Compendium on Risks & Harm of Fracking, 3rd Ed.
What is the future for West Virginia? For our children?
>>> Letter to Editor, S. Tom Bond, Clarksburg Exponent-Telegram, November 1, 2015
It is interesting that the E-T article on a pact among the Governors of West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania to advance horizontal drilling for natural gas came the same day a review of the third edition of a compendium on the risks of fracking arrived.
These states are no stranger to allowing, even encouraging, a sacrifice zone for big business to operate. The history of West Virginia counts several waves of destruction of people and land. Much of Harrison County is underlain by coal mines or covered with strip jobs. The orange water from hundred year old mines still flows in many areas and there are sinkholes from old mines dotting the surface.
The timbered areas have largely recovered with smaller trees. The areas once affected by oil and gas development, where salt water discharged down hillsides, and oil was lost overland until it covered creeks, have regained cover but not productivity.
The effective slavery of working for a company that paid in script is being forgotten, as are the many broken bodies left in caved in mines. Where was democracy in those days? Who in the legislature represented those diminished people who worked in the extraction industry?
“If natural resource extraction made an area rich, West Virginia would have streets paved with gold.” The fact is that natural resource extraction provides dull jobs that make one ill adapted to doing other work, and in hard times no one wants to hire such people.
So the governors of these three states are setting us up for another round. Anybody want to guess West Virginia won’t be the butt of it all?
What is coming this time is clearly indicated in the Compendium of Scientific, Medical, and Media Findings Demonstrating Risks and Harms of Fracking, third edition, published by Concerned Health Professionals of New York and Physicians for Social Responsibility. Chemicals are used by companies with no chemical expertise and no idea of health effects. Often sold by companies with no knowledge of health effects.
It is no longer possible to look at the data and conclude that fracking is safe.
Government agencies must act to protect the citizens they represent. If they fail to do so, citizens need to take local action to make sure their communities are protected.
As for the economics, drilling for gas and oil are notoriously high capital, low labor enterprises. The subsequent chemical industry is also not labor intensive, and both do not require much decision making on the part of the labor, failing to make them versatile enough to do other work if necessary.
So what kind of future is there for West Virginia? For our children? I’d suggest our political class needs to look around and find out what is going on in the world and not just talk to people who have schemes to get themselves rich.
>>> S. Tom Bond is a retired Professor of Chemistry and resident Farmer living in Lewis County in central West Virginia. He is an active participant in various conservation groups.
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