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"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.

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"energy in America" by Steven Schroeder

8/22/2013

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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.

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

8/20/2013

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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.

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Meet the Singing, Anti-Fracking Nuns

8/19/2013

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

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

8/17/2013

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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.

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.

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