A Legacy of Places Not Destroyed

By Carolyn Raffensperger, Executive Director

The White Mountain Apache anchor their ethics, history, and cosmology to the land. I worked as an archaeologist, years ago, in their community and became apprenticed to them, intrigued by their worldview, particularly how the landscape shaped the way they tell their history and how they understand the dynamic relationships between the land and people. In his book, Wisdom Sits in Places, Keith Basso describes how the Apache stories of how we treat the land and each other are encoded in place names. Environmental disasters like the nuclear disasters at Fukushima or Chernobyl similar encode wisdom, if we heed the warnings. Place names like Love Canal instantly convey a huge, complex history of corporate malfeasance, the heroism of Lois Gibbs and others, and ultimately vast changes in the law.

In her remarkable essay, “On What We Bury,” Rebecca Altman offers a litany and lamentation for the costly damage to the land, our communities and our bodies from toxic and radioactive sites, all of which have names, all of which have histories, all of which will be with us for a long time. 

I often wonder if we are educable or if we will fail to learn the lessons these wounded places teach us. 

The weekend of May 12, 2023, I participated in a Mississippi River Summit convened by the Great Plains Action Society to consider the rights of the Mississippi River. People from the entire length of the River gathered to talk about how the rights of that River and their communities had been undermined. Keshaun Pearson, board president of MCAP, Memphis Community Against Pollution spoke about their success in stopping the Byhalia Connection Pipeline and the ongoing work challenging a toxic ethylene oxide plant. Keshaun said that their community, which he identified by its zip code—38109—was tired of being a sacrifice zone. 

We have a choice now. Will we continue to make sacrifice zones or will we protect our homes and communities, recognizing that the land and communities hold rights together, that they are sacred and cannot be sacrificed on the altar of the economy?

At the three Women’s Congresses for Future Generations that we’ve held over the years, we acknowledged our responsibilities to uphold the rights of future generations, the rights of nature, and of the communities that shelter them. In doing so we declared that “We withdraw our consent from the institutions and practices that have put the world in peril.” 

One of the reasons that Altman’s essay is compelling, is that we are now faced with proposals to bury billions of tons of CO2 deep underground, CO2 that will be captured in an industrial process known as carbon capture and storage (CCS). As we have described in previous Networkers, CCS is a band aid on the cancer of climate change. It isn’t going to solve the problem because the fossil fuel industry has no intention of stopping drilling and fracking, selling and burning, which means that we will continue to add to the CO2 climate load. On top of that, they plan on capturing the CO2 and either burying it deep below the surface of the Earth or using it to get more oil out of the ground in a process known as EOR. 

I particularly grieve over the plans to bury CO2, a substance that will certainly alter if not destroy the ecosystems miles below our feet. We know more about the surface of the moon than we do the living organisms that inhabit that underground world. 

Will these CO2 burial sites that range from North Dakota to those under the Ocean in the Gulf of Mexico become our next sacrifice zones or will we fulfill our responsibility to treat the deep Earth as sacred and pass on these intact, mysterious ecosystems to future generations?

What strikes me about Altman’s essay and the names of places she describes, Rocky Flats, Toms River, Moab, is that they are names of the desecrated, the ones we treated as waste dumps. We don’t have a list of the places that were spared and allowed to flourish and be their own, inherently sacred places. I propose that we start such a list as evidence that we have fulfilled our responsibilities to honor the rights of Rivers, communities, the deep Earth. First on my list is Memphis, zip code 38109, for the Byhalia Pipeline that does not exist there. Another protected place is Bristol Bay Alaska, which has not been pillaged by the Pebble Mine, a vast gold mine which would have destroyed the salmon runs and the Indigenous communities that have lived there since time immemorial. 

When we say their names, Memphis 38109 or Bristol Bay, we, like the White Mountain Apache, are telling a history. In these cases, a history of people who took righteous action to protect the sacred. 

What story will we tell about the CO2 burial sites? Will we add them to our lamentations when we say their place names or will we add them to the litany of joy, of a legacy of health and integrity passed on to future generations.

I withdraw my consent from anything that treats any place or any people as less than sacred. I withdraw my consent from inflicting CO2 on the deep Earth communities. I give my consent to all that protects and restores the water, the forests and prairies, the birds and snakes and dragonflies and the human communities that make their home with them.  

Someday, the list of place names where contamination and destruction did not happen will be much longer. Let’s make it so.

Water protectors blocking construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline to protect the Des Moines River