills in drilling areas since 2003, more than 300 have seeped into water. In one case, a truck carrying drilling fluids crashed into the Colorado River, where it remained partially submerged for more than three weeks.

In neighboring Wyoming, the Bureau of Land Management found a 28-mile-long plume of benzene contamination in an aquifer beneath a gigantic gas field, caused by hydraulic-fracturing. The aquifer is near a tributary to the Green River, which in turn flows into the Colorado River. More than 1,000 other cases of contamination due to hydraulic-fracturing have been documented by courts and state and local governments in Colorado, New Mexico, Alabama, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

The Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force has not been able to create a scenario by which the economic and energy benefits of hydraulic-fracturing will outweigh its known dangers and risks. DEC is one entity delegated the authority to protect our Earth and waters against contamination caused by hydraulic-fracturing by refusing to allow our Earth and its waters to be exploited in this way. We ask that the DEC partner with us to find other energy sources that do not destroy our grandchildren’s ability to live long and healthy lives.