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No Fracking Way!
18 AprThey’re at it again.
The New York Times informs us that “Oil and gas companies injected hundreds of millions of gallons of hazardous or carcinogenic chemicals into wells in more than 13 states from 2005 to 2009, according to an investigation by Congressional Democrats.” The wells are being drilled to tap reserves of natural gas contained in deep rock formation. The chemicals are injected along with water and sand to release the gas. The process is known as hydraulic fracturing, aka hydrofracking, aka fracking.
Frankly, this sounds like one of those deals where they don’t really know what they’re doing. So you try this and that and, if it works, it works, and you keep on trying:
Some ingredients mixed into the hydraulic fracturing fluids were common and generally harmless, like salt and citric acid. Others were unexpected, like instant coffee and walnut hulls, the report said. Many ingredients were “extremely toxic,” including benzene, a known human carcinogen, and lead.
Instant coffee and walnut shells! Shall we try a little castor oil? Maybe a little ipecac? How about some eye of newt? Toe of frog? Then comes the wool of bat and tongue of dog.
Maybe dance a little jig while they’re at it.
Why the Expressive Arts are Essential to the Transition
16 AprThe expressive arts: music and dance, drawing and painting, calligraphy, sculpture, acting, needlecraft, architecture, and so on. Why they are essential: Because they bind us to one another and to the earth, they transform a place, a locus, into a home.
Before continuing down that path, however, let’s take a look back to the Romantics. It’s important to see how, for all their love of nature and of the expressive arts, they contributed to the ideologies that have ended up alienating us from Nature, and from the expressive arts.
It’s really quite simple. Back at the turn of the 18th into the 19th century, as the industrial revolution took hold, the Romantics venerated Nature, and opposed it to the City and to Industry. Industry was dirty, degrading, and alienating, keeping us from our True Home, nature. The trouble is, by so arguing, the Romantics placed Nature on a Pedestal, and put the Pedestal Over There Somewhere. The Romantics preserved nature by separating it from us. As more and more people moved into the cities, more and more people moved away from Nature. Nature became more and more alien, even as the Romantic Ideal became more and more alluring.
At the same time, the Romantics invested artistic expression in a class of rustics that lived Other There, in Nature, but also in an elite class of Geniuses who, while living among us, were not of us. Music and painting and poetry and dance became the provinces of those august geniuses, on the one hand, and women and children on the other. They were no longer capacities that each and everyone of us had and exercised. And those geniuses, they became the playthings of the industrial rich, perhaps railing against them, but ultimately tied to them as patrons.
Throttled by the military-industrial complex
14 AprIke got it right
And he saw it and called, yes in 1960 when he left the Presidency. But James Ledbetter informs us on Blogginheads.tv, that he was aware of the problem much earlier. Here’s an excerpt from a speech he gave in 1953:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
Will ever escape the grasp of this terrible logic, which continues to impoverish us?
The New Octopus
Big Coal Kills a Town
13 AprWhich is what Big Coal does. Kills mountains and towns and poisons the rivers and the skies.
Dan Barry of The New York Times tells the story of Lindytown West Virginia:
But the coal that helped to create Lindytown also destroyed it. Here was the church; here was its steeple; now it’s all gone, along with its people. Gone, too, are the surrounding mountaintops. To mine the soft rock that we burn to help power our light bulbs, our laptops, our way of life, heavy equipment has stripped away the trees, the soil, the rock — what coal companies call the “overburden.”
Now, the faint, mechanical beeps and grinds from above are all that disturb the Lindytown quiet, save for the occasional, seam-splintering blast.
Wouldn’t you know it, Massy Energy’s been at work.
Severity of Fukushima on Par with Chernobyl
12 AprWill it break the scale? The New York Times reports:
But at a separate news conference, an official from the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, said that the radiation release from Fukushima could, in time, surpass levels seen in 1986.
“The radiation leak has not stopped completely, and our concern is that it could eventually exceed Chernobyl,” said Junichi Matsumoto, a nuclear executive for the company.
Sunday Links
10 AprThe Atlantic: Japan Earthquake: One Month Later, 41 photos.
BBS: “New York is a major loser and Reykjavik a winner from new forecasts of sea level rise in different regions.”
Knight Foundation: Connected Citizens: The Power, Peril, and Potential of Networks. A Webinar on 20 April at 2 PM EDT. Download full report (PDF). “Rapid advances in digital media and technology are changing how we connect to information and each other. The way we engage in public dialogue, coordinate, solve problems—all of it is shifting. New networks are emerging everywhere. It’s exciting—and frightening. What is this new network-centric world? What does it mean for community change?”
LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art: “New York graffiti legend Lee Quinones has organized a team of street artists to do a new mural on the exterior wall facing Temple Street. Scaffolding is up now, with a couple of images in progress, and work is expected to be completed next week, before the April 17 opening of the “Art in the Streets” exhibition at the Geffen.”
Discussion of David Brooks oped at Marginal Revolution: Brooks says Dems are unwilling to ask voters to pay for the programs they want. “Until they find a way to pay for the programs they support, they will not be serious players in this game. They will have no credible plans and will be in an angry but permanent retreat.”
Thom Hartman, at Common Dreams: “With or without a government shutdown, Republicans have already won the debate on our nation’s budget. Why? Because the corporate media is on their side. Make the wealthy pay their fair share.”
Green Blog: “According to Gore nuclear energy is not the answer to our problems because it’s dirty, too expensive, unsafe and that it poses a threat to world peace.”
Truth and Traditions 