Is bottled water really “natural” if it’s contaminated with microplastics? A series of lawsuits recently filed against six bottled water brands claim that it’s deceptive to use labels like “100 percent mountain spring water” and “natural spring water” — not because of the water’s provenance, but because it is likely tainted with tiny plastic fragments.
Reasonable consumers, the suits allege, would read those labels and assume bottled water to be totally free of contaminants; if they knew the truth, they might not have bought it. “Plaintiff would not have purchased, and/or would not have paid a price premium” for bottled water had they known it contained “dangerous substances,” reads the lawsuit filed against the bottled water company Poland Spring.
The six lawsuits target the companies that own Arrowhead, Crystal Geyser, Evian, Fiji, Ice Mountain, and Poland Spring. They are variously seeking damages for lost money, wasted time, and “stress, aggravation, frustration, loss of trust, loss of serenity, and loss of confidence in product labeling.”
Experts aren’t sure it’s a winning legal strategy, but it’s a creative new approach for consumers hoping to protect themselves against the ubiquity of microplastics. Research over the past several years has identified these particles — fragments of plastic less than 5 millimeters in diameter — just about everywhere, in nature and in people’s bodies. Studies have linked them to an array of health concerns, including heart disease, reproductive problems, metabolic disorder, and, in one recent landmark study, an increased risk of death from any cause.
Of the six class-action lawsuits, five were filed earlier this year by the law firm of Todd M. Friedman, a consumer protection and employment firm with locations in California, Illinois, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. The sixth was filed by the firm Ahdoot & Wolfson on behalf of a New York City resident.
Each lawsuit uses the same general argument to make its case, beginning with research on the prevalence of microplastics in bottled water. Several of them cite a 2018 study from Orb Media and the State University of New York in Fredonia that found microplastic contamination in 93 percent of bottles tested across 11 brands in nine countries. In half of the brands tested, researchers found more than 1,000 pieces of microplastic per liter. (A standard bottle can hold about half a liter of water.) More recent research has found that typical water bottles have far higher levels: 240,000 particles per liter on average, taking into account smaller fragments known as “nanoplastics.”
The complaints then go on to argue that bottled water contaminated with microplastics cannot be “natural,” as implied by product labels like “natural artisan water” (Fiji), “100 percent natural spring water” (Poland Spring), and “natural spring water” (Evian). The suit against Poland Spring cites a dictionary definition of natural as “existing in or caused by nature; not made or caused by humankind.” That lawsuit and the others also point to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which does not strictly regulate the use of the word “natural” but has “a longstanding policy” of considering the term to mean a food is free from synthetic or artificial additives “that would not normally be expected to be in that food.”.
The lawsuit against Arrowhead bottled water, advertised as “100 percent mountain spring water,” argues that it’s the “100 percent” that’s deceptive. “Reasonable consumers do not understand the term ‘100 percent’ to mean ‘99 percent,’ ‘98 percent,’ ‘97 percent,’ or any other percentage except for ‘100 percent,’” the complaint reads. In other words, consumers expect a product that’s labeled as 100 percent water to contain exactly 0 percent microplastics.
Are reasonable consumers really taking labels so literally? Jeff Sovern, a professor of consumer protection law at the University of Maryland, said it’s “plausible” that people would expect bottled water labeled as “natural” to not contain non-natural microplastics, but it’s hard to say without conducting a survey. It will be up to judges to evaluate that argument — if the cases go to trial. One of the lawsuits filed by the firm of Todd M. Friedman against the company that owns Crystal Geyser was withdrawn last month, potentially a sign that the parties reached a settlement.
“A lot of these types of cases get settled,” said Laura Smith, legal director of the nonprofit Truth in Advertising, Inc. This may reflect the strength of the plaintiffs’ arguments, or it could reflect a company’s desire to avoid the expense of going to court.
In response to Grist’s request for comment, Evian — owned by Danone — said it could not comment on active litigation, but that it “denies the allegations and will vigorously defend itself in the lawsuit.”
“Microplastics and nanoplastics are found throughout the environment in our soil, air, and water, and their presence is a complex and evolving area of science,” a spokesperson told Grist, adding that the FDA has not issued regulations for nano- or microplastic particles in food and beverage products.
The companies named in the other lawsuits — BlueTriton Brands Inc., CG Roxane LLC, and The Wonderful Co. LLC — did not respond to requests for comment.
Erica Cirino, a spokesperson for the nonprofit Plastic Pollution Coalition, said the new lawsuits are part of a longstanding effort to hold bottled water companies accountable not only for microplastic contamination, but also for other misleading claims about their products’ purity. A lawsuit against Nestlé in 2017 said its “Pure Life Purified” brand name and labels misrepresented the purity of its water, in violation of the California Legal Remedies Act. That case was dismissed in 2019 for a “failure to allege a cognizable legal theory”; the latest lawsuits’ “natural” claims represent a different tactic.
Evian-branded bottled water.
Roy Rochlin / Getty Images
Perhaps the best-known legal challenges have involved the origin of so-called “spring water.” In 2017, for example, a class-action lawsuit against Nestlé Waters North America, which owned Poland Spring at the time, said the company was fooling customers into buying “ordinary groundwater.” A U.S. district court judge dismissed that suit in 2018 on the grounds that its allegations improperly cited violations of a state law, rather than a federal one. Nestlé settled a similar lawsuit in 2003 for $10 million, though it denied that its practices had been deceptive.
More recent lawsuits have taken aim at bottled water companies’ claims that their products are “carbon neutral,” or that their bottles are “100 percent recyclable.” Only 9 percent of plastics worldwide ever get recycled.
Many of these lawsuits have yet to be evaluated by a judge, although a 2021 complaint against Niagara Bottling over “100 percent recyclable” labels was tossed out by a U.S. district court judge in New York in the following year.
According to Smith, one hurdle for these lawsuits is that they’re only able to cite research on the microplastics’ potential to damage people’s health, rather than actual damages that they’ve suffered from drinking contaminated bottled water. Even if the plaintiffs did have health problems linked to microplastics, these particles are ubiquitous; it would be nearly impossible to isolate the effects from drinking microplastics in bottled water from those of microplastics found everywhere else.
“It’s a wider systemic issue with our entire food and beverage supply,” Cirino said.
Keeping microplastics out of people’s bodies would require a similarly systemic approach, potentially involving government rules and incentives for companies to replace single-use plastics with reusables made from glass and aluminum — as well as an overall reduction in the amount of plastic the world makes. In the meantime, one recent article in The Dieline floated the idea of putting microplastics warning labels on plastic water bottles.
The first sign of trouble bubbled up from gopher holes a stone’s throw from Stan Ledgerwood’s front door. The salt water left an oily sheen on the soil and a swath of dead grass in the yard.
It was June 2017, and Ledgerwood and his wife, Tina, had recently built a home on the family farm, 230 acres of green amidst the rolling hills and long horizons of south-central Oklahoma. There they planned to spend their retirement, close to Stan’s parents on land that has been in the family since 1920.
