PRESS RELEASE
Sand Wars in Cranberry Country:
An investigation into the money, politics and corruption behind sand mining
and its silent environmental crisis in Southeastern Massachusetts
Visit the Interactive Website documenting 110 mining sites
Contact: Meg Sheehan, Community Land & Water Coalition, meg@communitylandandwater.org, tel. 774.260.7864
Watch the You Tube Film: Short or Long
FIRST EVER INVESTIGATION INTO SAND MINING IN SOUTHEASTERN MASSACHUSETTS
- Global sand shortage causing furious rush to mine sand deposits
- Investigation links sand supply chains to government corruption, lack of regulatory oversight
- Documents air and water pollution, forest and biodiversity and danger to drinking water
Boston, MA (October 19, 2023) – Community Land and Water Coalition (CLWC), a grassroots network based in Southeastern Massachusetts, today released a first-ever investigative report into sand and gravel mining in Southeastern Massachusetts. The report, Sand Wars in Cranberry Country: An investigation into the Money, Politics and Corruption Behind Sand Mining and its Silent Environmental Crisis in Southeastern Massachusetts pulls back the curtain on an industry operating in plain sight while polluting the air, water, wetlands, desecrating archeological sites, and exposing the underground drinking water for over 200,000 people to contamination.
The report is part of the Sand Wars Project is a public collaboration based on years of research, hundreds of eyewitness reports, drone surveillance and thousands of public records documenting sand and gravel mining in Southeastern Massachusetts: the who, what, when and why. The Project includes a website, 4 minute and 10 minute videos, and an 84-page Report all available on the interactive website, https://www.sandwarssoutheasternma.org/
The website’s interactive map identifies about 110 historic and active mines. By clicking on location on the map, the public can find details about each location. The Project is ongoing. The public is invited to submit information that can be added to the Project resources.
The report documents how state and local officials provide regulatory approvals for mines that claim they are “cranberry agriculture” or “normal land development” for subdivisions. These regulatory approvals provide protection for a network of landowners, trucking companies, and the construction industry supplied by the sand mines. This includes letting landowners and mining companies violate the state Clean Waters Act by dredging for sand and gravel in the Plymouth Carver Sole Source Aquifer.
Cranberry agriculture and sand mining
Southeastern Massachusetts, famous for its approximately 13,000 acres of cranberry bogs, is also home to about 110 mining operations, according to the report. The report links mining to cranberry agriculture and estimates about 71% of the volume of sand has been mined by cranberry companies.
The report explains how, why and where this is happening. The Project profiles individual mining locations with details about the size, natural features and other aspects of each, claiming this is an underestimate and that more research is needed.
The report explains that because mining extraction is not regulated under state law and the environmental review statute, the Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act officials treat mining extraction as a local land use issue, the scope and scale of individual and cumulative environmental damage, including to groundwater, air, wetlands and Indigenous archeology have never been addressed.
Corruption
The Report explains how municipal and state officials provide protection for commercial sand and gravel operations by giving them permits and approvals for which the operations do not qualify. This happens in two ways. First, mining companies portray the operations as “cranberry agriculture.” Second, state land use laws allow limited earth removal for normal land development. Local and state governments issue permits even when common sense and what’s visible to the naked eye show this is not not cranberry agriculture or normal land development. Without these exceptions, the mining is prohibited.
State agencies also cover up for mining operations allowing projects to be classified as cranberry agriculture or normal land development. The agencies include Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act office that approved or ignored large mining operations as “cranberry agriculture” or subdivisions, the Department of Fish and Wildlife, Natural Heritage and Endangered Species Program that approves exemptions from the Massachusetts Endangered Species Act, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection that allows mining under the ruse of cranberry agriculture and the Massachusetts Department of Transportation that has entered into agreements for two mining sites.
Environmental, economic toll
The present and future economic toll from environmental damage and lost revenue is enormous, says the report. In March, 2023 the Massachusetts Office of the Inspector General announced an investigation into financial fraud in the region’s sand and gravel industry. This includes the activities of the Town of Carver Earth Removal Committee according to the Town’s Selectboard. The report identifies over 30 mining sites in Carver, many claiming to be cranberry agriculture.
In the Town of Wareham, the report documents that the Selectboard allowed A.D. Makepeace Cranberry Co., the world’s largest cranberry company headquartered in Wareham, to conduct mining without required permits. The report estimates this potentially deprived Wareham of $650,000.00 in lost revenue from earth removal fees.
In Plymouth, the report documents a pattern of the Zoning Board of Appeals issuing permits to the same mining operators for years, for different sites, all claiming the mining was necessary for cranberry agriculture or land development. Drinking water contamination could be caused by the mining, costing the towns billions, according to the report.
Unregulated, unnecessary
“This is the largest, single, preventable and most multi-faceted environmental crisis in the state’s history,” said Meg Sheehan, a public interest environmental lawyer with over forty years’ experience, from Plymouth. “This is complete obliteration and alteration of the environment above and below the ground – some mining operations dig 100 feet deep into the ground according to reports. Above ground, 2,500 acres of the surface of forests have been clear-cut and stripped, including global biodiversity hotspots. Mining takes the land down to bare sand, a sterile moonscape where nothing can grow again in a human timeframe. During the mining operations, residents are exposed to carcinogenic silica sand, noise, vibration, and truck traffic. Below the ground, the aquifer, essentially a river of water, is being exposed to more pollution. Experts say this can lead to more cyanobacteria outbreaks and change stormwater patterns, how rivers flow, and contribute to flooding among other problems.”
