Women are leading the fight against fracking
In 2004, Cathy McMullen had her retirement mapped out to a tee. She and her husband would move out of Dallas and onto a rural ranch with substantial acreage. Before long, the McMullens found the perfect spot: 11 acres, which they quickly filled with rescue dogs adopted from their local shelter. Located three miles away from any majorly trafficked roads, accessible only via a narrow dirt path, their ranch was quiet and idyllic. Better yet, it was theirs.
But after a few peaceful years, their solitude was interrupted. McMullen came home from her job as a hospice nurse to find 83 18-wheeler trucks lining the dirt road that led up to her house. Confused, she consulted the county, who informed her that the workers were there to develop the minerals underneath her property.
McMullen and her husband didn’t know that when they purchased their 11 acres, they had only bought the surface rights; they owned the land, but not any of the minerals underneath it. The latter instead belonged to a third-generation rancher in town, who decided to cash in on these rights by leasing them to an oil company for natural gas, leaving the McMullens powerless to stop it.
“We fought and fought and fought,” McCullen says. “Because this guy owned the minerals, there was nothing that we could do about it.”
The 18-wheeler trucks soon became a constant, unwelcome presence on McMullen’s property. Workers began drilling a petroleum well near their house that emitted dangerous chemicals. By that point, the pair knew the retirement dream they’d once envisioned for themselves was long gone. They found happy new homes for their rescue dogs, packed up their belongings, and left.
The McMullens are among countless Americans to find themselves at odds with the fossil fuel industry over mineral rights they never knew weren’t theirs. An estimated 18-million Americans live near oil and gas wells, which can leak carcinogens and toxic chemicals into surrounding air and water supplies. Women like McMullen all over the country have taken up a fight against fracking—a fight riddled with inequalities of power and financing that often proves fruitless.
Like so many others, McMullen never asked for the uphill battle she was forced into when she and her husband left their rural ranch for Denton, Texas. A friendly, vibrant town centered around two state colleges, Denton was a slightly more urban environment, where the McMullens figured county ordinances would prevent oil companies from building fracking wells within close proximity to residential areas.
But they were wrong. As of 2014, the city was home to 280 gas wells, many of which were located mere feet from hospitals, schools, playgrounds, and residential neighborhoods.
Feeling unable to pick up her life and move yet again, McMullen instead got to work. She attended city council meetings, handed out flyers, and talked to residents about the air pollution they were all surrounded by. She pushed first for regulation, calling for safety guidelines, limits on noise levels, and restrictions on the hours at which gas wells could flare (they often did so at three in the morning, McMullen says). But each request was voted down.
“Our original city council, they were very paternal in that they would say ‘Cathy, we hear what you're saying ... but there are just things you don't know,” she says, noting that the majority of its members were both male and “deeply entrenched” in the oil and gas industry themselves.
Cathy McMullen holding a Vote for the Fracking Ban sign during fracking ban campaign. Public Domain.
For years she fought, often as the only woman in the room, to put regulations on fracking, recognizing that the idea of banning fracking all together was a last resort. But one day, on a routine visit to a local neighborhood positioned just 75 feet from a gas well site, McMullen cracked. Parents in that neighborhood had reported that their children were experiencing frequent nosebleeds and asthma attacks. That day, she spotted a group of parents waiting anxiously for their kids’ arrival home from school while two nearby wells flared like large torches spraying fire into the sky. When the school bus arrived, McMullen watched as parents seized their kids, fearing their exposure to air pollution from the flares, and quickly darted into their homes.
Soon after, she started collecting signatures, and before long, had enough to get a vote to ban fracking on a county-wide ballot.
But as soon as they got wind of her activity, fossil fuel executives began following her and her five team mates, running painful T.V. ads during Dallas Cowboys games, and doling out misinformation to Denton residents at the polls. “Industry came out with guns blazing,” McMullen says. “In that election, they spent like $1.2-million to defeat us. And we spent $60.”
To make matters worse, community institutions like schools, churches, and hospitals were all hesitant to support McMullen, despite the known risks fracking posed to their community, because many of them were profiting off the minerals beneath their own land, she says.
