Last night, I pulled up the local news website to check the weather and came across a news article that our state government is considering a move to let the gas companies come in and start fracking. Fracking stands for “hydraulic fracturing” and is a process to extract fossil fuels from beneath the earth. For a more detailed explanation, you can check out this wiki link on hydraulic fracturing.
The more I read about this fracking process, the more horrified I became that our state is even considering allowing it to occur here. Currently, it is illegal, and seemingly for very good reason. Other states, such as Pennsylvania, who have allowed fracking, have found themselves with huge environmental and economic problems. Thousands of wells have been contaminated to the point where the “fix” from the gas companies is to truck in gallons of fresh water for the population to drink. People have gotten sick and died, and yet the gas companies have exempted themselves from all government and environmental regulations to the point where they don’t even have to reveal the chemicals they are putting into the water under the guise of keeping their patent secrets.
A segment from a documentary called GasLand shows a resident starting a fire by holding a match to the water coming out of the kitchen sink faucet. I added this documentary to the number 1 spot on my Netflix queue, so should be able to watch the entire thing for myself soon.
When the gas boom is over, the companies move out of the area leaving a destroyed environment, contaminated water, worthless property, and severe unemployment. I’ve even heard some talk that some of the recent earthquakes in Ohio could have been caused by fracking.
And now they want to do those very same things here. Wow, wonder what’s going to happen to our nearby nuclear plant if the earth upon where it sits becomes less and less stable due to fracking? I don’t think a lot of people here know about fracking. I’d never heard of it before this week, and people aren’t really talking about it. My fear is that the politicians are so much in the pockets of these large corporations that it may not even matter what the people who are going to be most affected, harmed, and even killed by this devastation want or do to try to stop it. We have such a huge history of political and corporate shortsightedness.
Sure, I realize that we are dependent on oil and fossil fuels and that it would be a very good thing to limit our dependency on other countries for energy, but are we going to sacrifice the health and lives of hundreds of thousands to millions of U.S. citizens’ lives for a short-term solution that could last for only about 40 years and then our problems are worse than they’ve ever been?
When the dollar is completely devalued and we have a complete economic crash, are we really wanting to be totally dependent on the goodwill of a gas company or a corrupt government to continue to send in the water trucks because our wells and groundwater are so contaminated that we have no other source of fresh water?
We’ve lived without fossil fuels for hundreds of years. We can’t live past three days without clean water. We are already losing rights and freedoms every day by the bucket load, and something like this would create yet a new dependency for the very water we drink.
Am I anti-business for thinking this way? I don’t think so. I am very much in support of business. If you work hard at a business, are rewarded with great wealth, and are generous with the people who helped you get there, then great! Capitalism at it’s finest. Boo yah! I’m all for that. There are businesses and corporations that I support, albeit some more willingly than others.
However, I also believe that good ethics is imperative in any business practice, and what is happening with these fracking deals isn’t ethical…at all. Yes, it can create jobs and cause a boom in the localized economy for the very short term, but the longer term harm and the cost of lives is far too great, and would create even more dependency on government agencies when we really need to be weaning ourselves away from those dependencies. We need to become a healthier and more self-sufficient society and not be so dependent on other countries, global corporations, or even our own government for everything.
Special thanks to ProgressOhio for the use of No Fracking Way under the Creative Commons license.
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