气候变化领域集成服务门户

Oil and gas lawyer Christian Turak surveys an area of his client’s property that was heavily contaminated by fracking brine water.

At one of the weekly Sunday brunch events in the Palace of Gold Rose Garden, I met Bhagavad Gita Das and Nikunja Das, a recently married couple whose previous first names were Larry and Natasha.

“We live in a state of absolute truth and pure ecstasy,” Bhagavad Gita Das said. We were sharing plates of fresh fruit on a warm morning in the palace rose garden. Nikunja Das, who is always smiling, nodded in agreement and picked up a sliced orange.

“I feel unbelievably amazing,” Bhagavad Gita Das says again a moment later, describing what it means to him to work as part of the ISKCON community and what it felt like to come to West Virginia after selling insurance and working as a car mechanic. “It was extremely noticeable, extremely noticeable, the happiness level that I was at. And I was like, I never felt this way, doing anything for anybody. And I’ve done a lot of cool things, but I never felt like this before. That’s why people come here, to also get that experience, that great happiness.”

On my visit I saw several Indian-American couples proudly showing their children a small Americanized slice of their homeland experience — the food, the clothing, the spirituality, the architecture of India, barely separated from what’s just beyond it: rural America’s mobile homes, pickup trucks, canned soda, fossil fuel extraction and Trump MAGA flags trembling in the wind. A sari-clad mother and her teenage daughter, in a Guns N’ Roses T-shirt, visited the buffet alongside me.

Gopisa Das, whose given name is Gabriel Fried, negotiated the community’s mineral rights deals after what he describes as “many months of difficult conversations among devotees” who wrestled with the environmental and spiritual implications of accepting oil and gas funds even as their precarious finances threatened the viability of the commune. “I lost hair, and turned gray,” he said. In the end, a capital improvement fund for the massive property was established with the Hare Krishnas’ oil and gas money, and all but two conscientious objectors have reconciled to the idea that this compromise is the cost of their heaven.

Fried says that by the time they learned about this opportunity, it was essentially already underway, with more than 50 percent of the land surrounding them under development for wells. “We had to protect ourselves.”

“We are all firm believers in Mother Earth and don’t want to see harm come to her,” he said. Before they signed they collectively felt they needed to “spiritually justify this” so they added environmental safeguards to the contract, some clauses to protect their own and their neighbors’ peace and well-being. “There are designated areas where they can drill,” chosen to minimize noise pollution and interruptions in the view from the Palace of Gold. “We protected ourselves and the people around us,” Fried said of the 16-page contract he brokered with the corporation that extracts their resources and pays them handsomely.

“We’re already complicit in this petroleum-based energy economy. We use electricity. We use cars. We may as well do these things in the Lord’s service,” Fried said.

Ricky Whitlatch, 62, has always lived in the hilly area outside Moundsville. For 39 years he worked at a coal-fired power plant on the banks of the Ohio River. Its towering smoke stack — once the tallest in the world at 1,206 feet — is visible from Whitlatch’s rural land 20 miles east. The panorama is grand. In the evenings, he sometimes takes a beer to the summit of his land and watches the long progression of the sun setting across the grassy mountains.

Since 2017, Ricky Whitlatch, one of Turak’s clients, has shared part of his 150 acres with a drill pad of about 200,000 square feet, room enough for seven natural gas wells.

He shares the 150-acre property with his son, daughter-in-law, twin grandbabies and preteen granddaughter, along with bears, coyotes, deer and more. Since 2017, he’s also shared the space with a drill pad of about 200,000 square feet, room enough for seven natural gas wells, parking for dozens of trucks and a trailer, where he just discovered one of the workers has been staying overnight.

The noise is constant, and when I visit I have trouble hearing him clearly over the rumble of compressors, even though we’re 200 yards away. “Don’t notice it,” he says. He wears a royal blue do-rag, wrap-around shades and a sleeveless muscle shirt. His beard is pure white. “I just hate the trucks.”

Whitlatch’s deal was signed in 2017 and the process of flattening one of his hilltops and constructing the drill pad was extremely disruptive. Then, the fracking began. I imagined several trucks — for sand, for water, workers — zigzagging up the tight turns of the hills to reach the drill pad for a week or two, and I could see how that would be annoying. Whitlatch corrected me. “It’s convoys. Trains of trucks. One after the other. Truck, truck, truck. And it took them most of a year.”

Throughout the region, I noticed signs, both hand-painted and official-looking, that warned truckers, “No Jake Brake” or “No J-Brake” in reference to the ear-splitting compression release brake that trucks often use to slow down on steep grades. The curving narrow roads here were never meant to be shared with hundreds of heavy trucks, and the people who live in this rural splendor never imagined hearing the staccato grunt of truck brakes day and night.

