[Southern California Permaculture] Margie's Thoughts on Fracking/& Sunset Magazine Article

[Margie Bushman, Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

Fracking!  Margie's thoughts, better late than 
never, been traveling away from home, apologies 
for late input & storytelling, Measure P still 
being decided by some, so I share...



I was a teenager when the entire Santa Barbara 
Channel turned from blue to black in just a few 
days.  Rushing to the seashore to take a look, I 
saw waves too heavy to crest, they simply slumped 
with the heaviness of our particularly thick 
crude oil.  My dog ran into the surf, as clueless 
as I was to the unimaginable implications of what 
had occurred, and was immediately covered in oil, 
destroying my car's interior as I frantically 
tried to get him home to clean up.  The dolphins, 
fish, seals, turtles, pelicans, birds and all the 
other wildlife in the Channel weren't so lucky, 
they simply perished in a suffocating sea of 
oil.  It was a simple cost saving measure on 
Platform A that allowed the unimaginable to happen.
[]


Even now I wonder how we let that happen with an 
unregulated offshore industry of those times, 
somehow trusting the industry to be smart and 
responsible. Tourism, currently the largest 
industry in the world, was also Santa Barbara's 
primary economy at the time, hotels, restaurants, 
businesses wondering if they would survive.  A 
fishing industry in peril, can you imagine the 
panic people felt?  Residents contemplated 
plummeting home values, as we saw a ruined and smelly environment.

Now we face a similar scenario with fracking, 
acidizing, and steam injection, all fairly new 
technologies currently not that well regulated.
In a heartbeat, with human error, or one bad cost 
saving decision, or maybe even nature pitching in 
with a major earthquake that would shatter any 
cement casing, a similar catastrophes could happen.

Americans are a creative and innovative 
people!  As the program coordinator for the SBCC 
Center for Sustainability for the past 3 years, I 
developed a City as the Solution series that 
highlighted people and communities around the 
world moving into the 21st century with fantastic 
new technologies that are working now.  We 
encouraged our students with speakers, many young 
like themselves, already successful 
entrepreneurs, to think about becoming the 
innovators, asking "Who will be the innovators for the 21st Century"?

Most of our current technologies are dated, rely 
on COMBUSTION to create energy.  When you combust 
a material, whether in a car engine or nuclear 
power plant, you create emissions, particulate 
matter, waste.  Nature very seldom uses this 
model to create energy, except to destruct, take 
things apart.  All emissions, whether you worry 
about climate disruption or not, ultimately end 
up in your lungs as you breathe the air around 
you, it goes into your bloodstream, from your 
bloodstream into your kidneys to be cleaned---no 
one, rich or poor escapes this  reality.  It's 
time to challenge ourselves to something better, 
as others around the world are doing, not get 
left behind just because we are too stubborn to 
move forward with new technologies, money making 
enterprises that have both the humans and environment in mind.

Since we have a population particularly devoted 
to the "good life" with love of wine, gorgeous 
views; celebrities, millionaires, billionaires 
claiming Santa Barbara as their own personal 
paradise, the so called "American Riviera", I 
wonder how even with enormous monetary gain, we 
would risk losing this jewel. We have been 
protected for a long time, I think why we are a 
bit complacent, we don't see the oil wells and 
fields of former times.  We seem to think Santa 
Barbara is blessed solely on it's own merits, not 
realizing it was some amazing citizen activists 
who worked so hard to protect and make our 
community look different from just about anywhere 
else in Southern California.

<http://www.stopthefrackattack.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Screen-Shot-2014-04-08-at-1.58.26-PM.png>
Screen Shot 2014-04-08 at 1.58.26 PM

Southern California oilfields

I just returned from the Southwest, Colorado, New 
Mexico and Utah.  The skies in Utah where my 
grandparents farmed and ranched are not the 
brilliant blue they used to be, smudged with 
subtle haze that never goes away.  Spills in 
Colorado where my grandkids live have resulted in 
ground water & aquifer contamination with deadly 
chemicals like benzene, toluene, xylene, 
ethyl-benzene, that citizens are now drinking.

On a narrow two lane scenic highway in Utah near 
the Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area, we 
were almost flattened by a large semi bearing 
down on our car as we slowed to pull over for a 
gorgeous view.  I laugh when I think of the irony 
of an environmentalist since the 6th grade, 
ending life this way.   We counted over 12 large 
semi's coming and going with fracking chemicals 
in and oil trucked out to a refinery nearby on 
this small road lacking guard rails in just one hour.