The view from the porch took in Stan’s parents’ house, two rows of pecan trees his great-grandfather had planted in the 1930s, and the forest shielding the Washita River, a muddy brown ribbon flowing along the southern edge of the farm. The nearest town, Maysville, has a population of 1,087.
“The only people who come down our road are either lost or the mailman,” said Stan, a husky man with a biting sense of humor.
Also visible from the porch was metal piping in a red-gated enclosure: an aging oil well.
Like many property owners in this rural farming community, the Ledgerwoods own their land but only a meager percentage of the oil beneath it. Pump jacks nod up and down in nearby fields of soybeans and alfalfa.
Stan and Tina Ledgerwood in the family’s pecan grove.
Mark Olalde/ProPublica
Stan’s 84-year-old parents, Don and Shirley Ledgerwood, have watched oil companies drill multiple wells on their farm, where the family had grown crops and run cattle. The family received small royalty payments from the oil production. And decades later, they had to allow a wastewater pipe to cross the farm when another company, Southcreek Petroleum Co. LLC, redrilled the well behind the red gate. The well, which plunged about 9,000 feet into the earth, was repurposed to inject salt water into the geologic formation and push any remaining oil up to other wells.
A new production boom never materialized for Southcreek in this slice of Garvin County, and the family didn’t hear much from the oil company.
“When they were through here,” Don said, “we thought we were finished with the oil business.”
But then a corroded valve malfunctioned underground, injecting brine into the soil, according to a report by a Southcreek contractor.
After salt water leaked from an oil well on the Ledgerwoods’ farm, fouling part of their land and their drinking water, the family struggled for years to hold oil companies accountable. Jason Crow/InvestigateTV+
A few days after the release was discovered in June 2017, Stan met with Southcreek and the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, the state’s oil and gas regulatory agency. At the meeting, the company characterized the incident as a “small spill,” the Ledgerwoods later alleged in court. It was unclear how long the leak lasted, but the saltwater plume had already saturated the soil and killed 2 acres of vegetation by the time it broke the surface, according to state oil regulators.
Samples analyzed a month later by Oklahoma State University found that the soil’s concentration of chloride, which occurs in the type of salt water injected into the well, had risen to more than 12 times the state’s acceptable level and was “sufficiently high to reduce yield of even salt tolerant crops.”
Other tests showed that chloride levels in the family’s water well had spiked to more than five times what the Environmental Protection Agency deems safe. The tests didn’t look for other contaminants like heavy metals that are often left behind by the oil production process.
The Ledgerwoods entered a grim limbo, wondering what toxins might be in the cloudy water coming from their faucets and waiting for someone to address the problem.
They experienced firsthand the policy failures that have allowed the oil and gas industry to reap profits without ensuring there will be money to clean up drill sites when the wells run dry and the drillers flee. A recent ProPublica and Capital and Main investigation found a shortfall of about $150 billion between funds set aside to plug wells in major oil-producing states and the true cost of doing so. When the Ledgerwoods later sought to hold the drillers accountable, the family learned how easily oil companies can use bankruptcy to leave their mess to landowners.
Don began traveling 30 miles round-trip to Walmart to buy bottled water. Stan and Tina’s steel pots rusted after being washed, and their 2-year-old great-niece’s skin became irritated and inflamed after repeatedly washing her hands while they potty-trained her. In a text message, the girl’s mother described her hands as looking like they had “a burn.”
Southcreek did not respond to ProPublica and Capital & Main’s requests for comment. In court, the company denied calling the release “small” and argued that the groundwater contamination was contained to the two impacted acres the state identified.
The Ledgerwoods watched in horror as the farm that represented their past and their hope for the future languished. Somehow it had to be fixed, they believed. The rest of the family had also considered retiring to the farm, said Steve Ledgerwood, Stan’s brother and a lawyer in nearby Norman, but that plan was going up in smoke.
“We’ve gone out and made our living and done what we were supposed to do, and we wanted to have a relaxed, peaceful life,” Steve said. “And it has been anything but that.”
“Our only source of fresh water”
The Ledgerwoods and other farmers in Garvin and McClain counties started worrying the moment the oil industry returned in 2012.
Southcreek and other oil companies wanted to resume extraction from the oil field underlying Maysville. But the reservoir was old, so they proposed flooding it with water to force the oil to the surface. Don Ledgerwood and other local farmers signed a petition beseeching the Corporation Commission to reject the companies’ plans.
After an oil well leaked salt water just outside her front door, Tina Ledgerwood wondered what else was in the water flowing from her taps.
Mark Olalde/ProPublica
“This aquifer is our only source of fresh water for our homes, families and livestock,” the farmers wrote. “We fear that any error in development and production could lead to devastating contamination to this critical freshwater supply.”
The farmers didn’t sway the Corporation Commission, and in 2014, Southcreek redrilled the well on the Ledgerwoods’ land. The company was small but produced about $4 million worth of oil and gas from the area, adjusted for inflation, according to an analysis of Oklahoma Tax Commission data.
State regulators are supposed to minimize the risks that accompany oil and gas production, including by mandating that drillers plug old wells to prevent them from leaking greenhouse gases into the atmosphere or leaching toxic chemicals into the land and water.
Cows graze in a pasture in Garvin County, Oklahoma, where farmers tried and failed to block renewed activity from oil companies over fears of water pollution. Jason Crow/InvestigateTV+
In theory, cleanup is guaranteed by financial instruments called bonds that companies fund and that regulators can put toward the cost of retiring wells if drillers go bankrupt or walk away. Sufficient bonding creates an incentive for companies to plug their own wells: Once the work is completed, the company gets its bond back. But when bonding requirements are lax, there’s little to deter drillers from forfeiting their bonds and leaving their wells as “orphans.”
Oklahoma allows companies to cover an unlimited number of wells with a single $25,000 bond. Alternatively, companies can satisfy bonding requirements by proving they are worth at least $50,000, in which case they often do not have to set aside any real money in bonds. Corporation Commission spokesperson Matt Skinner said the agency was unable to find a single case where the state recouped enough money to plug a well from companies that relied solely on the latter option.
To cover all of its roughly 30 wells, Southcreek held a $25,000 bond and filed paperwork to show it was worth at least $50,000. (Different agencies disagree on how many wells Southcreek operated.)
The well that spoiled the Ledgerwoods’ drinking water is one of the 18,500 that the Corporation Commission classifies as orphaned. “We would not be surprised to see that number go higher,” Skinner said. State taxpayers will ultimately be on the hook to plug many of them, or the state can leave the wells unplugged, but many will continue leaking.
Some orphan well cleanup in Oklahoma is funded by a voluntary 0.1 percent fee paid by industry on the sale of oil and natural gas. The Oklahoma Energy Resources Board spent $156 million of the funds collected from this fee over the past three decades. The state has an additional orphan well fund with several million dollars in it.
But Oklahoma has more than 260,000 unplugged wells — behind only Texas — according to data from energy industry software firm Enverus. To plug and clean up the state’s wells could cost approximately $7.3 billion, according to an analysis of state records. Oklahoma has just $45 million in bonds.
A state contractor plugs an orphan Southcreek Petroleum Co. LLC oil well on a farm across the road from the Ledgerwoods’ property.
