I know these Hills. I have moved among the people of the Sandhills for over 50 years, covered thousands of miles on back roads no more than sand ruts, investigated towns, traveled with ranchers into back country, and written a book about this fragile ecosystem, which was published by St. Martin's Press (Hawk Flies Above: Journey to the Heart of the Sandhills, 1996).
I can tell you one simple fact. These hills are made of sand; they are porous. Whatever you pour onto them moves quickly through the sand and into the water table. That water table is the Ogallala Aquifer, a huge lake of water embedded in sediments below the Hills, ancient water, pure water, water that fuels all aspects of life in seven states, water that attracts and sustains birds and waterfowl from all along the Central Flyway, and water that drives the cattle industry of the third largest beef producing state in the United States.
The Sandhills are almost 20,000 square miles of unbroken prairie, treeless, elegant, pocked with hundreds of transient lakes, thanks to the remarkably high water table. The Ogallala Aquifer. These hills are a treasure as great as Yellowstone.
And I know these hills, and the people of the Hills, and to have a foreign corporation (TransCanada) tell them that they are going to take their land and run a pipeline filled with Tar Sands oil across it to refineries on the Gulf coast, a pipeline that will inevitably leak oil onto the porous Sandhills, so that that oil can be shipped overseas is simply unacceptable. It goes against everything Nebraskans know to be true: you don't take the land of U.S. citizens for the profit of a foreign corporation, and you don't mess with the Ogallala Aquifer.
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How do we get government to think about water over oil? What would you do?
Seconds after Obama's January State of the Union speech ended, John Boehner and South Dakota Senator John Thune both tweeted their renewed support for Keystone--their plan to revitalize the country.
Who's handing out the cash? How much? To whom? Get on it HuffPo & ProPublica!
Ethanol ran the price of corn sky-high and grazing land went under the plow.
You are so right, and it one of the worst scourges of the Sandhills. Row crop agriculture doesn't belong there ,and like the Keystone XL threatens the quality of the Ogallala Aquifer, in this case from the herbicides and fertilizers that are poured onto corn crops and which subsequently percolate into the water table.
I railed about this in my book some 15 years ago, as have plenty of others in Nebraska.
Thanks for bringing it up.
Thanks for speaking up as a Canadian. It's good to know some of our neighbors are as disgusted as we are.
Where do you stand on the issue?
The "stuff" has to be mixed with chemicals, heated and then pushed under extremely high pressure in order to ooze (it does NOT flow). Based on the record of leaks in the portion of the pipeline that has already been built, either they don't have any idea how to build pipelines, or the stuff is so caustic that it eats right through their substandard materials. Coupled with their cavalier attitude that "it's no big deal" to push it across the largest aquafier in the United States, and we have a perfect recipe for disaster. It won't be a matter of "if," but "when" it will devastate our country.
Then we have the issue of this whole idea even gaining an inch of ground by all the political backdoor unethical dealings. The propaganda put out about this pipeline being such a "job creator" for our nation has been disproven. They lied about the safety of the pipeline, about the number of jobs it would create, and about the USA benefitting from the end product.
As I've said on other threads about this pipeline ... ask First Nations why they won't let this nasty disaster-in-the-making be built across their lands.