I Have Fallen Off The Edge Of The World

What Ed and I knew,
on some fundamental level,
is that once you’ve been
out in it long enough,
it becomes the top priority,
he told us as
we settled into the study.
When you’re out
in it fully,
you recognize
it’s where you belong.
We concluded that
it took a good ten days
in the wilderness
until you began to change.
You need to live
in the spirit of nature,
so that it’s totally
and intuitively
in your system.
Then you don’t have any choice but to defend it. **



But most scientists studying the western climate believe the freak will become the norm. Researchers recently concluded that the extended dry period in the West over the last ten years is the worst in eight hundred years—that is, since the years between 1146 and 1151. Eight hundred years! If we were just talking about another decade of this or, worse, a decade of the type of heat we were seeing in the summer of 2012, the results would be catastrophic. But climate scientists believe it will keep getting hotter. If so even drought-resistant plants will die, reservoir levels will continue to fall, crop production will drop. Worse, as vegetation withers, it will no longer be able to absorb carbon dioxide, further exacerbating climate change. And now to this precarious and combustible mix we have decided to add fracking.
We have chosen to do this not with caution but on a massive scale, and to do it right next to our precious rivers, right smack in the middle of aquifers.
We go into these places and use, mixed with the millions of gallons of water, a secret recipe of chemicals, many of them poisonous to humans, which we then force into fissures of rock with high-powered blasts to flush out the fuel we are seeking. The man in the bar had warned about earthquakes, but fracking is, in essence, a small seismic event, designed to blast out minerals. We have decided to inject poisons into the ground, then shake that ground, in a region where potable water is more precious than gold. But not, we have decided, more precious than oil. One thing is crystal clear. Though fracking is unproven technology, we are not treating it that way. Instead we are conducting a vast experiment all over the country, from the hills of Pennsylvania to the deserts of Utah. Since we are moving into unfamiliar territory you would think, if we were wise, that we would carefully monitor any and all results. We are not. When people in the fracked area complain that their water is fizzling out of their taps in a foamy mix, smelling of petroleum, the companies are quick to offer other water sources, like cisterns, but not quick, of course, to question the enterprise itself. In fact, the corporate response to the contaminated water supplies and groundwater has been consistent. They tell the landowners and anyone else who complains that they are concerned but that they will not slow down until there is conclusive proof that what they are doing is dangerous and poses a health risk. This is standard operating procedure in today’s world, but it is also, to anyone with a dollop of common sense, an ass-backwards way of doing things. Despite the troubles people are having, we’ll keep going full-speed ahead until someone proves to us the trouble is real, they tell us. Never, Maybe we should slow down until we learn the facts. **

As far back as 1912, John Muir had protested against the building of the Hetch Hetchy Dam with these words: These temple destroyers, devotees of raging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar. **

--David Gessner
All The Wild That Remains:
Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West **

Dave Stamey: Desert Wind