"Yolandita presents the imaginary Frack Family and their dog Rocky of Beaver County, PA who help us to visualize the staggering quantity of chemicals that were used in a typical frack job (hydraulic fracturing for natural gas extraction) near their imaginary house in the Marcellus Shale region of western Pennsylvania."
"Willful blindness sees no end of damage done." Stephen Richards
Shale Gas Reality Begins To Dawn
"It has long been our position at The Automatic Earth that North America is collectively dreaming with regard to unconventional natural gas. While gas is undeniably there, the Energy Returned On Energy Invested (EROEI) is dramatically lower than for conventional supplies. The critical nature of EROEI has been widely ignored, but will ultimately determine what is and is not an energy source, and shale gas is going to fail the test."
"Thus our
civilization has entered what John Kenneth Galbraith called 'the twilight of
illusion,' the point at which the end of a historical process would be
clearly visible if everybody wasn’t so busy finding reasons to look somewhere
else."
it is also about the rape of the environment for fracking."
Wendy Lee
"Beautiful 10-year-old children who are now living in what amounts to a prison replete with chain link fencing, construction machinery, the decimation of their community and its grounds, the loss of all of their new friends among the activists, and the loss of all of their old friends evicted from their homes. I can’t even imagine what this experience has been like for them."
"These are kids"
"The stress Aqua America has created for them is one of the ugliest, most revealing, and most damning aspects of this story. Look at the pictures of their handprints on our barricades reconstructed after the former owner, Skip Leonard, mowed them down. Imagine what it must be like for them to see what remains of these brightly painted walls now that Aqua America machinery has destroyed them. Imagine what they are learning about being an American."
"...everything we need to know about corporate fascism, the valuing of property rights over human rights, and the crass drive for profits is contained in the fact that Aqua America is so determined to build their water-withdrawal-for-fracking-station that they’ll risk the lives of two little girls on their bicycles rather than wait until they leave. And we cannot forget that this “leaving” is naught but the forced ejection of children from their homes, their friends, potentially their school, and their lives."
Mother, father please explain to me Why forests march to desert speed While snowcapped mountains melt away What do we tell our babies, when do we say, oh
Mother, father please explain to me How this world has come to be so Twisted between time and dreams Oh, mother, father please explain to me Oh, whats all this talk about? All this talk about it Spinning down, down, down, down, down All this talk about Endless words without Nothings done
Unfortunately, the environmental and health concerns about fracking that Truthland’s protagonist, Shelly Depue, determined to be “unfounded” after her trip have become a reality on her own property. In March, after a DePue neighbor outside Montrose, PA reported sludgy water and an “erupting” water well that was also determined to have unusually high methane levels, the Scranton Times-Tribune investigated and found that Tulsa, OK-based drilling company WPX Energy had been cited for environmental violations on multiple nearby wells in 2011, including on the Depues’ property, which they had leased to WPX (then Williams Production Appalachia) in July 2010. The violations were for “defective casing or cement … meant to protect aquifers [which contain drinking water] from gas and other fluids.”
From The Times Tribune, March 13..
"DEP inspectors also found gas bubbling from between the casing strings on three more WPX wells on the same two well pads - the DePue and Hollenbeck - although those wells were not cited for violations. Bubbling is often viewed by state regulators as an indication of a leak or defect in a well's construction."