Mark Olalde/ProPublica
The oil industry’s bonds are “shockingly inadequate,” said Peter Morgan, a Sierra Club senior attorney. “It’s clear that abandoning wells and leaving communities and taxpayers to foot the bill to clean them up is baked into the oil and gas industry business model.”
At the Capitol in Oklahoma City, which features repurposed oil derricks outside its main entrance, Republican state Rep. Brad Boles has tried for several years to address the shortfall. This year, he introduced a bill to create a tiered bonding system based on the number of wells a company operates, increasing the highest required bond to $150,000.
“We have a huge liability in our state that we’re trying to get better control of,” he said, acknowledging that his bill would only be a partial solution. “It’s a lot better than it was, but it’s nowhere near where we need to be.”
The Oklahoma House of Representatives and a Senate committee both passed it unanimously, but the bill didn’t receive a vote on the Senate floor. Boles pledged to run a similar bill next session.
“They’re doing you a favor if they clean up”
Shortly after the 2017 brine release, Southcreek began cleaning up with funds from an insurance policy. Fox Hollow Consultants Inc., an environmental consulting firm working with Southcreek, warned in a report that “the remediation of ground water impacted by saltwater is at best a difficult undertaking, costly, and often not effective.”
A monument to oil stands outside the Oklahoma Capitol.
Mark Olalde/ProPublica
A stream of trucks rumbled down the Ledgerwoods’ once-quiet gravel road as workers removed enough dirt to fill 750 dump trucks and pumped more than 71,000 gallons from the Ledgerwoods’ water well.
But the dangerous concentrations of chloride didn’t change, according to Fox Hollow’s report.
A family who leased the Ledgerwoods’ farmland decided not to plant a crop and removed their cattle.
Nearly two years after the spill was discovered, the company drilled new water wells next to each house, but questions about the safety of drinking the water persisted. Southcreek eventually halted its cleanup, and the Corporation Commission deemed the incident resolved.
“It’s your own property, but you’re made to feel like they’re doing you a favor if they clean up their pollution,” Stan Ledgerwood said.
The Ledgerwoods considered moving. A nearby farm was for sale. Although it was half the acreage with only one house, the water was clean and they could distance themselves from the debacle on their farm. So they held an auction for their farm in June 2019.
Workers remove contaminated soil from the Ledgerwoods’ farm after the 2017 saltwater release. Courtesy of Stan Ledgerwood
Their property had been appraised to be worth around $1 million before the spill. They feared bids would be low — they had disclosed the water issues to potential buyers — yet the offers from the auction were shocking, with bids for the whole farm coming in at $450,000.
Potential buyers’ “first question was about the water, and I couldn’t say it was safe,” Stan said.
Still, the Ledgerwoods needed to pay their attorneys, so they sold nearly all the land, about 200 acres, including the fields that earned them income. The family kept the two houses, with the injection well sitting in the field between them.
The same week as the auction, the Ledgerwoods sued Southcreek. The family’s lawsuit also named as defendants Wise Oil & Gas No. 10 Ltd. and Newkumet Exploration Inc. — which each owned an interest in the oil Southcreek was pumping — as well as the companies that manufactured and sold the well’s corroded valve. The family sought reimbursement for expenses related to the spill, monetary damages and an order that the oil companies finish removing the contaminated soil and water.
In court, Newkumet denied responsibility because it did not operate the well, while the other companies argued that the failed valve was not defective.
On a recent, unseasonably warm winter day, with a mackerel sky hanging over the property, Stan and Tina Ledgerwood talked about what brought them back to the farm. Stan had worked for three decades at the Oklahoma Electric Cooperative, a nonprofit utility, while Tina held an administrative role at the University of Oklahoma, and they looked forward to a peaceful retirement.
“There’s a draw to the beauty here,” Tina said.
There were also family memories stretching back a century. Tina recalled taking her niece to camp along the Washita, where sandbars interrupt the river’s meandering flow and willows grow on the red dirt banks.
Her niece still talked about eating the best hamburger of her life on one of those excursions, Tina said with a laugh. “It’s frustrating,” she added, her tone shifting, “because you look out there and it’s not yours anymore.”
Stan and Tina Ledgerwood at the failed injection well.
Mark Olalde/ProPublica
Company executives acknowledged they declared bankruptcy to avoid legal fees associated with the Ledgerwoods’ suit, according to court records.
Bankruptcy court has become an easy escape hatch for the industry to shed its costly obligations. More than 250 oil and gas companies in the U.S. filed for bankruptcy protection between 2015 and 2021, bringing about $175 billion in debt with them, according to research from law firm Haynes and Boone. (Haynes and Boone is representing ProPublica in several Texas lawsuits.)
Sen. Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, said it is “outrageous” that oil executives can pay themselves handsomely before offloading liabilities via bankruptcy. He is preparing a Senate bill to amend the Bankruptcy Code to address this pattern in the oil industry.
“They privatize the profits, and then they dump the costs on the taxpayer, which is an outrageous arrangement that needs to end,” Merkley said, adding that “this is not just one company in one place. This is a practice that has been exquisitely developed by the industry.”
Josh Macey, a University of Chicago law professor who studies bankruptcy, said that “one of the most significant benefits you get when you file for bankruptcy protection is the automatic stay,” which puts other cases on hold while the bankruptcy is ongoing.
The Wise Oil & Gas bankruptcy halted the Ledgerwoods’ suit.
So the Ledgerwoods ventured into labyrinthian bankruptcy court proceedings as creditors. But the bankruptcy filings for Wise Oil & Gas — which owned a 20 percent stake in the oil underlying the Ledgerwood farm — listed between $1 million and $10 million in liabilities against less than $33,000 in assets.
While Wise Oil & Gas appeared to be underwater, financial and legal documents showed that the company was one node in a sprawling business empire run by the wealthy Cocanougher family of North Texas.
Alongside their extended family, brothers Daniel and Robert Cocanougher own the web of businesses that included real estate holdings, golf courses, trash services, charitable organizations and more. A company representative estimated in court that the family controlled more than 100 companies. The entire operation was managed by Cocanougher Asset Management #1 LLC out of an office in North Richland Hills, Texas, near Fort Worth.
Wise Oil & Gas was kept afloat by more than 30 loans from other Cocanougher companies, chiefly Wise Resources Ltd., which shared an office with the oil company, according to records filed in court. The loans ensured the oil company had enough cash to operate, but it otherwise hovered around insolvency. Wise Oil & Gas periodically held less than $0 in its account, internal records revealed in court show.
The Ledgerwoods would never see any money from the Cocanoughers’ businesses.
“A pretty ordinary situation”
In bankruptcy, secured creditors, whose debt is backed by collateral, are first in line to claim proceeds from the liquidating company’s assets. Unsecured creditors — such as the Ledgerwoods — are paid if there are funds left over. Even further back in line are environmental claims, such as money to plug wells.
One secured claim stood out: $1.9 million for Wise Resources. According to legal filings, a few months before declaring bankruptcy, Wise Oil & Gas had consolidated its “outstanding obligations” and transferred them to Wise Resources, although the deal was backdated to the previous year.
