Fracking Wind

Wed 3/20

Monday brought a tempestuous wind, albeit sunny, unlike today.  Today I have a chill.  Today feels vacant, yet hopeful, as I repose once more in the vast space of Loveland public library.  Last night's 2nd reading of the oil and gas regulatory ordinance within their city limits was made a closed meeting at the last minute, preventing what would have amounted to a public outcry.  But you cannot prevent an outcry, as you cannot prevent the wind, and what it brings.  You can hope to modulate, and you may choose to ride the wind to safer ground, or stand and fight, exposing yourself to what may come, hoping that it makes you stronger without permanently weakening your carriage.

But Monday saw me back in the saddle, and I was barely from home when the wind blew me out of my lane and into mainline traffic.  It blew my rolled trousers down such that the chainguard caught them and ripped a hole.  On North College I set my bike against a sign to roll my pantlegs up tighter, and the wind took my bike down, emptying my mug of tea.  Swirling brown and white turned to mud.  Nothing to do but brace against the wind and take it on the legs.  A runner with a gorgeous German Sheppard greeted me at the bridge on the Poudre, and I was surprised to see water flowing, or else being blown.  Last time through here it was a sheet of placid ice, no sign of life beneath.  Up past the museum, Daz Bog, and then the long, slow stretch to campus via Howes.

Dreaming of the bicycle pleasures of Jersey shore

Getting going past Mulberry, I hear a hoarse voice call out, "Got two....in my tires."  The wind carries his voice away.  I stop - What's that?  "I got goatheads. Two of 'em. Make that three.  Look at that, why don't 'ya,"  pointing to the front tire now.  "They don't have these up in North Dakota!"  I give him one of my two patch kits.  He has a story.  This man came down from the Dakotas eight days ago.  He'd been lured there from an ad promising to double or triple his salary by employing him in the oil fields.  What they don't tell you, said he, was that the cost of living in that land has grown astronomically, like in Alberta, Canada, where the tarsands money continues to flow.  The rock-bottom price for a small studio apartment in the town he was in was $3500 per month.  You could get a job flipping burgers for 40K, but it wouldn't be enough to pay the rent, let alone to have food and other necessities.  And there certainly wasn't a value meal at McDonald's.

I dwell on this meeting most of the day.  On the way home, behind Lee Martinez Park, a gentleman walking the other way hails me, asks if I have any water.  I stop, hand him my bottle, and he guzzles the rest, half of it running down his beard.  "I got a thirst that won't quit," he says.  "Sorry I drank all your water."  I tell him he can likely get some free water at Daz Bog, and I try to give him directions, but he doesn't seem too keen on the idea.  It serves as a reminder that we all need water - good, untainted water, and that those in rural areas depending on well water will be threatened if fracking comes to their area.  Spills and well blowouts, such as the one which occurred recently in Windsor, point to the haphazard nature of this specific method of gas extraction and its wide ecological and health effects.  Sandra Steingraber writes eloquently and speaks fervently on this issue.  Theo Colborn publishes on the effect reagents in fracking fluid have on our endocrine system, and they are insidious, acute, and chronic.

Do we want this in No Fo Co? 

The next night, City Council gives the go-ahead for an operator's agreement with our single oil and gas entity, Prospect Energy.  Their hidden agenda was the Underdeveloped Area surrounding the Anheiser-Bush plant that would be available to frack, as it lies outside the city limits, inside the Growth Management Area.  We also learn that stricter, "good practice" regulations will not apply to their wells inside city limits, enabling them to begin fracking them to boost gas production. The earnest and constant petitioning of our city council since last fall - and some have engaged city leaders for much longer - led to a ban on fracking. Without stringent environmental requirements, and the state regulatory commission appears to attenuate such standards, we've inadvertently enabled this single operator to frack...within our city.  That is what is coming on this wind.  Sun and clear sky slowly build the proper conditions for the next storm.  The agreement which once appeared so clear, mindful of a city's right to advocate for its own environmental and public health when the state or federal government will not, has perhaps been tainted from the start, and full disclosure appears to have been given in such a way that it could pass in slipshod fashion, under the public radar.  Expediting the contract with Prospect Energy to avoid a lawsuit, perhaps even to appease our governor, seems to be the order of the day.

In the midst of winter I found, within me, an invincible summer. 
- Albert Camus

So a chill pervades the air on this first day of Spring.  I thought the winter would be difficult.  It was, but there was also growth.  And there are the children, who are also growing and learning alongside us.  I must meditate on Camus, through the fickle Spring and surreal political climate.  I must read Conrad, whose ideas of how the actions of government and the elite, principally through greed, lead to cultural, environmental and personal ruination.  I will return to Rilke, who teaches us that most people shoot for the things that are easy, and we appease ourselves often enough.  We even go for the easy side of easy.  He writes to a young poet he hopes to encourage that we must trust in what is difficult.  That is where we will be tested and refined to spread our ridiculous notions of liberty - for the air we breath, the water which gives life to all plants and animals, and the soil which gives us sustenance.

I spent time today participating in our children's class, one a cultures class, where my son is exploring the martial arts of Japan, and one a mock trial class, where I portray a witness to a murder for the prosecution team.  While children are learning, in many a town around our country, just like Loveland, the oil barons and wannabe gas barons plot their strategy to extract what lies under and around our communities, and safety regulations appear to be a minor hurdle.  One of the girls for the prosecution is asking a question - What does disallow mean?  "It means dis-allowed.  As in, not allowed," says the teacher. I would like to disallow fracking until every aspect of it can be shown to be safe within agreeable parameters.  If you (Oil Company X) cut corners and pour an inefficient well casing, you should be liable for the rest of your life for the remediation of your toxic spill or emission, including remediating the aquifer beneath you (most shale lies below aquifers), even though the science on that is in its infancy, and alleviating the health effects caused by your lack of vision.  If you were actually accountable for such costs, which you externalize beyond the calculus of your operations, you wouldn't be able to afford your method of extraction.  Also, you couldn't operate if you were beholden to regulations actually designed to protect the twin liberties of human and environmental health, each of which depends upon and bolsters the other.  So much for the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act - fracking enjoys exemptions from all of these, thanks to the EPA, which more and more looks like a lap dog for the oil and gas industry.

Duino Castle near Trieste, Italy, was where Rilke began writing the Duino Elegies in 1912--recounting that he heard the famous first line as a voice in the wind while walking along the cliffs and that he wrote it quickly in his notebook.

To Camus, Conrad, and Rilke I will add Wendell Berry, and while I'm talking about mad farmer/ poet/ philosopher archetypes, I'll throw in bell hooks, another Kentuckian.  I guess while I'm at it I'll throw in Jesus.  All filled a niche as cultural critics. All spoke about the onslaught of hegemonic control over our lives.  All waxed lyrical and mythical in their approach, depicting the profound anxiety which sets in when there exists a lack of communion between us.  Each in their own way brings their wit to describe an existential crisis, a spiritual crisis if you will, as the industrial nature of our society increases, and we become increasingly alienated from the Creation.

This whole push to educate and in the process become more educated, to speak out and against, to encourage bravery in our community leaders, began with words.  It will continue to be shaped by our words, and so I will continue to seek solace and inspiration in the myriad of voices out there, both present and in text.  I will trust that the synthesis will be difficult, as the problems we encounter then and now are so similar and cyclical.  Our future generation and our community right here and now depends on us doing this difficult thing, of expressing our ideology of faith and forbearance, but forbearance to a degree, of what is not allowable and what we can never imagine being allowable, and so of acting to disallow, if need be, for the sake of our liberty.  What does that mean?