The environment, the economy, frame it any way 
you want, but remember, like State Water that we 
were encouraged to vote for in the 
1990's,  touted as the ultimate solution to all 
our water problems, it may not work out the way 
you hoped, and you may be answering to a future 
population for your decision.  I wonder if we 
would all be willing to put our votes on a slip 
of paper, bury it in our backyards where our kids 
or grandkids can dig up in the future.  Instead 
of "Daddy, what did you do in the war" of 
previous generations, maybe we will be asked what 
you did you do to secure a sustainable future for us all?

7000 fracking pad permits, going to international 
corporations and shareholders!  what will they 
look like, where will they be located?  Will 
Santa Barbara county receive any compensation for 
hosting this oil frenzy?   Santa Barbara has been 
protected for the last 45 years since the oil 
spill in 1969, we can't imagine what these 
thousands of fracking pads would look like on our 
very thin corridor between the mountains and the 
sea, or on our farm and ranch lands to the north.

14 states have all but banned or restricted 
fracking, awaiting the onset of safeguards and 
firm regulatory foundations. In sharp contrast 
with other energy-rich states, California has 
veritably no regulatory framework in place for hydraulic fracturing.




Do you love wine?  Great article in Sunset magazine, April 2014 issue:
Sunset







The Future of Fracking in California

Barry Yeoman
<http://www.sunset.com/travel/california/fracking>http://www.sunset.com/travel/california/fracking

Billions of barrels of oil lie in the Monterey 
Shale. The windfall from tapping into that deeply 
buried cache could be mind-blowing – so could the damage.

<http://www.sunset.com/travel/california/fracking?width=500px&height=500px&title=%0A%20%20%3Cdiv%20class%3D%22field-caption%22%3E%0A%20%20%20%20The%20Getzelmans%20want%20a%20reliable%20water%20supply%20for%20their%20vineyard.%20%20%3C/div%3E%0A%0A%20%20%3Cdiv%20class%3D%22field-credit%22%3E%0A%20%20%20%20Dave%20Lauridsen%20%20%3C/div%3E%0A&inline=true#colorbox-inline-351292371>
[]

<http://www.sunset.com/travel/california/fracking?width=500px&height=500px&title=%0A%20%20%3Cdiv%20class%3D%22field-caption%22%3E%0A%20%20%20%20The%20Getzelmans%20want%20a%20reliable%20water%20supply%20for%20their%20vineyard.%20%20%3C/div%3E%0A%0A%20%20%3Cdiv%20class%3D%22field-credit%22%3E%0A%20%20%20%20Dave%20Lauridsen%20%20%3C/div%3E%0A&inline=true#colorbox-inline-351292371>The 
Getzelmans want a reliable water supply for their vineyard.
Dave Lauridsen


As Paula Getzelman and I stroll among her Syrah 
and Grenache vines, she points out how the 
freestanding plants were “head-trained,” or 
cultivated to look like goblets. Head-training 
can produce less fruit per acre than growing the 
plants on horizontal trellises, but that’s okay 
with her. “It allows the vine to give its all to 
a smaller number of grapes,” she says.

Paula’s Tre Gatti Vineyards, a 5-acre boutique 
operation in California’s San Antonio Valley that 
she runs with her husband, Paul, has provided the 
couple with more than just an income and a 
palate-pleasing product. It has given them an 
exit from their fast-paced city lives. She had 
worked in the health care and pharmaceutical 
industries, he in food sales. At one point she 
was traveling four days a week for her job. “What 
we were doing was for the money,” she says, “not 
for the soul.” In 2001, craving a change, she 
moved back to Lockwood, the agricultural town in 
southern Monterey County where the couple had 
started their married life three decades earlier. 
Paul followed in 2003, and that year they planted their vines.

Coaxing grapes from the ground is dicey business. 
There are tiny leafhoppers that drain chlorophyll 
from the plants. There are late-summer days when 
an imprecise forklift movement can overturn a 
half-ton of grapes onto the dirt road. But these 
days Paula worries about another industry that 
wants to coax its own product from deeper beneath the soil.

The San Antonio Valley is part of the Monterey 
Shale, a 1,750-square-mile patchwork of rock that 
the oil industry calls a potential energy 
bonanza. A 2011 U.S. government study estimated 
that the recoverable oil inside the shale far 
outstrips the reserves fueling the current booms in North Dakota and Texas.