Southcreek tanks that formerly collected contaminated liquid near the Ledgerwoods’ farm are now leaking. Jason Crow/InvestigateTV+
During one deposition, Jamie Downing, a lawyer for the Cocanoughers, went back and forth with Steve Ledgerwood, who occasionally represented his family, over whether Robert Cocanougher was “two different people” when he signed documents for Wise Oil & Gas and for Wise Resources.
“Robert Cocanougher is signing documents in his capacity as general partner of one entity or the manager of another entity,” Downing said. “They would not be the same person.”
Even though the Cocanoughers were wealthy, the layers of corporate entities between the family and the oil limited their liability for the saltwater spill. It is difficult to “pierce the corporate veil” and tie a company’s actions to individuals, so executives finding protection in bankruptcy is “a pretty ordinary situation,” Macey explained. “We’ve gone too far in shielding investors from the cost of corporate misconduct.”
Daniel and Robert Cocanougher and company attorneys did not respond to requests for comment. In court filings, the family and its companies argued that they were not responsible for the brine release and were within their rights to file for bankruptcy protection.
The Ledgerwoods soon realized the bankruptcy case would lead to neither the cleanup of their farm nor Wise Oil & Gas paying for the damage, so they filed a motion to dismiss it, sanction the Cocanoughers and force the company back into their Oklahoma lawsuit.
The judge overseeing the case was Mark X. Mullin, a former corporate bankruptcy attorney himself. At first, he acknowledged the Ledgerwoods’ plight. “To be clear, the court has a lot of empathy for what happened to the Ledgerwoods,” he said during an August 2021 hearing.
But two months later, Mullin ruled against the Ledgerwoods. He disagreed that Wise Oil & Gas had entered bankruptcy to shed bad investments and dodge cleanup obligations. He blasted the Ledgerwoods for requesting sanctions against the Cocanoughers.
“Merely because the Ledgerwood Creditors have been damaged by the saltwater contamination, this does not provide them with an unfettered right to retaliate or lash out against unrelated and far-removed targets, such as the Cocanougher Sanction Targets,” Mullin wrote.
If the Ledgerwoods wanted to continue seeking damages against the Cocanoughers and their businesses, they would have to pay the oil company’s attorneys’ fees, about $107,000, Mullin ruled.
Mullin declined to comment.
In September 2022, the trustee overseeing Wise’s liquidation reported that, after paying administrative fees, the company had no money for creditors. The Ledgerwoods withdrew their claim.
“I can’t afford to come in and clean it up”
The Ledgerwoods weren’t the only ones taking a financial hit. Southcreek, the well’s operator, also entered bankruptcy protection and began offloading its wells. Cleaning them all up could cost taxpayers nearly $1 million, based on the Corporation Commission’s average cost to plug a well.
Don Ledgerwood hauls clean water from a well at his son and daughter-in-law’s home.
Mark Olalde/ProPublica
Even before the company liquidated, Southcreek executive Gus Lovelace admitted to the state that the company had stopped maintaining its wells, according to Corporation Commission records.
The company left some wells to the state as orphans, including the injection well that fouled the Ledgerwoods’ land. Some ended up in the hands of other oil companies, although those, too, appear to be on the verge of becoming wards of the state.
Michael Brooks, a neighbor of the Ledgerwoods, lives on a farm that his father-in-law worked before him — they’ve put in more than 50 years between the two generations. On a recent winter morning, Brooks showed ProPublica and Capital & Main a 3-acre drill site that scars his land and provides him no royalties.
The plot would be Bermuda grass pasture for cattle, but the paddock instead hosts two inactive oil wells and huge tanks that the Ledgerwoods believe held the salt water that fouled their land. Brooks has to retrieve cows that slip through the barbed wire fence around the site and chew the wells’ rusting metal and drink wastewater.
“I’m at a complete loss,” he said from beneath the brim of a hat embroidered with the logo of an oil and gas pipeline company. “I can’t afford to come in and clean it up. I wouldn’t even know where to start.”
Brooks has for years tried to reach the companies that own the wells, calling phone numbers on the signs posted around them. No one ever answered or called back, he said.
ProPublica and Capital & Main’s attempts to contact the owners were also fruitless. Court records indicate several of the Southcreek wells on Brooks’ farm and other nearby properties were sold out of bankruptcy. But the first company that purchased them is not a registered oil operator in Oklahoma, and the Corporation Commission has no record of the business taking them over.
The idle wells were then transferred to another oil company, but, when asked about that transfer, Corporation Commission staff said they had made a mistake in approving it and would try to revoke it. The best Brooks can now hope for is the state declaring that the wells are orphaned and plugging them.
“It’s just so frustrating because it’s just here. We look at it every day outside our windows,” Brooks said, adding, “It’s been nothing but a pain.”
“We’ll never have back what we had”
Nearly seven years after brine first poured from gopher holes on the Ledgerwood farm, most of the land has been sold. But the well is still there, rusting behind a curtain of dry weeds.
“We don’t get these years back,” Stan Ledgerwood said. “There’s no way to pay for that. We’ll never have back what we had.”
Stan and Tina drink from their new water well. But Don and Shirley Ledgerwood, Stan’s parents, don’t trust the water that flows from their faucets, as their house sits at a lower elevation than the injection well and water tests have shown occasional increases in the salt concentration.
Don’s back is slightly hunched, but his sprightliness belies his 84 years. He still cuts the expanse of grass surrounding his old brick house, and Stan long ago gave up asking to do it for him. “He doesn’t do it right,” Don said, as he filled 5-gallon blue plastic jugs with water from Stan’s well. In one form or another, Don has been hauling water for six years.
As he hoisted the jugs into his off-road vehicle, Don lamented that landowners have to allow oil companies to drill on their property, only to see those operators avoid the costly cleanup.
“That’s not right,” he said.
The sun was rising higher, and Don had more chores to do. So he finished loading the water jugs and whisked them down the gravel road, kicking up dust that hung in the air alongside his parting words.
The coastal communities of Guayama and Salinas in southern Puerto Rico feature acres of vibrant green farmland, and a rich, biodiverse estuary, the protected Jobos Bay, which stretches between the neighboring townships. But this would-be tropical paradise is also the home of both a 52-year-old oil-fired power plant and a 22-year-old coal-fired power plant, which local residents say contaminate their drinking water and air, and harm people’s health.
“It’s a classic sacrifice zone,” said Ruth Santiago, a lawyer and community activist who has fought against environmental injustice in Puerto Rico for more than 20 years. “A friend calls this ‘the beautiful place with serious problems.’”
Local residents envision a cleaner future as these fossil fuel plants are scheduled to retire within the next several years. They see rooftop solar as the best alternative as the island transitions to renewable energy.
In November 2023, the federal government allocated $440 million in funding for rooftop solar energy in Puerto Rico, part of a billion dollar energy investment in the island. Officials, in recent years, have acknowledged that the region has suffered as the home of polluting power plants.
