By John Brummett

Rod Bryan calls himself an “eco-refugee from Southwest Arkansas.”

His native Lafayette County and its surrounding region once experienced better days, mainly by stripping the land of timber for milling. But then, in time, the squirrel-hunting woods of Bryan’s happy youth were gone, replaced by rows of replanted pine trees.

Gone, too, were the days of bounty.

What happened, he understands, was that the people used up the land for short-term and short-sighted benefit, leading to the inevitable day, now come, when the land would be ravaged, or at least less fertile, and the money-makers and jobs moved on elsewhere.

The local economic model had not provided any of what Bryan has now come to covet and preach with a self-styled fervor and zeal, even a touch of angry combativeness and impatience. It’s called sustainability. Something that lasts, that recycles, that regenerates, that doesn’t get used up, you see.

Bryan considers himself lucky to live now in midtown Little Rock among others who subsist on an art or craft not depleting the land. Until lately, he had considered himself further lucky to be able to drive north toward, say, Clinton, and enjoy land less disturbed.

But now that very area is dotted heavily with land left bare except for wells through which natural gas companies are shooting massive amounts of water and sand and mud and chemicals deep into the ground in what’s called hydraulic fracturing. They’re looking for gas and finding it.

Landowners are making money from new leases and royalties. A poor state is beholding all this — the Fayetteville Shale Play, it’s called — and proclaiming it our great good fortune.
Bryan is saying “beware” and trying to get somebody to listen to him.

He’s always trying to get somebody to listen to him. He ran for governor as an independent, riding a bicycle and taking longer trips in a Mercedes fueled with used cooking oil from the neighborhood Oyster Bar. He liked it when I called him “an enlightened good ol’ boy.” He didn’t like it when, as the election drew nearer, I dismissed him as fringe and put my writing focus on Mike Beebe and Asa Hutchinson.

When he doesn’t like something, or you, he makes his disdain palpable, as he has of me in a blog post here and there.

He finds me and my mainstream media to be approximately as short-sighted as the land-depleters of Lafayette County. He says most of his news anymore is “brokered by Facebook.”

His frustration is understandable, but his anger and short fuse can be counterproductive.
It was encouraging, then — to me, at least — that we were able to talk in a civil way over the telephone the other day.

The context was that he and a couple of other people have formed a nonprofit, the Arkansas Conservation Alliance, and Bryan has taken to lobbying state government. He’s attending regulatory commission meetings. He’s monitoring legislative budget hearings. He intends to roam the Capitol halls in the imminent legislative session.

His message? Well, that’s one of his problems. His message gets superficially interpreted as being illogically opposed to rare economic opportunity for needy people in a chronically poor state.

But his message is not that. His message is that we should value ourselves and be smarter and more responsible in the process of making short-term money. His message is to leave something for tomorrow’s bounty.

He thinks it’s in our real, practical and greater interest to know in this natural gas play what those chemicals are that are getting shot deep under ground and sometimes burp back up. He thinks it’s in our real, practical and greater interest to know whether those chemicals can get into the groundwater supply and what the effect might be on our health. He thinks it’s in our real, practical and greater interest to try to construct a state regulatory system less obliging to the fleeting bounty provided by the money-makers and land-depleters and more concerned about what can and should be sustained.

He remains both an enlightened good ol’ boy and a fringe figure.

His challenge is to become more the former and less the latter. My challenge, and all of ours, is to receive him as more the former and less the latter.

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John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.