What I Think About Fracking and the $15,000 cabbage story

Brendan pointed out to me that Nova Scotia is allowing an oil/gas company to move ahead with seeing if fracking for shale gas around Lake Ainslie (Cape Breton) would be a lucrative thing to do.  Arrghh!!  It makes me sad to think that a tiny province like Nova Scotia with such delicious drinking water in a time when the world is running out of water, would even dare to consider allowing this process into its borders.  

Fracking works by pumping craploads of toxic, carcinogenic chemicals underground.  It's been implicated in causing earthquakes, spoiling wells and harming people and livestock.  

Yes people need jobs, but I think more than that people need food and water.  How about support for more organic farms over fracking?  Or support for locally produced furniture and instruments made from sustainably harvested Nova Scotia wood? Or support for Nova Scotia's vibrant community of artisans, craftspeople, potters, writers, musicians, and other creative types, could we not somehow export this resource rather than explore for gas?

We've seem to have gotten all wrapped up in Money, and the hoarding of it for money's sake.  We seem to have forgotten that money originated merely to facilitate the bartering of goods and services.  Since Nixon dropped the gold standard in 1971 on the American dollar, and so many other countries rely on "fractional reserve banking" is really just worthless paper. I  watch a lot of documentaries when I sculpt, and IMO the global economic system as it is, is not sustainable.  You can't drink money.  You can't eat money.  And if money becomes meaningless, then what are you going to eat and drink?  

My father was born in Katerburg Poland in 1925, it's now part of the Ukraine.  He told me stories of his family being shipped off to a Siberian workcamp in 1939 by the Russians, and in 1941 these Poles being brought by train to England to help fight Hitler.  On their journey (by train and boat) from Siberia to England, his mother asked him and one of his brothers to go to a market in Tehran to buy food, with all the money he had earned that year.  He could afford one cabbage for them to share.  He told me the value of that cabbage in modern currency was $15,000 due to food scarcity in the war.  For the rest of his life, my father took great pride in growing as much of his own food as possible.

It seems to me that to gamble our province's drinking water, one of the most important ingredients to human survival, in exchange for money and some jobs is not environmentally or socially responsible.    I believe in the precautionary principle. Once the chemicals are added to the watershed, you can't get them back out.

I'd encourage people to watch a documentary called Gasland: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1558250/

As well as a documentary called "For Love Of Water" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1149583/
before deciding whether Nova Scotia needs this kind of development.

I'd also invite people to look at a map of Canada, and consider the size of Nova Scotia relative to the size of BC and Alberta.  We have a much tinier landbase to gamble on this type of industry and its associated environmental impacts.