Last Thursday Ben and I attended a meeting in town concerning the effects of fracking. Fracking, for those of you who don’t know is the process of fracturing the underground structure of rock in order to pour in chemicals to extract natural gas. The problem isn’t in the fracturing itself, but the chemicals which they put in. Those chemicals leak up though fractured ground into the aquifer and surface water or spill into waterways though careless acts, permanently destroying underground sources of water and killing waterways. Do you recall that I made reference awhile back to darker-souled individuals who care nothing about others? The people responsible for this pollution are those kind of people. At the meeting our local group, which is trying to protect the environment in our county, showed a documentary, Split Estate, which told about the shocking, ill effects of those chemicals on humans. In the film they also interviewed gas and oil company representatives. The blatant, bold-faced lies those representatives told were appalling. I was aghast at the way they were able to smile so pleasantly as they told their interviewer there was absolutely nothing wrong with what they were doing and that they were fully in compliance with the law. And actually, thanks to our beloved politicians, they were fully in compliance with current laws.
Also in the film they showed the lives of people whose health and well-being had been completely destroyed and whose homes had to be abandoned – a complete financial loss – because the water, land and air around them had become so polluted with extremely toxic chemicals. The landscape around the drill sites is reminiscent of the land around Butte and Anaconda that was destroyed by the copper mines and smelting process. The chemicals the drillers put into the earth are never divulged and don’t have to be because of laws that protect the gas and oil companies, but there are also poisonous substances that occur naturally at the depths the companies drill and are washed up in the process, but some of the chemicals that ‘show up’ are not naturally occurring, but no one can prove that because the companies don’t have to tell what they put into the ground. One company representative interviewed, again with a sweet and innocent smile, told the interviewer that what they put into the ground is a surfactant, that it was just “soap.”
The reality of us living here on earth in the current political and economic situation we have religiously nurtured across the globe is that we, the people, don’t matter. We, who pay the taxes and keep this world running with our labor, our hearts and our minds, are given no more consideration than bothersome mosquitoes on the drill sites.
No comments:
Post a Comment