The curving narrow roads outside Moundsville, W.Va., were never meant to be shared with hundreds of heavy trucks.

To better enjoy his personal nirvana, Whitlatch bought two off-road four-wheeler buggies that he drives around the property. He insisted I hop in one of them for the full tour. Like Barbara Smith, he has a few concerns — mostly the truck noise — but seems generally unworried about the fracking activity on his property. The monthly checks he receives allowed him to retire, to provide a home for his son’s family, and to generally not have to worry about money for the rest of his life. It’s a new feeling. Joyous.

The summer sun blasts us, but the buggy’s partial roof offers a little shade, and Whitlatch drives me up and down the hills at speeds that generate a cool wind. He laughs and revs the engine, hot-dogging up a hill that must be a 45 degree grade. “You wanted the tour!” he shouts at me, grinning. I can’t decide whether the Hare Krishnas or Whitlatch are living in a deeper state of ecstasy. He pulls our little vehicle to a stop, and Turak, driving the other buggy, joins us.

After water and chemicals are pumped into the ground for fracking, the toxic liquid, often called brine, is pumped out. Brine is classified as radioactive by the EPA. Per Whitlatch’s agreement, it’s supposed to be pumped off and away from his property. It’s up to the energy company to dispose of it. We see a thick black corrugated pipe which shoots the wastewater across the crest of a hill and to its destination, where it will be stored briefly and then hauled away by more trucks. Last year, “it ruptured,” he said. He noticed the pressurized brine shooting up in the air and spilling down the hill and called the company, whose representatives fixed the leak and replaced the top soil in that area. Whitlatch was still concerned.

“They think of stuff to tell you to make you happy and hope you can go away,” he said, laughing again. We stood downhill from the site where the brine line had ruptured. All around us were variations of vibrant green, except for a 30-ft-wide stretch of land leading all the way down the slope. Here, the grass — even though it had been replanted by the gas company after the rupture — was dry and brown and the trees were leafless in an otherwise resplendent July. The company had replaced some of the top soil, but obviously not enough.

Turak says that a constant part of his work is to hold energy companies accountable. After our visit today, Turak will call and find out why there’s a worker sleeping in the trailer on Whitlatch’s drill pad, and he’ll follow up about the remediation for the site of the rupture.

The dangers and annoyances are many and unknown. Fracking sites leak methane, and occasionally spontaneous explosions occur at drill pads. When one erupted at another client’s site recently, Turak tried to get the media involved to cover the story. “I told them it’s not for publicity for the law firm. This is a public service story,” he said. But no one covered it.

When my father was about my age, in his mid-40s, he made the radical decision to quit life as a businessman, enroll in a Lutheran seminary and become a pastor. He made no formal vow of poverty, but the effect was similar. He was chasing his own spiritual awakening, his personal quest for an idyll on earth.

“The meek shall inherit the earth,” he sometimes teased, reminding me that “meek” could mean “poor,” in other words, us. He reminded my brother and me all the time that we were blessed in other ways. He never encountered the term “mineral rights” in his entire life.

Late in the day, I finally headed to my ancestors’ land. Before my trip, I noticed that Google Maps had updated the aerial photos around it. Now a white rectangle — a drill pad — was visible amid the green, just adjacent to the tract I was told I partially owned. I assumed it was newly built following the permit that was approved ten months ago. I set out to see it, and to see what I could of the land whose minerals were partly mine.

In Burton, W.Va., where Uhle owns part of the mineral rights, the property owners are selling because of the fracking in the area.

Just when I thought I’d established a tentative détente with the wild twists and pitched hills of West Virginia’s panhandle, the roads reminded me again that I was the outsider here. The acreage I was visiting is many miles deep in the hills on the narrowest and crookedest roads. Photographer Scott Goldsmith gamely rode shotgun, keeping an eye on the deer that routinely darted in front of the car at dusk. The trip was long and conducted largely outside the range of my phone’s 5G coverage. The drive confirmed my research; there were an outsized number of cemeteries. It also confirmed some of what non-West Virginians might assume about the state knowing its legacy of poverty, and a still increasing affliction of opioid drugs. Chickens and pigs roamed unkempt yards. A beach towel printed with the Confederate flag drooped on a clothesline. People observed my rental car climbing hills from their decrepit porches.

The extended time in the car gave me time to reflect on how Turak and Clark see things.

“In an ideal world, there would be no fracking,” Turak told me in the lobby of his law office. “But then you have to think about the people here. Without this money, what choices do they have?”

