Reading the public comment : the keystone XL pipeline and future of environmental writing【翻译】

CHAPTER I
Nebraska’s Sandhills, a cattle ranching region of grass-stabilized sand
dunes and inter-dunal valleys, stretches 20,000-square miles across the northcentral
part of this Great Plains state—the equivalent of four Connecticuts.1 It is
the largest sand dune system in North America, and among the four largest on
Earth. Despite its name, the region’s riches – in eco-systems of ecology and
economy – reside in water, not sand per se. Beneath the vast network of
undulating sand dunes sprawls an equally vast hydrological network, including
the largest freshwater aquifer in the world – the Ogallala aquifer, which supplies
drinking water for eight states and about 30 percent of the groundwater used for
irrigation in this country.2 If geomorphology tells us to look at the relationship
between topography and the geologic structures sustaining it – a surface and the
infrastructure it’s built upon-within – then to understand “the Sandhills” not just
as a name and landscape but as a place represented in discourse and language,
we need to understand the deep structures propping up the idea and image of
* A version of this paper was presented, in condensed form, at the 2013 American Studies
Association (ASA) annual meeting, “Beyond the Logic of Debt, Toward an Ethics of Collective
Dissent,” November, Washington D.C. A separate version of this paper was presented at the
2012 Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences (AESS) annual meeting, “Preparing for
our Environmental Future,” June, Santa Clara U., Santa Clara, CA.
1 A fact—expanded upon – in David A. Owen’s Like No Other Place: The Sandhills of Nebraska
(Lincoln: Bison Books, U Nebraska, 2012).
2 Sassoon, David. “Crude, Dirty, and Dangerous: The Dangers of Diluted Bitumen.” New York
Times 21 Aug. 2012: A19. Print.
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the Sandhills. They have been described, variously, as “fragile”3 (for their rare
sandy soil type—entisols), as “distinct” (home to 720 different plant species), as
“mostly intact”4 – and, as such, a place whose “ecosystem sensitivities” often
dissuade cattle ranchers from overgrazing (so as to prevent erosion, ensuring
sand-tolerant grass species their habitat). Very little of the Sandhills has been
plowed (often, simply, because it’s impossible: we’re talking about sand, not
soil).5 For migratory birds—like the famed Sandhill crane – this ecosystem serves
as “the central flyway,” a pathway link between critical habitat areas across the
North American continent that these species depend on for survival.
One could argue – as many, as of this writing, are – that the region
provides essential, critical ecosystem services (fresh drinking water, agricultural
3 This adjective and all the others quoted in this sentence come from "Sandhills (Nebraska)."
Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation Inc., Inc., 14 May 2012. Web. 16 July 2012.
4 “Intact,” at least, to the Euro-Americans who created a ‘working’ definition of a laboring
landscape – an “intact” gaze manifested in the settlers who prospected the region, particularly in
the mid nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries, during the Homestead (1862) and Kinkaid
(1904) Acts, if not also in the generation of settlers and cattle barons who followed in the wake of
The Louisiana Purchase (1803). Note: the Town of O’Neill, Nebraska still preserves the law office
of Moses Kinkaid.
5 In a recent essay about the Sandhills, in the publication Prairie Fire (Nov. 2012), the author,
William Beachly, comically alludes to Lieutenant G.K. Warren’s 1855 government report that
“nowhere west of the 97th meridian would the soil and rainfall support continuous settlement…”
in the Sandhills (5). Perhaps for the Anglo-European settlers, yes. And until the advent of
irrigation technologies in the 20th-century, the Sandhills relied on natural springs (and spring-fed
stream- and river-systems); freshwater from the Ogallala aquifer seeps through the porous sand
and silt of the Sandhills, creating freshwater ecosystems in regions of Nebraska that, geologically,
are not ‘part’ of the Ogallala aquifer—land that does not sit above the aquifer—but nonetheless
exists in relation to it, linked by hydrological networks. The lesson: ecosystem “boundaries” are
never so clean cut. How do you speak of a “region” then? How do you map an “ecosystem”
then? The field of ecosystem geography—a sub-discipline of Physical Geography interested in
categorizing the Earth into a “hierarchy of…finer-scale ecosystems”—takes up such questions,
particularly in relation to cartography. (See Robert Bailey, Ecosystem Geography (New York:
Springer, 2009)). See also the proliferating literature on bio-regionalism.
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land, wildlife habitat, etc.), and should not be tinkered with without a guarantee
that those services continue unimpeded. The Sandhills – its variegated mosaic of
fertile wetlands and bone-dry semi-desert – serve as the central drainage basin
for the Platte River, a river-system connecting the Continental Divide to the
Mississippi River Valley. Hence why the Sandhills have been heralded as
possessing “the largest and most intricate wetland ecosystem in the United
States” (Owen 2). To discuss the Sandhills, then, is to discuss the Platte; and to
discuss the Platte is to discuss the variety of regional identities – tied up in labor,
ethnicity, race, Prairie politics (itself an amalgam of clashing ideologies), and
natural resource politics – of the trans-Mississippi West. Bounded by its
westernmost headwaters in the Rocky Mountains, the Platte drainage basin
drains the snow and ice melt from Wyoming (where the North Platte begins) and
Colorado (where the South Platte begins); the North and the South branches
unite in western Nebraska, forming the Platte – which channels the waters
through the Sandhills, linking up with the Missouri River, and ultimately
draining into the Gulf of Mexico via the Mississippi River. The Sandhills is as
much connected to global trade networks – via Texas and Louisiana shipping
ports – as it is a local tourist, recreation, and natural resource for aesthetic
consumption and extraction industries.
TransCanada, the multi-billion dollar Canadian oil conglomerate, runs oil
pipelines through the Great Plains. Its largest network of pipelines is collectively
named the Keystone Pipeline. Proposed in 2005, approved in 2008 (by a
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Presidential Permit under the George W. Bush Administration), and operating
since 2010, it twists and tumbles over (and under) 2,151 miles of the North
American content – river crossings and disparate ecosystems from the
Athabascan Tar Sands in Alberta, Canada to the Midwestern oil refineries in
Cushing, Oklahoma and Wood River and Patoka, Illinois – transporting 435,000
barrels a day of tarry oil. The Illinois refineries currently refine more gasoline per
barrel than any other region in the U.S.

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