Despite all the forces working against McMullen and her team, in November of 2014 the ban won, and Denton became a frack-free town.
It’s far from uncommon in towns that sit upon vast mineral reserves for activists like McMullen to face widespread resistance from neighbors and oil executives alike. According to Kristen McHenry, assistant professor in comparative women’s studies at Spelman College, women like McMullen often bear the brunt of both the risks associated with fracking and the responsibility to end it.
Because of gendered divisions of domestic labor, women are often the first to discover the health consequences of living near an oil well, says McHenry, who published a feminist critical analysis of fracking in 2017. Mothers are the first to notice when their child’s nose is bleeding during school drop-off and are most often tasked with refilling their inhaler prescriptions, for instance. They’re also more often asked to expose themselves to air and water pollution— taking their kids to the park despite a nearby well or washing dishes with contaminated water.
The efforts of women activists are often met with targeted harassment by the oil industry. McHenry recalls one anti-fracking activist she interviewed who said her YouTube was flooded one day with menacing comments that reflected a chilling degree of specificity about her life and cited facts about her daughter. The interviewee told McHenry she believed the online harassment was part of a larger targeted campaign by the oil company she was at odds with.
“That's one thing I will say about the oil and gas industry, is that it's organized,” McHenry says. “Nothing is coincidental or haphazard.”
Rosanna Esparza, gerontologist, researcher, and environmental justice activist, says the residents of Kern County, Calif. have experienced similar strains of harassment from the fossil fuel industry. The county accounts for over 70 per cent of the state’s total oil production, and many of its thousands of wells are located near predominantly low-income, Spanish-speaking immigrant neighborhoods.
Esparza has worked closely with communities in Kern County to track air pollution levels and push for legislative change. Like McMullen, she too has seen fear in parents’ eyes as they recall wells flaring in the middle of the night, discuss their children’s newfound respiratory issues, or battle with the thought of bathing in polluted water. And she too has seen members of the oil industry harass her community both in private and at public demonstrations.
Esparza says Kern County’s anti-fracking activists, many of whom are women and community matriarchs, aren’t quelled by these attempts. “In fact, it just made us more prepared,” she says. “Knowing the facts and researching more and studying more. And when they were doing this to people that they perceive to be less educated and have less stature and class in their community, and these people were coming out with, 'this is the facts,' and being adamant about what they knew, it just pretty much shut these boys down.”
Dr. Rosanna Esparaza participating in community garden clean-up in Shafter, Kern County. Photo courtesy of Dr. Esparza.
Currently, 5.5-million Californians live within a mile of an oil well—it’s a daunting statistic, but one that Esparza and her community are committed to changing. She’s currently fighting to put state-wide setback regulations in place, rendering it illegal for an oil well to be built within 2,500 feet of schools, hospitals, nursing homes, and other places where vulnerable communities may populate.
Texas, where McMullen still resides, holds similar statistics: 4.5-million of its residents live less than a mile away from a fracking well. That statistic may not change any time soon because just months after Denton passed its fracking ban in 2014, the state overturned it in 2015, passing legislation effectively declaring such bans illegal. It rendered not only Denton’s ban obsolete but the bans of other towns like it while preventing new ones from popping up.
“I mean, I was in tears,” McMullen says, recalling the day Denton’s ban was overturned. “I felt like everything I tried to do to help us had just hurt us and everyone else in the state of Texas.”
She then set her sights on a new mission: to get oil out of Texas government, starting at the local level. The following year, she successfully fought against the re-election of numerous city councilors with whom she once battled over fracking regulations. Two women were elected to the council in their place, and another woman was elected in the following cycle, each bringing diversity of gender, background, and thought to the table.
“I think we accomplished a bigger goal than we set,” McMullen says. “Now, I think the small goal was the ban and the big goal was the courage it’s given a lot of people to say, ‘a few dedicated people with no money can really show industry—who has billions and trillions of dollars—you’re still gonna have to be held accountable.’”
Image credit: Natural Gas Fracking in Louisiana, a natural gas fracking well near Shreveport, Louisiana by Daniel Foster, 2013 (Flickr | CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
