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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.

from "The Fracking of Rachel Carson: Silent Spring’s lost legacy, told in fifty parts" by Sandra Steingraber

8/17/2013

1. Rachel Carson, the ecologist who kicked the hornet’s nest, wrote a book that needed no subtitle. Published fifty years ago this September, Silent Spring rocketed to the top of the bestseller list, prompted a meeting with the president’s science advisers, occasioned congressional hearings, and circled her neck with medals of honor. It also let loose swarms of invective from the pesticide industry. Throughout it all, Carson remained calm. Friends and foes alike praised her graceful comportment and gentle voice. Also, her stylish suits and trim figure. Nevertheless, her various publicity photos (with microscope; in the woods; outside her summer cottage in Maine; at home in Maryland) look as if the same thought bubble hovers above them all: I hate this.

2. In the later portraits, Carson was dying of breast cancer. It was a diagnosis she hid out of fear that her enemies in industry would use her medical situation to attack her scientific objectivity and, most especially, her carefully constructed argument about the role that petrochemicals (especially pesticides) played in the story of human cancer. But behind her unflappable public composure, Carson’s private writings reveal how much physical anguish she endured. Bone metastases. Radiation burns. Angina. Knowing this, you can imagine her patience running out during the interminable photo shoots. The wretched wig hot and itchy under the lights. The stabbing pains (cervical vertebrae splintered with tumors) that would not, would not relent.

3. In the iconic Hawk Mountain photo, Rachel Carson is truly beautiful. Her smile looks natural rather than forced. Posed on a rocky summit, she is wearing a badass leather jacket and wields a pair of leather-strapped binoculars. So armed, she scans the horizon. At her feet, the whole of Berks County, Pennsylvania, unfurls, forest and valley, field and mountain, like a verse from a Pete Seeger song.

4. Hawk Mountain, along the Appalachian flyway, is an officially designated refuge for raptors. As with so many sanctuaries, it started out as a hunting ground with bounties. By the mid-1930s, it had become the spot in Pennsylvania to witness the annual fall migration of hawks. Rachel Carson loved it here. She wrote about her experiences in a never-finished, never-published essay titled “Road of the Hawks.” According to biographer Linda Lear—who gathered the fragments into the collection Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson—the essay is notable not only for its careful analysis of bird behavior and knowledge of geology but also because Carson traced the origin of her airy lookout to Paleozoic marine organisms.

5.

And always in these Appalachian highlands there are reminders of those ancient seas that more than once lay over all this land . . . these whitened limestone rocks on which I am sitting . . . were formed under that Paleozoic ocean, of the myriad tiny skeletons of creatures that drifted in its waters. Now I lie back with half closed eyes and try to realize that I am at the bottom of another ocean—an ocean of air on which the hawks are sailing.

6. She sat on a mountaintop and thought about oceans.

7. The marine inhabitants of the ancient seas that once overlay Appalachia transformed, when they died, into gaseous bubbles of methane. Pressed under the accumulated weight of silt sifting down from nearby mountains, the seafloor solidified into what’s now called the Marcellus Shale, a layer of bedrock that’s located under thousands of feet of what we would call the earth, but the mining industry callsoverburden: the material that lies between the surface and an area of economic interest. To extract methane bubbles from the area of economic interest, the natural gas industry is now blowing up the state of Pennsylvania.

8. High-volume, slickwater, horizontal hydrofracking would be considered a crime if the requirements of the Safe Drinking Water Act, which regulates underground chemical injections, pertained.

-- from "The Fracking of Rachel Carson: Silent Spring’s lost legacy, told in fifty parts" by Sandra Steingraber (published in the September/October 2012 issue of Orion Magazine). Click here to read the rest of the article.

Fracking Links

8/17/2013

Organizations

Artists Against Fracking

Catskill Citizens for Safe Energy

Don't Frack New York

Environmental Working Group

Frack Free Sussex

Loretto Community

No Frack Illinois

Stop the Frack Attack

Stop the Frack Attack on Illinois

Students Against Fracking

Treasure Karoo Action Group

Articles

"The Fracking of Rachel Carson: Silent Spring’s lost legacy, told in fifty parts" by Sandra Steingraber (Sept./Oct. 2012 issue of Orion Magazin e)

"Video: Meet the Singing, Anti-Fracking Nuns" by James West (Mother Jones, 8/15/2013)

"World joins South Africans in fight against Fracking" (wecanchange.co.za)

Note: This is a new, ongoing list...check back soon for more updates.

Artists Against Fracking

8/17/2013

articles:

"Let's Give Clean Water a Chance" by Yoko Ono

links:

Artists Against Fracking

Artists Against Fracking Ireland

Artists Against Fracking UK

Yoko Ono and Artists Against Fracking Find Out What Fracking Has Done to Pennsylvania from JFOX on Vimeo.

Fracking Futures

8/17/2013

FRACKING hell or fracking bliss? An art installation at Liverpool's FACT gallery gives visitors a chance to decide what they think of this controversial gas extraction technique. A miniaturised fracking "rig" simulates the sounds, tremors and flames that a real one might produce, and appears to drill right through the gallery floor.

-- from "Art installation brings you face to face with fracking" by Kate Ravilious (New Scientist, 7/31/2013)

An installation in Liverpool explores the future of fracking for shale gas in the UK. Photograph: Christopher Thomond (The Guardian, 8/15/2013)

HeHe - Fracking Futures from FACT on Vimeo.