Socio-economic impacts
“Right before our eyes, our environmental and cultural heritage and the ancestral land of the Wampanoag people is being destroyed – irreversibly. Mining companies, with the complicity of town officials, are allowed to level the region’s highest hills making claims that the mining is “necessary” for agriculture or a subdivision. This makes no sense. For decades, we’ve been seeing trucks, sometimes one a minute at times fly down local roads to the highways around Plymouth, Carver, Wareham and Middleboro exporting sand and gravel for commercial sale. This is essentially unregulated and unnecessary. There are alternatives to using sand and Massachusetts needs to catch up with what is happening globally with this issue,” said Sheehan. “In the meantime, the extraction must stop and our residents, water, forests and biodiversity must be protected.”
Drinking water
Every resident of the region relies on the shallow underground aquifer and interconnected ponds for drinking water. The forests, sand and gravel are the natural filtration protection for the drinking water. Sand and gravel mining permanently removes this filtration. Local bylaws passed towns protect communities and drinking water from sand and gravel mining.
“Why are our state and town officials allowing these operations to continue unregulated for years, harming our water and creating public nuisances with dust, noise, vibration and loss of property value? No one has the right to cause this type of pervasive irreversible harm to the public and the environment and present and future residents,” said Sheehan.
United Nations warning on sand
The United Nations Environment Program recently launched the Global Sand Observatory Initiative calling “sand resource governance” “one of the greatest sustainability challenges of the 21st century”. It calls sand mining a silent environmental crisis and reports sand, gravel and aggregates “are the second most-exploited natural resource in the world after water.”
In Massachusetts, the extraction of sand and gravel from the earth is regulated only on the local level as a land use. This puts the power to grant “earth removal permits” into the hands of a few local officials in town halls – the “fox guarding the chicken coop” according to the report. The report documents that for decades, the same local officials with close ties to industry have dominated the permit boards, operating behind a veil of secrecy – until recently. Since the investigation began, four members of the Carver Earth Removal Committee have resigned-three of whom worked in the cranberry and trucking industry that benefit from sand and gravel mining. Mining operators are allowed to self-monitor their activities which creates the potential for depriving taxpayers of earth removal revenue.
Indigenous history and culture
Speaking about this threat to Southeastern Massachusetts, the ancestral home of the Wampanoag people for over 15,000 years, Linda Coombs, well known author and educator from the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) said, “The care of the earth is all of our sacred responsibility – all humans who live on this earth. We need to rethink our societies, and about what it means to be in relationship with the earth, and to NOT think of her as merely a commodity.”
“I am very concerned about the destruction of the environment and the effects of the sand mining on our groundwater. It baffles me that Carver’s boards and committees have allowed, permitted and assisted in the removal of the natural filter for our Sole Source Aquifer, our sand. Who is responsible when the 200,000 people that rely on the Plymouth/Carver Sole Source Aquifer don’t have access to it because of contamination? Is it the predatory companies that are fueled by greed? Is it our State representatives and regulatory departments that have ignored our cries for help and refused to enforce the laws of the Commonwealth? These are the questions that I want answered now that so much sand has been removed from the aquifer” said Mary Dormer, Carver Resident, Co-Founder, Carver Concerned Citizens.
Climate impacts
Michael Kellett, Executive Director of the wilderness preservation group Restore: The North Woods addressed the climate change, biodiversity and forest impacts of this sand and gravel mining. “Clearcutting a forest fuels climate change by releasing large amounts of carbon from the trees and soils — especially on sandy soils such as those in Southeast Massachusetts. Even worse is clearcutting the forest and then mining the sandy soil. This not only releases vast amounts of carbon. The forest, soils, and biodiversity are unlikely to ever be restored to the complex natural systems that exist today.”
Major findings
- Negative impacts across all environmental media: forests, biodiversity, air pollution, water pollution, wetlands, groundwater, and Indigenous archeological sites, making the problem multi-faceted and pervasive,
- There are at least 110 historic and active mining operations that have:
- Stripping 2,600 acres of forested land down to bare soil or below and into the aquifer and irreversibly leveled topography;
- Extracting at least 61 million cubic yards of sand and gravel – at least 2.5 million truckloads, enough to circumnavigate the globe 1.3 times;
- Destroying vast areas of the globally rare Atlantic Coastal Pine Barrens forest and the Natural Community ecosystems unique to the region;
- Harms the public health and well-being by noise, vibration and emissions of carcinogenic silica sand;Destroyed evidence of Native American Indigenous use and occupation of the land without proper review as a result of failures by the Massachusetts Historical Commission
Moratorium and investigation
The report calls for a complete moratorium on the mining and an assessment of the damage to date. It questions whether mining is necessary at all.
It calls for a thorough investigation of all operations, all environmental impacts, particularly the impacts of dredging in the aquifer and a review of financial incentives including tax incentives and state grants for the cranberry industry, a “beleaguered industry” and “dual use” SMART solar subsidies. According to the report, at least two “agricultural ponds” created by mining are approved for “floating solar”. It calls for educating municipal officials and calls on the state and federal officials to stop all activities to protect the Plymouth-Carver Sole Source Aquifer.
For more information: www.sandwarssoutheasternma.org
Additional Contacts:
Michael Kellett, Executive Director, RESTORE: The North Woods, kellet@restore.org, (978) 618-8752
Carver Concerned Citizens: carverconcernedcitizens@gmail.com