Blog Archives

"Fracking the Shale" by Gloria Betlem

8/27/2013

Fracking the Shale -- detail from the original 12"x180" mixed media drawing

Gloria Betlem paints the natural world around her in upstate New York and central Florida. She specializes in the pastel medium, utilizing its wide spectrum of pure color to its fullest, in her vibrant interpretations. Increasingly, her work has taken on critical environmental issues, including carefully researched topics such as hydrofracking, preserving Hemlock and Canadice Lakes and Florida’s at-risk areas and species. She occasionally ventures out into other interests in her art, embracing portraiture and subjective imagery. Her work is in collections world-wide and she is a sought after, caring teacher. www.gloriabetlem.com

Fracking the Shale is part of a larger installation, "The Finger Lakes: Above & Below," which has been traveling throughout western New York. Fracking the Water is the artwork on the cover of Vigil for the Marcellus Shale, edited by Dwain Wilder and Bart White.

"Walleye Ate the Oilman" by John Roche

8/26/2013

Walleye ate the oilcan
ate the whole town, county, state of Pennsylvania,
United States of Self-Absorption
then exploded
In red, white, and blue flames
shooting out of Everyman’s water tap.
In a democracy, we get the firewater we deserve.

* * * *

"Walleye Ate the Oilman" appears in Vigil for the Marcellus Shale, edited by Dwain Wilder and Bart White.

John Roche teaches English at Rochester Institute of Technology. Three of his poetry collections, The Joe Poems (2012), Topicalities (2008) and On Conesus (2005), are available from Foothills Publishing, and Road Ghosts (2011, published by theenk Books, is available from SPDBooks.org. He has appeared in numerous magazines, including Yellow Medicine Review, House Organ, Big Bridge, and The Woodstock Journal. John is currently editing an anthology of poems about the mythic Joe the Poet for Beatlick Press, Albuquerque.

"What We Will Be When We Are Not" by Alice Zinnes

8/26/2013

What We Are When We Are Not by Alice Zinnes
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 11 x 14 inches
Copyright remains with the artist.

Balcombe -- Shale Gas Exploration & Anti-Fracking Demonstrations

8/25/2013

Here's some recent media coverage regarding shale gas exploration in Balcombe (UK):

"It is expected that the final cost of policing the protests, which are continuing on a much smaller scale, will eventually hit around £3.7 million.

"Anti-fracking activists are protesting about energy firm Cuadrilla's exploratory oil drilling operation in the countryside."
-- from "Are Balcombe fracking protests worth almost £4m in policing costs?" by Louise Gray (The Telegraph, 8/23/2013)

Links:

Balcombe anti-fracking protest – in pictures (The Guardian)
Caroline Lucas explains protest aims after fracking arrest in Balcombe - video (The Guardian)
Vivienne Westwood joins Balcombe fracking protest - video (The Telegraph)

Photographs by Michael Forster Rothbart

8/24/2013

Fracking Pennsylvania

There is a war brewing in the hills of central Pennsylvania and the southern tier of New York. Half a mile underground, in the shale bedrock, are vast natural gas deposits worth an estimated one trillion dollars. An increasingly common drilling method called hydraulic fracturing or "fracking" makes it feasible to extract the gas by pumping millions of gallons of water, sand and proprietary chemicals down wells under high pressure.

* * * *

Photojournalist Michael Forster Rothbart explores the human consequences of environmental contamination. His book on Chernobyl and Fukushima will be published by TED Books this fall.

Rothbart's photographs were included in FRACKING: Art and Activism Against the Drill, an exhibition at Exit Art (New York City).

Vigil for the Marcellus Shale

8/24/2013

artwork by Gloria Betlem

Public Poetry in a Dire Time

The world is at a great crossroads, a moment defined by growing global awareness of the huge disparities between the power, wealth and rapacity of corporations, the sway they have over government, legislators, regulators, and even - to some extent - the courts, and the plight of ordinary people, waving as in Whitman's image, like tall prairie grass over the whole Earth.