After a 2022 visit to Salinas and Guayama, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan announced a plan to spend $100,000 to improve monitoring of the air and water pollution from the coal-fired power plant, which is owned by Virginia-based Applied Energy Services Corporation, or AES.
“For too long, communities in Puerto Rico have suffered untold inequities—from challenges with access to clean drinking water to fragile infrastructure that cannot withstand the increase and intensity of storms brought on by climate change,” Regan said in a press release.
The EPA examined a drinking water sample in May 2023 from groundwater near the power plants that supplies drinking water to the region and found that metal levels did not exceed federal criteria. EPA public information officer Carlos Vega said more samples will be analyzed and the EPA will continue to inform the community. No timeline for the additional testing has been established.
For decades, most of Puerto Rico’s electricity has been generated in the southern part of the island. The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority uses over 30,000 miles of distribution lines to send energy generated in the south to more urban areas, primarily in the north, like San Juan.
Coastal power plants in the south have posed health risks for community members, Santiago said; according to a 2022 report from the environmental law nonprofit Earthjustice, the AES plant produces 800 tons of coal ash waste per day that contaminates the air and nearby waters. Many low-income residents in the south struggle to pay electricity bills that are more than 30 percent higher than in the U.S. as a whole. Nearly half of Guayama’s residents were below the poverty line in 2022.
AES did not respond to multiple email requests for comment. AES Puerto Rico said that their plants are in compliance with regulations in a 2020 press release.
The Aguirre Power Complex oil-fired plant in Salinas, Puerto Rico is scheduled to retire by 2030. The plant neighbors Jobos Bay, a protected estuary home to multiple endangered species, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association.
Esther Frances/Medill News Service
An EPA inspection in 2021 revealed the coal facility was not in compliance with the Clean Water Act for releasing polluted stormwater without a permit. In 2022, the EPA found the coal plant exceeded legal emission limits for pollutants like carbon monoxide and mercury, according to an Earthjustice analysis. The EPA issued several other violations for the coal plant dating back to 2019, citing it for inadequate disposal of coal ash and endangering residents, according to the Environmental Integrity Project, an environmental watchdog group.
“People know that it’s a terrible impact, but it’s not easy to move to find somewhere else to live,” Santiago said.
Many local residents cannot move because average home prices have increased across the island since Hurricane Maria hit in 2017, according to activists and researchers in Puerto Rico.
The coal plant is scheduled to retire in 2027, when a 25-year contract expires between AES and the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority. To replace coal, AES has turned to utility-scale solar power.
AES Puerto Rico began construction for the 135-acre Ilumina Solar PV Park in Guayama in 2011. AES Puerto Rico’s coal plant, solar farm and some smaller projects together supplied up to 25 percent of Puerto Rico’s electricity.
A few solar farms have already been built on the South Coast, and in February 2022, the Puerto Rican Energy Bureau approved 18 new utility-scale solar panel projects across the island. Critics say the solar farms are using dwindling agricultural land, and a group of environmental and public health organizations including Earthjustice and the Sierra Club Puerto Rico filed a lawsuit in August 2023 to stop the government of Puerto Rico from allowing the solar farms to be built on ecologically important land.
A 2019 law mandated that the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority reduce the use of fossil fuels for electrical generation on the island and generate 100 percent renewable energy by 2050. In addition, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority issued an Integrated Resource Plan in 2020 that includes a plan to retire the Aguirre Power Complex oil-fired plant by 2030.
Instead of large solar farms, many local organizations in Puerto Rico see a better solution for their region’s electricity production—rooftop solar panels. They prefer this kind of solar energy for communities because unlike large solar facilities, rooftop solar installations do not use up farmland, which in Puerto Rico decreased by 37.5 percent between 2012 and 2018, according to the Census of Agriculture.
In February, the Department of Energy released results of its study of Puerto Rican renewable energy, named PR100. The study reported the huge potential for rooftop solar in Puerto Rico—up to 6,100 MW by 2050 under the most aggressive scenario—but said utility-scale renewable energy would still be needed.
The study also noted the challenges in deploying rooftop solar, including unstable roofs and lack of property titles. But Puerto Rico has a long way to go to reach the 2050 green energy goal; as of 2022, only 6 percent of electricity generated in Puerto Rico was renewable.
Ruth Santiago’s son Jose and other electricians helped install rooftop solar panels in Salinas neighborhoods through Coquí Solar, a community-based organization working to help low-income and vulnerable residents access solar energy.
The solar kits from Coquí Solar provided homes with solar panels and batteries, which could provide electricity during a blackout. Rooftop solar arrays often cannot meet a home’s entire electricity demand, but the battery storage the solar array generates can run crucial things like refrigerators, lights and medical equipment in case of an electrical blackout, while also reducing a household’s energy bills significantly.
The kits cost about $7,000, which Ruth Santiago said Coquí Solar purchased using grants from various Puerto Rico-based organizations and foundations. Coquí Solar, working with other organizations in the area, also installed the equipment in the homes of vulnerable community members for free. Jose Santiago said the elderly and people living with chronic illnesses and disabilities in the area suffer during blackouts, which are frequent on the island.
“Every year, the power leaves for five, six days,” Jose Santiago said. “Sometimes more, sometimes several times, and you don’t want to see the old people in the line at the gas station trying to get ice to put in their fridge. So, [rooftop solar energy] helps them.”
After Hurricane Maria caused structural damages to the island’s electrical infrastructure in 2017, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority reported that all of their electric consumers, over 1.5 million customers, were without power. Some Puerto Rico residents spent close to 11 months without power, according to climate change and development specialist Ramón Bueno.
“That just sounds like a number, but all we have to think about is how do we deal with losing power for two, three days? That’s radical,” Bueno said. “So, two, three months is very radical. And five times that is even more.”
Ruth Santiago said Coquí Solar’s rooftop solar installments have empowered the community by giving residents “agency” over their electricity generation. The desire for electricity independence had grown in Puerto Rico after recent destructive hurricanes and other impacts of climate change.
Organizations like Coquí Solar have spent years working toward decentralizing solar energy across the island, and Bueno said many are strong and independent.
“They’re pretty articulate framers of an alternative way to move forward with energy systems,” Bueno said.
Ruth Santiago worried that the retirement dates of the coal and oil plants could be delayed or that a new infrastructure would depend heavily on utility scale solar that would rely on a centralized grid and expose communities to blackouts during and after storms. She hoped that concerns about the community’s health and environment would be enough to force the plants to close on schedule and that rooftop solar would be prioritized over large-scale solar.
“We need to really go beyond resilience, we need to go toward energy security and sovereignty, and that’s what we’re trying to do, at least create and do these pilot projects, these community-based examples of what that transformation would look like,” Ruth Santiago said. “If we don’t do it now, then when?”
The United States Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has proposed the ending of new coal leases on federal land in Montana and Wyoming’s Powder River Basin (PRB) — the nation’s most productive area for the highly polluting fossil fuel.
The new proposal would impact millions of acres of mineral reserves on federal lands, reported The Associated Press. However, the short-term effects will likely be limited since the leases take years to develop and there is less demand for coal.
