(To all my fractivist friends, please accept this early Christmas gift. I hope you enjoy it.)
To Frack Or Not To Frack (a Fracklet)
To frack, or not to frack: that is the question:
Whether it’s wiser in this time to suffer
The stink and catastrophic errors of outrageous drilling,
Or to lock arms against an endless convoy of trucks,
And by opposing stop them. To frack, to extract —
No more — and by extraction to say that we greatly
Fatten the wallet, and get natural gas for our neighbors
And/or China! That’s a monetary inflation
To be righteously celebrated. To frack, to extract —
To extract — perhaps to pollute: ah, there’s the catch,
For in that extraction of fracking what chemicals may come up
When we have cracked that ancient shale
Should make us pause. Then there’s the radon
With such a long half-life:
And should you bare the land for a pipeline,
And breathe in the compressor station’s toxic fumes
that may hover as the law delays?
Calls to the environmental office don’t get returned.
They try your patience, they make you wait,
While you yourself want to scream
In their faces. Who put those tar balls there,
and the smell of sulfur in the air?
Is that just the flaring aftermath?
And what undiscovered poisons may hide here and there?
No one is sure, but wonder you will.
What makes the headaches, all these new ills we have
And possibly others we don’t know about yet?
The industry wants to make fools of us all,
raise a great fog of confusion.
You feel sick all over, you’re pale, the pain won’t stop,
The lesions on your skin won’t heal and at the moment,
Your entire world feels like it’s totally out of whack,
And all because of fracking!
I could say that this comes with apologies to Willie the Shake, but I have a feeling that if he were around to hear it, I think he'd actually like it. I would like to thank fellow fractivist Bill Huston for the inspiration on this, as the idea for it originally came from a conversation we had a few years ago -- thanks, Bill.
You can find the YouTube video for it here:
youtu.be/...