Clark agrees, and it’s the reason he started his foundation. “When you’re discussing oil and gas development, you really have to look at the environment, the production, and the local residents,” he said. “How are the local residents benefiting? And really those three things are interrelated. You cannot take one away and say, we’re going to only work on this one, or we’re only going to make this successful. All three have to be successful together.”

The fracking process is fairly straightforward. Drills bore holes in the earth to depths around one-mile and then highly-pressurized water, sand and other chemicals are shot into those openings.

Clark believes that if you have the capacity to see how the environment, the gas and its plentiful financial resources, and the local population are connected, it makes sense to “find ways to improve, to help move all three of those forward together.” He may be happy that he’s leased his substantial mineral rights and begun this important work in his community, but he’s not blind to the yet-unknown environmental risks. He told me that there have been several “unexplained deaths” of cows on his land in recent years, but says, “I can’t point to oil and gas and say that’s why. Animals do pass away.” When it comes to fracking, the research and other information available makes it very challenging to draw a sharp line equating causes and effects.

When we arrive at the drill pad adjacent to the tract of my ancestors’ land, it appears a lot like Whitlatch’s with one major difference. Instead of looking crisp and brand-new, it looks a bit tattered. A metal sign is bent inward, and rust creeps up the sides of the six wells sunk into the drill pad’s gravel. This isn’t a new site; a document there appears to be from 2013. A placard says the site’s status is “producing.”

It’s possible this drill is only accessing the land beneath it. But if this drill is already accessing my land, too, with the permit approved in August 2021, then the landman has left out something important in this story. The land I came to see is not being considered for development. It’s quite plainly been developed. The vast, leafy slopes immediately south of us, where my acreage begins, are unreachable; there are no roads. From here, it’s impossible to tell if that uninhabited expanse is being tapped for what’s below.

Like many West Virginians, I feel ill-equipped to determine what’s happening or how to protect my rights, if I even have any. A few weeks ago, Turak suggested that I would probably be due some money or lots of money from these mineral rights. A third option suddenly seemed as likely as any — no money. If the ground is already being tapped with permission from someone else, I may have neither consent nor any income on the line.

By now, early evening shadows are stretching long across the gravelly ground. I want to begin the return drive before it’s dark. I also want to know whether my ancestors’ land is being fracked, or will be soon, but the answers are out of reach, too deep in the void of unfamiliar hills for me to discern tonight.

Uhle surveys the area in West Virginia where she has split mineral rights to land.

Every turn on the circuitous way back to Moundsville opens a new panorama. The sun is setting spectacularly, and pink and blue clouds are like thick cotton candy above us. Summer light shoots across the hills. Gold is everywhere.

At 4:52 a.m. I woke in the New Vrindaban commune guest quarters to my neighbors chanting “Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama, Rama, Hare, Hare, Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna,” on their way to the 5 a.m. temple festivities. Wrecked with exhaustion, I turned off my scheduled alarm and slept until just after 7 a.m. when a frac truck trundled heavily and loudly up the hill on the road between my room and the cow sanctuary. It was time for me to get out of West Virginia.

Back home, the landman had been suspiciously silent for several weeks. Having learned the tract number from Turak, I was able to approach the company that held the permit and try to learn more. While I waited for their investigation and reply, I wondered why the landman had not called to cajole me some more. I called him and never heard back. I had to assume that he’d met the 75 percent consent needed and I was out of luck.

Weeks later, the oil and gas company finally completed its research into county records and returned to me with a disappointing determination. “You are not a mineral owner,” the customer service representative emailed me. My brother and I would have been mineral rights holders to that land I visited in July, but for the fact that my great-grandmother had exacted revenge on her daughter in a newly-discovered last will and testament from the 1920s. “I hereby give, will, devise and bequeath to my beloved daughter …” the passage began, going on to hand all mineral rights and other assets to a great aunt I never knew. “I have intentionally omitted to provide herein for or to make any bequest to …” it continued, naming her other daughter, my grandmother. Perhaps I should not have been surprised. In the 1920s, my grandmother left Appalachia to pursue her own dreams in Florida. In addition to “doing hair” as she called it, my grandmother played drums in an all-lady jazz band at a Miami nightclub called The Gray-Wolf. She enjoyed gin. She’d run toward her own heaven and forsaken whatever inheritance might have come from her backcountry roots. I was, officially, not an heiress.

Whitlatch’s deal was signed in 2017 and the process of flattening one of his hilltops and constructing the drill pad was extremely disruptive.

Whether or not the landman was offering me a fair deal when he approached me with his offer, in this instance, he was simply referencing an outdated document. The will that was discovered later in the summer of 2022 superseded the 1897 deed book that prompted his first few calls. In the confusing, high-stakes, ever-shifting, every man and woman for themselves environment that is 21st century West Virginia, I can hardly hold it against him.