First Circle Talk of 2024 examines the true costs of energy extraction

On the first evening back from winter break, Groton students filled the Sackett Forum for a Circle Talk featuring Toni Jensen PhD, a Métis writer who focuses on the spread of emerging energy-extraction methods and their accompanying socioeconomic impacts: violence on the land that too often begets violence on a community. 

Dr. Jensen’s Carry is a memoir-in-essays about gun violence, land, and Indigenous women’s lives. An NEA Creative Writing Fellowship recipient in 2020, she teaches at the University of Arkansas and the Institute of American Indian Arts. Carry and her other works use personal stories to shine a light on the imbalance often brought to areas when fracking or other energy-source extraction methods like mining or drilling comes to town.

“I’m most interested in diving deeply into the lives of those affected by oil and gas extraction,” she said, “but also mining, forestry, commercial, agricultural, and food production. 

“My writing almost always begins with a question or series of questions,” Dr. Jensen explained. “In the case of this project about extractive industries, I was mostly curious about questions of balance or proportion: How do we balance our material needs, the stuff we wear, the cars we drive, the energy we use, and also our wants with the environmental and social impacts of these extractions? What are the human costs of these extractions and how can studying these costs—how can gathering people’s personal narratives—help lead us toward solutions?” 

Fracking itself isn’t the problem, said Dr. Jensen. It’s the speculative, often unregulated nature of the culture surrounding fracking that leads people to take chances that could irreparably scar the environment. 

“The technology is not bad technology,” she said. “It was a case of we were looking for solutions to our oil and gas issues. We wanted to be energy independent. And all of these are good goals. Yet the technology use is only as good as the people who were using it. And there was a lot of wildcatter speculation, especially in Texas and Oklahoma, where people who were trained to do conventional drilling in oil got licensed to go out and frack and they didn’t actually know what they were doing.” 

Having studied and taught at places like Penn State and Texas Tech University, Dr. Jensen has seen the environmental impact of fracking throughout the Rust Belt and in west Texas, two hotbeds for the technology. As she began to look more closely, however, she noticed the human toll—increased gun-related crime, domestic violence and sexual assault, and even human trafficking—that often followed.

“When I lived in Pennsylvania, I interviewed people who worked in grocery stores during the oil and gas boom. I interviewed women who worked in the hotels and motels,” she said. “If you worked at a grocery store in a frack town during the height of the boom, you couldn't work the night shift alone or you had to have someone walk you to your car.

“Incidences of sexual assault and other violent crime against women in particular rose by more than 100 percent,” she continued. “Housing is a big problem when you bring workers into these rural areas, predominantly male workers. You have a huge workforce dropped into very rural areas usually, and very temporary housing. Trailers, RVs, that kind of thing, just crop up. There's no 911 address if anyone needs help because this isn't a real place, it's not a real town. So there’s no structural way of monitoring.” 

While fracking companies bring jobs and often shower host communities with an influx of investment—money for schools or libraries—the true cost-benefit ratio is harder to measure, said Dr. Jensen. 

“When I was doing the research,” she said, “I could always tell, going through a fracking town, whether they had already taken the money and gone and agreed to let the companies come in because you have a new library or you would have a new elementary, middle, or high school. A town that didn't have employment has employment. And so it fundamentally changes a town for a while.” 

And yet increased truck traffic brings air and water pollution. A transient, overstressed workforce brings more drug and alcohol abuse and crime. And that’s before considering what fracking can do to the land itself. Researchers estimate the benefits of allowing fracking into a community at about $2,000 annually per resident, Dr. Jensen said, an amount that is quickly overwhelmed by the consequences that come with it.  

“That calculation of $2,000 per year is based on people’s current understanding of the health impacts at the time of their study,” she said. “If people’s understanding of the health impacts were to change, it's likely that this would alter the net benefits. Then they may have health costs, right? Extra bills for going to the doctor. 

“The idea is that, in our service for clean energy, we're fundamentally changing the lives of the middle of the country, whole towns,” Dr. Jensen continued. “When I interviewed the women who lived in these places, I found that it had fundamentally altered the fabric of their towns, the places that they live—not just their environment, what the place looked like, or even the quality of the water, but how people acted.”

During a question-and-answer session with students following her talk, Dr. Jensen was asked about the chances for a future that embraced more efficient and environmentally friendly energy sources.

“I would love to have a good answer to that,” she said. “I do think, of course, wind and solar can be developed further. But I drive a hybrid car at the moment and, in the great state of Arkansas, you’re taxed extra for driving a hybrid. And that's true throughout the south, you get an extra tax for trying to be environmentally friendly and moving away from gas culture.

“I think, whether we like it or not, that we’re going to have to change our shopping habits. We’re going to have to change our water consumption patterns. We’re going to have to figure out the solution to how major cities in the west and southwest are going to run out of water sooner versus later. We're going to have to figure these sorts of things out, and I would love to have solutions, but I don’t.”