An incredibly heart-wrenching account of a West Virginian speaking about the love of a place and the defeatism that seeps in when society celebrates riches and rewards over its human and natural capital. Such profound visions come people when they cannot drink their water.
A Manifesto for Understanding in a Time of Great Thirst, Emma Fisher, Charleston.
The most powerful passage I want to quote here, but I hope everyone reads the whole piece.
It makes us angry, so angry. But we don’t direct our anger in the right places. Because the right places are so mighty and everlasting that we feel defeated before we even start. And those right places capitalize on their ability to shape our minds with slippery, imperious moves that are only slightly more veiled than the company store. Embracing modern manipulation techniques in advertising and branding and marketing to convince us they’re an ally. And we believe it. Because there is too much at stake to not believe it. And because we’ve been taught to believe it, and we’ve been taught that not believing it makes us a traitor.
And so we take the frustration that comes, and we turn on one another, and we turn on ourselves. And we keep ourselves down, in small behaviors every day. Small behaviors that shape our lifetimes. With this knowledge of powerlessness that is so insidious, so deeply, collectively understood as “the way it is,” it becomes difficult to detect, and it becomes us.
Amazing how poignant her statements ring for the debate here in North Carolina. Those in favor of fracking who repeat industry’s talking points without taking into consideration data to the contrary need to hear this voice from West Virgnia. Please, pro-industry folks, stop insulting the public with overblown claims about the stellar record of hydraulic fracturing. I, for one, acknowledge that this is an incredible technology to access and extract good resources, but there are a lot of risks involved, and the sustainability of natural resources must be accounted for in a cost-benefit analysis. But what should be an open discussion between policy-makers and the public quickly devolves to name-calling in a public forum: people turning on each other.
North Carolinia, we must do better.
-BT
Triassic Basins water & shale gas 