English assignment

Pinkwashing: Fracking Company Teams Up With Susan G. Komen to ‘End Breast Cancer Forever’

SANDRA STEINGRABER

October 9, 2014 by EcoWatch

pinkdrill

What do you get when you cross a breast cancer charity with a

frack job?

The answer is the image above which, as I am writing, is going

epidemically viral.

It’s hard to stop staring in utter baffled amazement. Is it some kind

of … phallic cyborg?

The opening scene of a yet another sequel to Tremors? �Kevin Bacon! Nevada! Subterranean, worm-like, cross-dressing

graboid!�

A sex toy from hell?

In fact, it’s all these things and more. Susan G. Komen, the largest

breast cancer organization in America with more than 100,000

volunteers and partnerships in more than 50 countries, has

teamed up with Baker Hughes, one of the world’s largest oilfield

service companies with employees in more than 80 countries.

Susan G. Komen hands out pink ribbons for breast cancer

awareness, and Baker Hughes fracks. So, there you have it: a

pink, fracking, drill head.

That’s Susan G. Komen pink, by the way. It’s special. Like John

Deere green. And that signature color has been painted by hand

on a thousand drill bits, which will soon be shipped by Baker

Hughes to well pads all over the world, thus facilitating a thousand fossil fuel extraction projects just in time for Breast Cancer

Awareness Month. Which is this month. �But please don’t confuse

Baker Hughes pink drill bits with Chesapeake Energy’s “even-rigs-

can-rally-for-a-cure” pink drill rigs. That was so 2012�.

I am not making this up. Read more about the Komen/Baker

Hughes frack-for-the-cure effort here. Watch a little promotional

video about it here.  And then share the contents of your heart

with Susan G. Komen headquarters: right over here.

As the story explains, when the pink drill bits are shipped in their

boxes (and, yes, the boxes are pink, too), they come packed with

information about “breast health facts, breast cancer risk factors

and screening tips.”

And exactly whose breast cancer awareness quotient will be

bolstered out there on the well pad? Inside the trailers and the

trucks? Down on the drilling floor? Up on the derrick?

“The hope is that the roughneck who cracks open that container

learns a little more about the disease that afflicts 200,000 women

per year.”

Here’s what I’m wagering that roughneck does not learn from the

literature shipped with his drill bit this October: I’m betting he

does not read about the recent study from the U.S. Centers for

Disease Control that found dangerous levels of benzene in the

urine of workers in the unconventional (aka fracking) oil and gas

industry. Benzene is a proven human carcinogen.

According to Bernard Goldstein, MD, toxicologist and former dean

at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health, “These

workers are at higher risk for leukemia. The longer, the more

frequently they do this, the more likely they are to get leukemia

particularly if the levels are high.”

In addition to leukemia, benzene is also a suspected cause of,

well, breast cancer.

Benzene exposure is known to induce breast cancer in laboratory

animals and is modestly associated with breast cancer among

women. But the best evidence we have for the benzene-breast

cancer link comes from studies of young male workers exposed

on the job. Male breast cancer is clearly linked to occupational

exposure to benzene.

So, maybe those pamphlets really will come in handy in the man

camps.

The carcinogenic dangers of fracking begin at the job site and

extend far beyond. They include silica dust (a lung carcinogen);

volatile organic air pollutants (linked to lymphoma); radioactive

wastes, such as radon and radium (lung and breast cancers

again); and drinking water contaminants, such as arsenic and

brominated byproducts (both bladder carcinogens). Indeed,

cancer hazards are present at every stage of the drilling,

fracking, processing, and distribution process.

Researchers at the University of Colorado School of Public Health

found higher excess cancer risks in people living within a half-

mile of drilling and fracking operations than people living further

away.

But I’ll guess that particular study is not packed in the box with

the drill bit and the cancer screening tips.

So, here’s a message from me to America’s biggest breast cancer

charity:

Susan G. Komen, it’s time to stop taking money from the frackers

and come home. Your roots—as well as my own—are in central

Illinois. �I grew up near Peoria. And so did the woman named

Susan, in whose memory the organization was created. And so

did her sister Nancy who founded it).

While your pink drill bits are multiplying on social media, here’s an

image from Illinois that’s also enjoying a bit of traction. Take a

look: more than 100 people pack a county board meeting last

night in objection to plans to drill for oil in McLean County. The

signs they hold: “Not one permit.”

notonepermit

Here is the vision statement that your $100,000 donor, Baker

Hughes, distributes to the world:

“We are looking forward to the next 100 years of working side by

side with our customers to continue expanding the limits of oil,

gas and alternative energy drilling, completion and production …”

Meanwhile, back in your home and mine, folks are hunkered down

in the fight of their lives against fracking and are messaging

under the banners #NoDrilling and #ClimateChange.

Those are the hashtags of awareness—enough for this month and

all the rest to follow.

All together, it’s the beginning of the cure we’ve been racing after.

© 2021 EcoWatch

SANDRA STEINGRABER

Sandra Steingraber, Ph.D. is an ecologist, author,

internationally recognized authority on the environment

links to cancer and human health, and co-founder of New

Yorkers Against Fracking. She is the author of Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of

Cancer and the Environment and, her most recent, Raising Elijah: Protecting Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis.