Sister on a mission: the Texas nun using oil company money to fight fracking

Fuente The Guardian

“I call it redeeming the money,” said Sister Elizabeth Riebschlaeger, munching a turkey sandwich in a bar with a stuffed steer’s head mounted on a wall next to a life-sized poster of John Wayne.

About six years ago, when fracking got feverish in the Eagle Ford Shale, a company offered to lease the mineral rights to some land bought by her grandfather in the 1920s.

Sister Elizabeth did some research about the consequences of fracking – extracting natural gas by pumping water, sand and chemicals at high pressure into wells deep underground – and did not like what she learned. But her attorney told her that the company would find a way to get the rights with or without her consent.

She decided: “What I’ll do is I’ll take the money and use it for something that will promote responsible development.”

The nun would donate her oil and gas windfall to fund watchdog activities, holding the oil and gas industry to account and warning of the dark effects of get-rich-quick, lightly regulated capitalism.

The 80-year-old roams the region, educating, advocating and sniffing out malpractice, often in a white Honda Civic with more than 250,000 miles on the clock, a windscreen that keeps getting cracked by road debris kicked up by trucks, and bumper stickers that say “Don’t Mess With Texas” and “No Disposal Pits”.

As a result of her vow of poverty, the proceeds from Sister Elizabeth’s mineral rights go to her Catholic congregation, the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word of San Antonio, which funds her tours.

Sister Elizabeth is backing a long-running, longshot campaign to stop a fracking waste pit from being built next year in fields just outside the city limits of Nordheim, only half a mile from the main drag and a school with about 170 pupils. It’s an eye-catching battle in the Eagle Ford, which runs for some 400 miles through south Texas from the border with Mexico through to counties north-west of Houston.

The first well of the Eagle Ford Shale boom was drilled in 2008. That year, 26 drilling permits were issued. In 2014, the height of the frenzy, the figure soared to 5,613. Amid the industry’s continuing downturn, 642 permits were issued from January to August this year.

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A landscape of cattle ranches became blotched with well pads. As vehicles barreled along once-quiet country roads, fatal traffic accidents in the region increased by 40% between 2011 and 2012.

“One man’s American dream quickly becomes another man’s American nightmare,” Sister Elizabeth said. “All you have to do is drive around and you will see the damage being done to the environment. And I point those things out and tell people that it can be reported.”

Read the entire report here.