That oil is not easily obtained, though. Trapped 
inside the rock, it needs to be extracted by one 
of several modern technologies. The best known is 
hydraulic fracturing, nicknamed “fracking,” which 
entails drilling deep beneath the earth’s surface 
and horizontally across the rock, then pumping 
water, chemicals, and sand underground to 
fracture the shale and free up the fuel. Fracking 
has unlocked stubborn oil and natural gas 
reserves elsewhere, creating jobs and fostering 
hopes for an energy-independent future. A recent 
study by the International Energy Agency said the 
technology is driving down U.S. gas and 
electricity prices, and it predicted that the 
United States will become the world’s largest oil 
producer around 2020 and that North America will be a net oil exporter by 2030.

But fracking and related activities have also 
been linked to water and air pollution, health 
problems ranging from asthma to low birth-weight 
babies, wildlife habitat disruption, and boomtown 
ills such as homelessness and crime. 
Environmental activists warn that these problems 
could plague California if the Monterey Shale is exploited.

Paula, 71, is no activist. But she worries, in 
her measured way, that drilling the shale without 
a better understanding of the risks could 
jeopardize the San Antonio Valley’s most valuable 
resource. “What we have in that vineyard is 
dependent on water,” she says. “If our water is 
decimated, both in quality and quantity, we 
pretty much have no fallback position. Once the 
water is gone, you can’t reclaim it.”

<http://www.sunset.com/travel/california/fracking?width=500px&height=500px&title=%0A%20%20%3Cdiv%20class%3D%22field-caption%22%3E%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%3C/div%3E%0A%0A%20%20%3Cdiv%20class%3D%22field-credit%22%3E%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%3C/div%3E%0A&inline=true#colorbox-inline-1818697729>
[]



The Native Americans who lived in California 
thousands of years ago observed that the ground 
naturally seeped petroleum, which they used in 
thickened form for everything from canoe building 
to chewing gum. It took until the 19th century 
for oil drilling to begin, and in 1892 the first 
gusher erupted near Ventura. That kicked off a 
series of booms as oilfields were discovered 
around Los Angeles, the Central Valley, and 
offshore. Output peaked in 1985, though 
California still ranks third among the states in oil production.

With the easiest oil gone­oil that flowed from 
its source rock and pooled in underground 
reservoirs, waiting to be sucked out like a 
Slurpee­the big questions are how much remains 
and whether it can be reached. The U.S. Energy 
Information Administration (EIA) tried to answer 
those questions in a 2011 report examining the 
Lower 48’s shale resources. When it came to oil, 
the leader by a landslide was the Monterey Shale, 
a checkerboard of discrete basins that stretches 
from Southern California’s Orange County to the 
Eel River watershed north of Ukiah. EIA put the 
Monterey’s recoverable potential at 15.4 billion 
barrels, more than four times that of the next 
most promising formation, North Dakota’s Bakken 
Shale. The agency later lowered its estimate to 13.7 billion.

The report came out as fracking, ramping up 
nationwide, triggered North Dakota’s current oil 
boom and Pennsylvania’s natural gas rush. But 
drilling horizontally across the Monterey might 
prove trickier, because its rock strata have been 
jumbled over the eons by seismic activity. “On 
the East Coast, if we look at the geology, it’s 
akin to a layer cake,” says Jayni Foley Hein, 
executive director of the Center for Law, Energy 
& the Environment at the University of 
California, Berkeley. “In the Monterey Shale, it’s more akin to a marble cake.”

For all the logistical challenges, the sheer 
amount of anticipated oil makes the Monterey too 
tempting for the energy industry to leave alone. 
“I think you could see, if the technological 
barriers are overcome, a significant replacement 
of imported oil with domestically produced oil,” 
says Tupper Hull, vice president of the Western 
States Petroleum Association. A University of 
Southern California study, funded by Hull’s 
organization, projected that, if EIA’s estimates 
are correct, drilling could create 2.8 million 
jobs in California and bring in $24.6 billion in 
state and local taxes during the peak year of 2020.

But the government’s projection has been 
disputed. In December, two organizations critical 
of fracking­the Post Carbon Institute and the 
Physicians Scientists & Engineers for Healthy 
Energy­released an analysis by veteran Canadian 
geoscientist J. David Hughes that concluded the 
EIA numbers are significantly overstated. That 
cast doubt on the rosy jobs forecast in the USC 
study. Other industry-friendly studies have predicted smaller job gains too.