“This is a monumental decision that will save lives, safeguard our environment, and significantly cut carbon emissions in the United States,” said Drew Caputo, Earthjustice vice president of litigation for lands, wildlife, and oceans, in a press release from Earthjustice. “We are grateful that the Biden administration has shown the courage to end coal leasing in the Powder River Basin and at long last turn the page on this climate-destroying fuel.”
BLM has issued the final version of a supplemental impact statement (SEIS), as well as an amendment to the land use plan for its Buffalo Field Office, a press release from BLM said.
BLM developed the amendment and SEIS in response to a federal court order from 2022.
“The BLM’s proposed alternative, Alternative A, would amend the 2015 Buffalo Field Office resource management plan and make BLM-managed coal resources in the planning areas unavailable for future leasing. Federal coal production is anticipated to continue through 2041 under existing leases,” the BLM press release said.
The SEIS looks at alternatives to Buffalo Field Office federal coal leases and provides updated data and analysis of the health impacts of fossil fuel development in the area.
In 2022, the 12 surface coal mines that were active in the region produced roughly 220 million “short tons” of coal, down from approximately 400 million tons 14 years earlier.
The Energy Information Administration has said that coal production in both the PRB and the U.S. peaked in 2008 and have declined sharply since.
The proposal brought criticism from Republicans in Congress on the heels of a new air quality regulation by President Joe Biden that could lead to coal-fired plants being shut down if they don’t reduce their pollution, The Associated Press reported.
Environmentalists said the new proposal indicates a shift in the country’s coal policy.
“Coal companies in this region already have decades of coal locked up under leases, and it’s hard to imagine they’ll find buyers that far into the future given the competition from more affordable energy sources,” said Mark Fix, a Montana rancher who belongs to the conservation group Northern Plains Resource Council, as reported by The Associated Press.
Government analyses of the BLM proposal have said stopping federal coal leases would lower carbon dioxide emissions from the fossil fuel equal to 293 million tons annually — about the same as produced by 63 million gas-powered vehicles.
“The BLM’s decision to end coal leasing is a sea change in the transition to clean energy,” saidDerf Johnson, Montana Environmental Information Center’s deputy director, in the press release from Earthjustice. “As we wind down the coal mining in the PRB, there is an immense opportunity to continue growing the clean energy economy.”
“I am very worried about the state of the world’s coral reefs,” said Derek Manzello, coordinator for NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch, as Reuters reported. “We are seeing (ocean temperatures) play out right now that are very extreme in nature.”
Coral bleaching happens when warm ocean surface temperatures cause the colorful algae that live in the tissues of corals to be expelled. Without the symbiotic benefits of the algae, corals turn pale and become vulnerable to disease and starvation.
“From February 2023 to April 2024, significant coral bleaching has been documented in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres of each major ocean basin,” Manzello said in the press release.
Since early last year, mass coral bleaching has been confirmed in the Caribbean, Florida, Brazil, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the eastern Tropical Pacific, large swaths of the South Pacific, the Gulf of Aden, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf and other areas of the Indian Ocean.
“As the world’s oceans continue to warm, coral bleaching is becoming more frequent and severe. When these events are sufficiently severe or prolonged, they can cause coral mortality, which hurts the people who depend on the coral reefs for their livelihoods,” Manzello added.
Mass coral bleaching has been documented in at least 62 nations and territories, reported Reuters.
During the previous global event — from 2014 to 2017 — 56.1 percent of coral reefs were subjected to heat stress sufficient to cause bleaching. Another event in 2010 affected 35 percent of reef area, while the first worldwide bleaching in 1998 struck 20 percent of reefs.
“Climate model predictions for coral reefs have been suggesting for years that bleaching impacts would increase in frequency and magnitude as the ocean warms,” said Jennifer Koss, NOAA’s Coral Reef Conservation Program director, according to NOAA.
NOAA noted that Atlantic Ocean corals have been most affected by rising ocean temperatures. Nearly all — 99.7 percent — of the reefs in the basin have been subjecting to heat stress leading to bleaching over the last year, Reuters reported.
Corals are likely to suffer more this summer, with the Southern Caribbean already accumulating heat stress at bleaching levels in some areas.
“This is alarming because this has never happened so early in the year before,” Manzello said, as reported by Reuters. “El Nino is dissipating, but the ocean is still anomalously hot. It won’t take much additional warming to push temperatures past the bleaching threshold.”
The Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) in the Bay Area of California is set to fully transition its school bus fleet to electric buses. With this move, it is expected to become the first big school district in the U.S. to switch to 100% electric buses with vehicle-to-grid (V2G) capabilities.
The school district has partnered with Zūm, a school transportation services company, to acquire a fleet of 74 entirely electric buses. In addition, the school district will receive bidirectional chargers, which can not only charge the buses but send stored or excess energy from the vehicles back to the grid.
This means the fleet of electric buses and chargers will double as a virtual power plant (VPP). Zūm reported the OUSD fleet VPP is expected to send 2.1 gigawatt hours (GWh) per year back to the grid, which will save about 25,000 tons of emissions.
“Oakland becoming the first in the nation to have a 100% electric school bus fleet is a huge win for the Oakland community and the nation as a whole,” said Kim Raney, executive director of transportation at Oakland Unified School District, as reported by Smart Energy International. “The families of Oakland are disproportionately disadvantaged and affected by high rates of asthma and exposure to air pollution from diesel fuels. Providing our students with cleaner and quieter transportation on electric school buses will be a game changer ensuring they have an equitable and stronger chance of success in the classroom.”
OUSD and Zūm are collaborating with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) via its Clean School Bus program, California Air Resource Board via the Heavy Vehicle Incentive Program, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, Clean Mobility Operations programs and Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) to electrify OUSD’s fleet.
According to the California Air Resources Board, OUSD’s fleet transports 1,300 students to and from school each day. Soon, students will be able to ride emissions-free, electric buses in an area vulnerable to poor air quality. A recent American Lung Association report found that Alameda County is one of the most polluted counties to live in the U.S.; Oakland is located in Alameda County.
Countrywide, student transportation has more than 500,000 school buses, with 90% of these buses using fossil fuels for power. This contributes 8.4 million tons of emissions per year, Zūm reported.
Zūm has set a target to help electrify 10,000 buses in the U.S. and plans to work toward electrifying the larger transportation fleets for San Francisco Unified School District and Los Angeles Unified School District, Electrek reported.
“We at Zūm strongly believe it is time to move beyond pilots and deploy sustainability solutions at scale. Converting the Oakland Unified school bus fleet to 100% electric with VPP capability is the right step in that direction,” Ritu Narayan, founder and CEO of Zūm, said in a statement. “This historic milestone is a win-win proposition: Electric school buses with V2G provide students with cleaner, fume-free transportation and allow us to send untapped energy from the bus batteries back to the grid, creating an enormous impact on grid resilience.”
The bill has finally wound its way through the legislature, backed by tremendous support in both chambers. It now heads to Republican Governor Phil Scott for his signature, which he has suggested he will not provide. But with two-thirds of the House of Representatives and 26 of 30 Senators supporting the law, the Vermont General Assembly could achieve an easy override should the governor choose to exercise his right to veto. Once the bill takes effect, Vermont will be the first state to make Big Oil pay for the impacts of climate disasters.
