Rachel Maddow did her usual thorough job of explaining how North Dakota’s oil boom has affected the environment. And by affected I mean utterly destroyed. And by environment I mean wildlife, rivers, water supplies, homes, and human lives:
“It was carrying Bakken crude oil…”
Bakken oil has had another devastating effect on North Dakota that nobody else is talking about. Please read the entire article, but to give you a taste (and a major headache), here are a few excerpts from the Los Angeles Times explaining how a “once-isolated” Indian reservation is now dealing with a whole lot more than environmental disasters:
How’s that oil glut workin’ for ya, North Dakota? Tim Purdon, U.S. attorney for the state: “When we serve search warrants now, we don’t just find drugs; we find firearms. Everyone is heavily armed. There are more and more guns.” Driven by the new wealth of the Bakken oil fields, drug dealing has spread across the reservation, tearing apart families and destroying the fabric of this once-isolated community. […]
MHA Nation Children and Family Services Department officials said they never had to take custody of children born addicted to opiates until 2010, when child services officials saw their first drug-addicted baby born on the reservation. There have been at least 15 such cases since. “It’s a tidal wave,” Judge Johnson said. “This is beyond the capability of our tribes.” […] Local and federal officials believe the sellers had ties to Mexican gangs… Known as MS-13, the Los Angeles-bred gang began proliferating outside the U.S. after many of its members were deported to Central America. […]
With the wealth generated by the Bakken oil fields, crime has increased so much in the region that voters just across the state line in Roosevelt County, Mont., recently passed a bond to increase jail space. The FBI plans to open an office in the region. One mother, a resident named Amelia Reed, “receives oil royalty money from land she inherited on the reservation, and says the monthly checks made it easy for her to drop at least $400 a month for her habit.” “This used to be home,” she said. “Because of the drugs and the oil boom, it’s not the same as when I was growing up.… Everyone is scared here.“ Another by-product of Big Oil: Drug addiction. If deniers don’t believe climate change will kill you, maybe they’ll pull their petroleum-soaked heads out of the sand long enough to recognize that meth and heroin can. Or is this all just a liberal “hoax,” too?