Susan Christopherson, an economic geographer at 
Cornell University, says the prosperity brought 
by oil and gas extraction often proves temporary. 
“It’s an industrial process,” she says. “It 
drives out other activities like tourism or 
farming. Once the boom-bust cycle is over and the 
drillers leave, those counties often have fewer 
people and less diverse economies than when they started.”


Before it was renamed Lockwood in the late 19th 
century­after suffragist Belva Lockwood, who by 
some reckoning was the nation’s first female 
presidential candidate­the Monterey County 
settlement was sometimes called Hungry Flats or 
Poverty Flats. “Even the rabbits had to bring their lunch,” locals said.

It was hardly less isolated when Paul Getzelman’s 
mother, Lucile, came in the late 1920s to teach 
at a one-room schoolhouse in nearby Bryson 
Hesperia. Her arrival was big news for Lockwood’s 
bachelors. “The young men were buzzing around 
like flies,” Paula says. Lucile chose a suitor 
named Maurice Getzelman, and in 1929, the couple married.

In the 1930s, the two of them bought a general 
store in Lockwood, eventually moving it to the 
new paved road through town, where it sits today. 
It reminded Paul of a western-movie general 
store­“with the Levi’s in back,” he says, 
“hardware on one side, fresh meat, a little bit 
of fresh produce.” Paul, now 68, grew up 
attending cattle brandings and dove hunts. His 
elementary school graduating class had five students.

Paul and Paula married in 1972 and ran the store 
together. Paula, a self-described city girl, 
learned how to roll dice with the old-timers for 
coffee. The work, she learned, was unrelenting. 
“A rural store is a mistress,” she says. “We 
would get people knocking on our door at midnight 
wanting to know if they could get a gallon of 
gas.” Wanting their three boys to have the 
benefits­sports, culture­of a more urban life, 
the Getzelmans moved to Fresno in 1975.

During their absence, the San Antonio Valley 
began to change. The first modern vineyard was 
planted in 1996. The valley’s high hillsides, dry 
summer heat, and cool nights help nurture fruity, 
crisply acidic grapes. A stampede followed, Paula 
says, as growers converted fallow land and barley fields to vineyards.

Returning to Lockwood after a quarter-century, 
the Getzelmans found primal satisfaction in the 
cycles of vineyard life. “When we saw the first 
leaf come up, I cried,” Paula says. “It was like 
giving birth.” In 2006, at the behest of the 
Getzelmans and another grower, the federal 
government named the San Antonio Valley its own viticultural area.

Not long afterward, the first hints that oil 
companies might be interested in the local shale 
began surfacing. A well was drilled 10 miles from 
the Getzelmans’ farm, annoying the neighbors but 
not really alarming them. Oil and gas company 
representatives quietly began buying mineral 
rights near that well, though no one has 
approached the Getzelmans. News spread of the 
fracking booms in other places. The government 
released its 2011 Monterey Shale assessment. That 
year, and the next, the Bureau of Land Management 
auctioned mineral rights it owned in southern 
Monterey County. Buying the rights were Vintage 
Production California, a subsidiary of Occidental 
Petroleum, as well as three agents that acquire 
and manage land for drillers: Neil Ormond, Lone 
Tree Energy, and West Coast Land Service.

Paula realized how little she knew about the 
Monterey Shale. The state did not track fracking 
activity. Oil companies were cagey about their 
plans. Studies about the environmental effects of 
hydraulic fracturing were few. But there were 
reports of related water contamination in other 
states. As she learned more, Paula grew wary, 
particularly about the prospect of pumping 
fracking fluid­which often includes chemicals 
(such as benzene, 2-butoxyethanol, and toluene) 
that are linked to cancer or damage to the liver, 
bone marrow, or central nervous system­below the 
valley’s groundwater. “If they were to frack out 
here, and it were to go horribly wrong,” she 
says, “the consequences would be unspeakable.”


How likely is it that something might, in Paula’s 
words, “go horribly wrong”? That’s the core of 
the debate over fracking nationwide, and it’s 
complicated by a knowledge void. “The research is 
not keeping up with the pace of growth,” says Rob 
Jackson, a professor of earth sciences at 
Stanford University. “We’ve been playing catch-up 
in the scientific community, and that’s 
especially true for the realm of potential human health interactions.”

Oil and gas companies have fractured rocks since 
the late 1940s, albeit on a smaller scale than 
today. “This technology has never been associated 
with groundwater contamination in California,” 
says the petroleum association’s Hull. Some 
scientists feel hopeful the Golden State will 
maintain a healthy track record even as hydraulic 
fracturing or other well-stimulation methods ramp 
up. “Drilling for oil is a large-scale industrial 
process,” says Mark Zoback, who is a professor of 
geophysics at Stanford and an industry 
consultant. “There are a lot of things that can 
potentially go wrong. But if you follow best 
practice, and you get good regulations and 
enforce them, it can be done safely.”