The struggle to keep our environment free of hydraulic fracturing has become, in many ways, the epitome of this crossroads, pitting grassroots rural people, aroused and radicalized because of its dangers, against the power of the world's richest corporations - the oil and gas industry….

-Dwain Wilder, Co-editor

Against Giants

A rapturous hymn in celebration of water… a couple facing hopeless bills and hard choices…an elegy for land rendered sterile and a defiant shout of "Keep Off!"… ground zero in the fracking wars…A lying down before bulldozers. A brave refusal to move.

Poems of anger, poems of sorrow. What can a few poor poets do against the might of Exxon® and other corporate mammoths? For what comes next, we need the angry kind. We need poets to defy their power. We need small farmers and ordinary citizens who are brave, stubborn, unshakeable and cunning. We will play David to their Goliath. We're pretty handy with slingshots.

-Bart White, Co-editor

Click here to find out more about Vigil for the Marcellus Shale.

"energy in America" by Steven Schroeder

8/22/2013

You cain’t let oil wait! It’s waited too long. It wants to come up! I worked too long as a revivalist for something that didn’t come. The end of the world, No more waiting! Things got to materialize.
    - Oil King, in William Goyen’s Come, The Restorer

If finding and producing energy in America were as easy as Jed Clampett and his rifle made it look in the opening credits of the Beverly Hillbillies, we probably wouldn’t have needed to pioneer a well stimulation technology known as hydraulic fracturing. But it isn’t, and so we did – first using the process in 1947 to stimulate flow of natural gas from the Hugoton field in Kansas.
    - Halliburton, Fracturing 101

it produced phenomenal results for us
    - Dick Cheney

the end of the world
no more
waiting, it wants

a small percentage of additives
it wants it wants it wants
to come up

down the hatch
a little torture
a little force
a little murder
stimulate the flow

follow and as it were hound
nature in her wandering
drive her afterward

the same place the same
place the same
place

remediate

phenomenal results
enhanced interrogation
to stimulate
the flow.

either you are with us, or

no more

the incidence of fractures
is difficult to quantify

severe pain may
radiate anteriorly, may
mimic the breaking of a heart
and great earthquakes shall be
in divers places and famines
and pestilences and
fearful sights and
great signs

old men rave on
young men dreaming
dream murder and there is

a crack in everything and there is more
heat than light and there is no end in sight.

* * * *

Steven Schroeder is a poet and visual artist who has spent many years moonlighting as a philosophy professor. His most recent collections are Turn (with David Breeden) and Raging for the Exit. More at stevenschroeder.org.

Fracking from Space

8/22/2013

from "Fracking Art: 8 Pics of Utah's Open Fracking Waste Ponds" by War on Error (Daily Kos, 7/26/2012)

"The Nice Young Man Visits" by Rev. David Breeden

8/20/2013

The very nice young man, even
Christian, comes way out to our
house to talk about the gas. The

gas that is surely down there
under the farm, just sitting there,
waiting (who would have thought?

Whoever could have got it out,
but isn’t it almost unbelievable,
how smart people have got

these days?) And he, the
very nice young man, even
Christian, tells me how it’s even

almost a miracle, how they do
all this. Something nobody
could ever have used before is

the hope of America. A
miracle--we’ll be free of all
those foreigners with their oil.

And we know what they want,
after all, don’t we? The nice man,
young and even Christian, says.

Yes, naturally, think about it all
you want. Just call him when.
Just call him when all I want

to do is sign and get rich.

* * * *

Rev. Dr. David Breeden, Minister has a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from The Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD from the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi, with additional study in writing and Buddhism at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. He also has a Master of Divinity degree from Meadville Lombard Theological School. The author of many books, Rev. David blogs at wayofoneness.wordpress.com and revdocdavid.tumblr.com. He tweets at @dbreeden.

Meet the Singing, Anti-Fracking Nuns

8/19/2013

Source: "Video: Meet the Singing, Anti-Fracking Nuns" by James West. Reposted with permission from Mother Jones.