“The sad truth is we have had multiple devastating climate events in the past year leading up to the legislative session that really drove home the need for this kind of action with Vermont legislators,” said Ben Edgerly Walsh, who helped champion the bill as the climate and energy program director at the nonprofit Vermont Public Interest Research Group. Politicians of every description received the message of the moment, giving the bill strong support across the state’s Democratic, Republican, and Progressive parties.
The law, which faces an almost certain legal challenge, builds on the polluter-pays principle that guides existing hazardous waste remediation laws, and it will mandate that the largest extractors and refiners of fossil fuels contribute — with amounts relative to the emissions they expelled between 1995 and 2025 — to a fund established by the state treasurer. This Climate Superfund will have a two-fold goal: recoup the costs incurred in responding to and recovering from climate-amplified disasters, and dedicate revenues toward resilient infrastructure better equipped to withstand the storms to come.
Once the bill becomes law, a lot of work remains before Vermont sees even a cent. The biggest task falls on the scientists and government officials who will have to determine what big oil companies must pay into the fund and how much they owe. Attribution science provides the backbone for these calculations and for the Climate Superfund Act as a whole by building quantitative links between extreme weather and the emissions of major polluters. By running models that compare scenarios with and without human-induced greenhouse gas emissions, scientists can determine the degree to which climate change shaped a given bout of extreme weather. This method provides a robust basis for calculating the so-called social cost of carbon, and the financial responsibility of major emitters.
“Obviously, this is about these companies paying their fair share, not more than that,” said Edgerly Walsh. “We know that in any world, Vermonters are going to wind up paying significantly for the climate crisis, but these companies should pay their fair proportional share of these costs.”
The Environmental Protection Agency currently places the social cost of carbon at $51 per ton, a rate that Vermont’s treasurer can use to calculate how much fossil fuel companies owe the state based on what they’ve emitted. The money is certainly needed. A 2021 report projected that flooding alone could cost Vermont $5.2 billion over the course of the century. Already, the state has spent more per capita on climate disasters than all but four other states, according to the Vermont Atlas of Disaster.
To determine which businesses to levy the costs upon, the bill outlines a “nexus” of association with Vermont. Any fossil fuel company that has conducted business — such as marketing or selling their gas or coal products — in the Green Mountain State can be subject to the law. But the bill sets a high threshold for inclusion by targeting companies responsible for 1 billion metric tons or more of greenhouse gas emissions. This selective approach ensures that accountability falls on the worst offenders, those who have pumped excessive emissions in the atmosphere since the first United Nations climate conference in 1995. But trying to get the biggest fish on the hook in this way also comes with the greatest risk, and this bill will doubtless face legal pushback.
“The Vermont legislature has understood from the get-go that the fossil fuel industry would very likely use all the tools at its disposal to shirk accountability,” said Anthony Iarrapino, a lawyer who was consulted on the legal framework of the bill. The precedent set by other superfund laws and the expertise behind the scientific testimony have, according to Iarrapino, made the legislation robust enough to withstand challenge in the courts. “They have been very thorough in their analysis,” he said. The attribution method outlined within the bill is also understood to be quite conservative and will almost certainly underestimate how much Big Oil owes, which should further defend the law from claims of excessive burden.
Should the bill survive the legal challenges as expected, Vermont will be the first state in the nation to force Big Oil to pay for the climate disasters caused by its products, succeeding where New York, Maryland, and Massachusetts haven’t. Each has introduced similar legislation, but their efforts have stalled or failed. Last month, however, California joined the mix, introducing its own superfund bill that is currently maneuvering through committees. Such bills demonstrate how states and the nation can conjure creative solutions to the challenges ahead — including the ever-salient question: how to make polluters pay.
As the planet grapples with the ever-starker consequences of climate change, a debut book by Lumbee citizen and Duke University scientist Ryan Emanuel makes a convincing argument that climate change isn’t the problem — it’s a symptom. The problem, Emanuel explains in On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice, is settler colonialism and its extractive mindset, which for centuries have threatened and reshaped landscapes including Emanuel’s ancestral homeland in what today is eastern North Carolina. Real environmental solutions, Emanuel writes, require consulting with the Indigenous peoples who have both millennia of experience caring for specific places, and the foresight to avoid long-term disasters that can result from short-term material gain.
Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1977, Emanuel was one of a handful of Native students at school. He spent summers visiting family in Robeson County, North Carolina, the cultural center of the Lumbee Tribe, or People of the Dark Water, where he played outside with other children, occasionally exploring a nearby swamp, one of the many lush waterways that slowly wind through the region, with a cousin. Today, Emanuel visits those swamps to conduct research. He describes them with an abiding, sometimes poetic affection, such as one spring day when he stands calf-deep in swamp water, admiring white dogwood flowers floating on the dark surface as tadpoles dart underneath.
But that affection lives with tension. Emanuel describes trying to collect “reeking” floodwater samples from a ditch after 2018’s Hurricane Florence. In Emanuel’s retelling, a nearby landowner — a white farmer who uses poultry waste as fertilizer — threatens to shoot Emanuel. The sampling, the man believes, would threaten his livelihood, which is wrapped up in North Carolina’s extractive animal farming industry — a system of giant, polluting “concentrated animal feed operations” overwhelmingly owned and operated by white people, and exposing mainly racial minorities to dirty air and water. They are a sharp contrast to the small backyard farms and truck crops grown by Emanuel’s aunties and uncles back in Robeson County a generation ago. As the man holds his gun and lectures about environmental monitoring, Emanuel reflects silently that they are standing on his ancestors’ land. Ever the researcher, he later finds deed books from around the Revolutionary War showing Emanuels once owned more than a hundred acres of land in the vicinity. Still, he holds a wry sympathy for the man, who, he notes, is worried that environmental data will jeopardize his way of life in a place his family has lived for generations.
Eastern North Carolina is a landscape of sandy fields interwoven with lush riverways and swamplands, shaded by knobby-kneed bald cypress trees and soaked with gently-moving waterways the deep brown of “richly steeped tea,” Emanuel writes. In addition to water, the region oozes history: It includes Warren County, known as the birthplace of the environmental justice movement, where local and national civil rights leaders, protesting North Carolina’s decision to dump toxic, PCB-laden soil in a new landfill in a predominantly-Black community, coined the term “environmental racism.” It’s also the mythological birthplace of English colonialism, Roanoke Island. On the Swamp draws a through line from early colonization of the continent to ongoing fights against environmental racism and for climate justice, with detailed stops along the way: Emanuel’s meticulous research illustrates how the white supremacism that settlers used to justify colonialism still harms marginalized communities — both directly, through polluting industries, and indirectly, through climate change — today.