Still, water contamination elsewhere shows that 
fracking is hardly foolproof. Researchers at The 
University of Texas at Arlington have discovered 
elevated levels of arsenic, selenium, and 
strontium­sometimes exceeding the government’s 
safety thresholds­in private drinking-water wells 
near drilling sites in Texas’s Barnett Shale. 
Likewise, Jackson and his former colleagues at 
Duke University have found heightened levels of 
methane and other gases in the water wells of 
Pennsylvanians living near Marcellus Shale fracking sites.

“It’s very easy to say, rhetorically, that there 
haven’t been any instances of water contamination 
documented in the state, so what’s there to worry 
about,” says environmental scientist Michael 
Kiparsky, associate director of the Wheeler 
Institute for Water Law & Policy at the 
University of California, Berkeley. But there’s a 
logical flaw in that reasoning, he says: Unlike 
the Marcellus and Barnett, the Monterey has never 
had high-intensity fracking on the same scale. 
Moreover, Kiparsky says, it could take decades or 
longer before contamination migrates far enough 
to be detected. “The problem then becomes similar 
to Superfund sites, where the activity that 
caused the pollution didn’t come to light as 
hazardous until later, and often until the perpetrator was long gone.”

Researchers do know there are plausible 
mechanisms for contamination. Fracturing shale 
also cracks the rock above it, says Anthony 
Ingraffea, a professor of civil and environmental 
engineering at Cornell. “You’re damaging what 
Mother Nature has provided over the last 300 
million to 500 million years as a natural cap,” 
he says. “Over some period of time, there’s a 
possibility that the damage will allow gas or oil 
or other hydrocarbons to leak upward.”

The weakest links in the safety chain, according 
to experts, are the steel casings and cement that 
line the wells underground. They’re designed to 
isolate harmful chemicals from the surrounding 
environment, but they’re far from infallible­6 to 
7 percent of new wells drilled in Pennsylvania 
over a three-year period had “compromised 
structural integrity,” according to Ingraffea’s 
research. The worst breaches can poison drinking 
or irrigation water, and Ingraffea says this “is 
undeniably happening, has happened, will always 
happen. And it’s not rare.” In December, the U.S. 
Environmental Protection Agency’s inspector 
general released a report on the dangerous levels 
of carcinogenic benzene and explosive methane in 
drinking water in Parker County, Texas, near Fort 
Worth. A gas-production well used in fracking 
“was the most likely contributor to the 
contamination of the aquifer,” the report noted.

Ingraffea and Kiparsky fear that California oil 
operations could prove particularly vulnerable to 
well failure because of their proximity to 
earthquake faults. “The state is a very 
seismically active region,” Kiparsky says. “Might 
seismic activity cause the type of damage to 
cementing and casing that could lead to more contamination of groundwater?”


Research suggests that high-volume hydraulic 
fracturing could contribute to local air 
pollution and global climate change. Less often 
discussed are the implications­well pads, 
pipelines, access roads, 24-hour lighting, truck 
traffic­of having a long-term industrial 
infrastructure across the California countryside. 
Some of the Monterey Shale lies beneath places 
like the San Joaquin Valley’s Kern County, which 
is in many parts already heavily industrialized. 
Other areas, like the San Antonio Valley, remain pastoral.

“The specter of Kern County–type oil development 
extended to other parts of the state is, to me, 
really quite frightening,” Kiparsky says. “You 
would have vegetation removed. You’d have soil 
exposed. You’d have plants and animals displaced. 
You’d have disturbance of wildlife behavior. 
You’d have migration corridors interrupted. You 
could have sediment runoff that could degrade 
water quality in nearby streams, impacting fish 
and plant life. The ecological implications are 
potentially severe.” None of this is certain, he 
notes, because of the shortage of research.

One day Paula Getzelman and I drove 6 miles 
beyond Lockwood to the Williams Hill Recreation 
Area, which is owned by the federal government 
and operated by the Bureau of Land Management. 
Silvery digger pines with their enormous cones 
lined the steeply banked dirt road as we climbed 
in her SUV. Drought-tolerant chaparral plants 
hugged the ground. Quail darted in front of us, 
and long views unfolded in all directions, with hills the color of wheat.