With convoluted waterways accessible only by small boats, and hidden hillocks of high ground where people could camp and grow crops, the swamplands of eastern North Carolina protected Emanuel’s ancestors, along with many other Indigenous peoples, from genocide and enslavement by settlers. Today, with climate change alternately drying out swamplands or flooding them with polluted water from swine and poultry operations, it’s the swamps that need protection, both as a geographic place, and an idea of home. The Lumbee nation is the largest Indigenous nation in the eastern United States, but because the Lumbee Tribe gained only limited federal recognition during the 1950s Termination Era, its sovereignty is still challenged by the federal government and other Indigenous nations. Today, federal and state governments have no legal obligation to consult with the Lumbee Tribe when permitting industry or development, although the federal government does with Indigenous nations that have full federal recognition, and many industrial projects get built in Robeson County.
In writing that’s both affectionate and candid, On the Swamp is a warning about, and a celebration of, eastern North Carolina. Though the region seems besieged by environmental threats, Indigenous nations including the Lumbee are fighting for anticolonial climate justice.
Grist recently spoke with Emanuel about On the Swamp.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Q. What motivated you to write this book?
A. Many years ago, I thought that I wanted to write a feel-good book about celebrating the Lumbee River and the Lumbee Tribe’s connection with it, and talking about all the reasons why it’s beautiful, and amazing, and important to us. So I thought that I would write this essentially nature story, right? But as my work evolved, and as I started thinking more critically about what I actually should be writing, I realized that I couldn’t tell that love story about the river without talking about difficult issues around pollution, climate change, and sustainability, and broader themes of environmental justice and Indigenous rights.
Q. Could you tell me about your connection to place?
A. I have a relationship to Robeson County that’s complicated by the fact that my family lived in Charlotte, and I went to school in Charlotte, and we went to church in Charlotte. But two weekends every month, and every major holiday, we were in Robeson County. And so I’m an insider, but I’m also not an insider. I’ve got a different lens through which I look at Robeson County because of my urban upbringing, but it doesn’t diminish the love that I have for that place, and it doesn’t keep me from calling it my home. I’ve always called it home. Charlotte was the place where we stayed. And Robeson County was home.
I can’t see the Lumbee River without thinking about the fact that it is physically integrating all of these different landscapes that I care about, [and] a truly beautiful place.
Q. In 2020, after years of protests and legal battles, Dominion Energy and Duke Energy canceled the Atlantic Coast pipeline, which would have carried natural gas 600 miles from West Virginia to Robeson County. In On the Swamp, you note that a quarter of Native Americans in North Carolina lived along the proposed route of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. What was the meaning of the Atlantic Coast pipeline project for Lumbee people?
A. That was an issue very few Lumbee people paid attention to, until they saw the broader context to the project and realized that such an outsized portion of the people who would be affected by the construction and operation of that pipeline were not only Native American, but were specifically Lumbee. I think that’s what generated a lot of outrage, because for better or for worse, we’re used to being treated like a sacrifice zone.
The Atlantic Coast pipeline gave us an easy way to zoom out and ask questions like, “OK, who is going to be affected by this project? Who’s making money off of this project?”
It was also a way to engage with larger questions about things like energy policy in the face of climate change and greenhouse gas emissions. [It] brought up philosophical questions of how we feel about the continued use of fossil fuels and the investment in brand new fossil fuel infrastructure that’s going to last 30, 40, or 50 years, at a time when everybody knows we shouldn’t be doing that.
Q. At the end of the day, the Atlantic Coast pipeline didn’t happen. What do you think is the main reason?
A. The collective resistance of all of these organizations — tribal nations, committed individuals, grassroots organizations — was enough to stall this project, until the developers realized that they had fallen into the Concorde fallacy. Basically, they got to the point where they realized that spending more money was not going to get them out of the hole they had dug in terms of opposition to this project.
But as long as [developers] hold on to those [property] easements, there’s certainly a threat of future development.
Q. You write that people can physically stay on their ancestral land and still have the place taken away by climate change, or by development projects. Can you talk a little bit about still having the land but somehow losing the place?
A. The place is not a set of geographic coordinates. It’s an integration of all the natural and built aspects of the environment. And so climate change, deforestation, these other types of industrialized activities, they have the potential to sweep that place out from under you, like having the rug pulled out. All of the things that make a set of geographic coordinates a beloved place can become unraveled, by these unsustainable processes of climate change and unsustainable development. I think that the case studies in [On the Swamp] show some of the specific ways that that can happen.
Q. Could you talk about your experiences as a researcher going out in the field, navigating modern land ownership systems, and how that connects to climate change?
A. I don’t know if it’s fair to say that I have to bite my tongue a lot, but I kind of feel that way. When I hear people talk about their ownership of our ancestral lands — I’m a mix of an optimist and a realist, and I understand that we’re not going to turn back the clock. And frankly, I’m not sure I want to, because Lumbee people are ourselves a product of colonial conflict, and we wouldn’t exist as the distinct nation that we are today, if it were not for the colonial violence that we survived. We might exist as our ancestral nations and communities, but we definitely wouldn’t be Lumbee people. So this is a complicated issue for me.
When we think about the front lines of climate change, we don’t often think about Robeson County, North Carolina. But because our community is so attuned to that specific place, we’re not going to pick up and move if the summers get too hot, or if the droughts are too severe. That’s not an option for us. So I think that some of the urgency that I feel is not too different from the urgency that you hear from other [Indigenous] people who are similarly situated on the front lines of climate change.
Q. Something else that you make a really strong point about in this book is that something can be a “solution” to climate change, but not sustainable, such as energy companies trying to capture methane at giant hog farms in Robeson County. How should people think about climate solutions, in order to also take into account their negatives?
A. The reason why people latch onto this swine biogas capture scheme is if you simply run the numbers, based on the methane and the carbon dioxide budgets, it looks pretty good.
But a swine facility is a lot more than just a source of methane to the atmosphere, right? It’s all these other things in terms of water pollution, and aerosols, and even things like labor issues and animal rights. There are all these other things that are attached to that kind of facility. If you make a decision that means that facility will persist for decades into the future operating basically as-is, that has serious implications for specific people who live nearby, and for society more broadly. We don’t tend to think through all those contingencies when we make decisions about greenhouse gas budgets.
Q. What are some ways that the Lumbee tribe is proactively trying to adapt to climate change?
A. Climate change is not an explicit motivation [for the Lumbee Tribe]. If you go and read on the Lumbee Tribe’s housing programs website, I don’t think you’re going to find any rationale that says, “We’re [building housing] to address climate change.” But they are.
Getting people into higher-quality, well-insulated and energy-efficient houses is a big deal when it comes to addressing climate change, because we have a lot of people who live in mobile homes, and those are some of the most poorly insulated and least efficient places that you could be. And maybe 40 years ago, when our extreme summer heat wasn’t so bad, that wasn’t such a huge deal. But it’s a huge deal now.
Q. What is the connection between colonialism and climate change for eastern North Carolina, and why is drawing that line necessary?
A. The one sentence answer is, “You reap what you sow.”
The longer answer is, the beginning of making things right is telling the truth about how things became wrong in the first place. And so I really want this book to start conversations on solving these issues. We really can’t solve them in meaningful ways unless we not only acknowledge, but also fully understand, how we got to this point.