When BLM auctioned off 20,000 acres of mineral 
leases in 2011 and 2012, many of the parcels 
surrounded Williams Hill. The agency didn’t 
believe much drilling would take place there, so 
it performed only cursory environmental 
assessments. “We haven’t seen a big rush into 
this area,” says Gabriel Garcia, a BLM field 
office manager who has also worked as an 
environmental protection specialist for the agency.

Environmentalists and local officials took a less 
sanguine view. They feared that drilling on the 
land leased by BLM not only might pollute the 
water and air, but also could harm endangered 
species like the California condor, which was 
brought back from the edge of extinction and now numbers over 200 in the wild.

Since 2011, the Center for Biological Diversity 
and the Sierra Club have filed two lawsuits to 
block the BLM leases. In March 2013, U.S. 
Magistrate Judge Paul Grewal ruled that the first 
set of lease sales violated federal law. “The 
potential risk for contamination from fracking, 
while unknown, is not so remote or speculative to 
be completely ignored,” he wrote. BLM is now in 
settlement talks with the plaintiffs and has 
promised a fuller environmental review before moving forward.


California’s farmers and ranchers have not formed 
a consensus around fracking. Some, like Paula, 
believe that, based on current information, the 
risks outweigh any potential economic gain. 
Others are eager for the additional income from 
oil leases­“particularly in this time of severe 
drought, when they’re laying 30 percent of their 
land fallow,” says Diane Friend, executive 
director of the Kings County Farm Bureau. Farmers 
there, she says, trust the steps that the oil 
companies are taking to protect their aquifers. 
And because saltwater intrusion has already 
forced many of them to rely on surface water for 
irrigation, problems underground won’t imperil 
their crops. “One reason they’re not afraid,” 
Friend says, “is that the water quality’s already bad.”

Hull, the industry official, says oil and 
agriculture have prospered side by side in 
California for more than a century. “They 
understand that it’s necessary to coexist, and 
they do so extremely well,” he says. The question 
is whether that peace will continue if drillers 
crack the Monterey code and the resulting boom 
demands more water. In a statewide context, the 
amount of water used for fracking would be small. 
But experts say it could create local shortages.

The Getzelmans use 7,000 gallons an acre every 
time they water their vineyard. Nationally, 
fracking requires about 1 million gallons of 
water annually per well; in California, which 
hasn’t had horizontal drilling on a mass scale 
yet, the water usage has been lower. But the 
state, which has seen its groundwater depleted by 
almost 20 trillion gallons since the early 1960s, 
could face tensions too. “Between groundwater 
concerns and the state’s recently declared 
‘drought emergency,’ any expansion of water use 
for hydraulic fracturing in this region will 
likely spark strong public concern that could 
jeopardize the industry’s social license to 
operate,” says a report published in February by 
Ceres, a nonprofit group that advises business leaders on sustainability issues


With all the uncertainties about drilling the 
Monterey, how should California proceed? Last 
year, the state legislature passed a measure, 
called Senate Bill 4, allowing hydraulic 
fracturing and acid stimulation (another 
extraction process) while also putting in place 
more regulation than exists today. It also 
mandated a study of the “hazards and risks” of 
these techniques that is due by January 1, 2015. 
The new law disappointed the oil industry, which 
considers its requirements burdensome and 
unnecessary. And it disappointed 
environmentalists, who wanted a moratorium until 
the safety issues are better understood.

Hull considers the call for a moratorium 
“draconian”­an overreaction to what he considers 
modest and well-managed risks. “You would not do 
anything of a technological nature if you were 
required to first prove the absence of any risk, 
of all risk,” Hull says. “That’s silly.”

Paula Getzelman finds herself craving a middle 
ground between the absolutists. “If we really put 
our minds to it, we could come up with a method 
to extract oil safely,” she says. Some scientists 
agree with her. Until that method is developed, 
though, she believes a moratorium is the best 
interim measure­“to allow time to gather some 
evidence, whichever way it might go, and allow 
for more reasonable discussion on both sides.”

With a large enough research investment, Paula 
says, we might find a way to tap the Monterey 
that’s both lucrative for the oil industry and 
protective of the environment and human health. 
If that happens, she’ll be all for it. “But if, 
in fact, people who say it can’t be done safely 
are correct,” she says, “you can’t go back and unring that bell.”







Santa Babara Permaculture Network Logo

(805) 962-2571
P.O. Box 92156, Santa Barbara, CA 93190
margie at sbpermaculture.org
http://www.sbpermaculture.org

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