Fracking: Our Experience Is Not An Abstraction

Fracking: Our Experience Is Not An Abstraction

Reporting from amidst fields of fracking wells in Colorado, Trinity La Fay writes about the conscious experience of being in relationship to the place she lives, and the disconnect between people and land needed to maintain the destruction.


Experience Is Not An Abstraction

by Trinity La Fey

On the Colorado Rising website, the maps of oil and gas rigs light up the area just above where I live, past my friend’s house halfway up the state, all the way up and out along the plain in a great sweep.  Like some demented statistical X, the active wells appear in a sea of blue dots: the abandoned wells.  Combined, they swarm completely around the jagged Rocky Mountains, a rising, desperate sea of exploitation.

I remember when the word fracking was used as a supplemental television curse.  The way that they said it seemed perfect, as if they understood that it was a primary contributing source of the doom.  The story was about a people who, ejected from a poisonous Earth, had colonized in space only to be pursued repeatedly by a predatory cybernetic race. A race they had created. I think stories are important.  So does Joseph Campbell, but, as Mary Daly quotes him regarding child victims of sati (the Hindu practice of burning widows alive in the funeral pyres of their late husbands):

“In spite of these signs of suffering and even panic in the actual moment of the pain of suffocation, we should certainly not think the mental state and experience of these individuals after any model of our own more or less imaginable reactions to such a fate, for these sacrifices were not properly individuals at all.”

While I have visions of flickering relatives keening at the river’s edge, smell burning hair, feel the air being sucked from my lungs: he does not imagine their stories are relevant to his experiences.

So, harrumph.

Scrolling out on the Drilling Maps.com site, I see that we, at least, have the resistance of Mountain Range.

Texas; Oklahoma; Louisiana; Mississippi; Kansas; Michigan; the border between North Dakota and Montana. Just about every square inch from Cleveland, Ohio to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Charleston, West Virginia: like fire, the red dots blend.  The names of places are all but erased behind them.  I cannot see Arkansas written, but I know it is there.  From Pennsylvania’s border with New York; all the way down California; all the way up from the Gulf of Mexico to the ice of the Beaufort Sea.

From the Great Lakes down to the Rio Grande; like a ring of fire around the coast of South America, like accidents waiting to happen from the Gulf of Oman to the Barents Sea; like sinking islands from the Arabian Sea to the Yellow Sea to the Tasman Sea. From the North to the South Pacific: companies know no boundaries.

The beneficiaries of these companies, the responsible, I wonder if they learn these names.

I wonder if they are all unreachably psychopathic, or stupid, or if it matters.  The dead squirrel on the road; the stoodup friend; the barren landscape full of ghosts: to their experience, it does not matter if it was cruelty or carelessness.

Besides making it possible to set aflame the now undrinkable water that results from such enterprise, whose footage abounds online, Elementa, Science of the Anthropocene, hosts a special collection forum of “Oil and Natural Gas Development: Air Quality, Climate Science and Policy” wherein an article by Chelsea R Thompson, Jacques Hueber and Detlev Helmig, entitled Influence of oil and gas emissions on ambient atmospheric non-methane hydrocarbons in residential areas of Northeastern Colorado discusses ozone levels and calls it abstract.

Like Paul R. EhrlichPaul R. Ehrlich and Carl Sagan in The Cold and The Dark: The World After Nuclear War, everyone agrees that this is not working.  Unlike that pivotal conference, however, modern realizations are lost in a desperate sea of distractions.  Here is what The Cold and The Dark said abstractly:

“- survivors would face starvation [as] global disruption of the biosphere could ensue. In any event, there would be severe consequences, even in the areas not affected directly, because of the interdependence of the world economy. In either case the extinction of a large fraction of the Earth’s animals, plants, and microorganisms seems possible. The population size of Homo sapiens conceivably could be reduced to prehistoric levels or below, and extinction of the human species itself cannot be excluded.”

Boundaries are underrated.

According to me. Lots of people like to travel; I’m not into it.  I have fallen in love with every landscape I’ve seen, but then, I didn’t get to know them.  I live in a hard place that I know very well.  Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson have a wonderful conversation during which they speak about the necessity of listening to the Others that are places to care for and live with them, and also the joy of being of a place: the intimacy that comes from noticing what cannot be observed in passing.  It can be argued that Amber is ancient light that has been stored and that Jet is ancient darkness.  Like Saga, they keep our stories.  Shale; Oil; Gas; Tar: these exhumed ancestors seem to bellow as they burn that we wake sleeping titans at our peril.  Or, as the article put it:

“The findings presented here suggest that oil and gas emissions have a large-scale regional impact on ambient [non methane hydrocarbons] levels, thereby impacting a large population of [-] residents, and representing a large area source of ozone precursors. The short-chain alkanes exhibit strong correlations with propane in Erie/Longmont, Platteville, and within Denver, supporting the conclusion of widespread impact of [oil and natural gas] emissions.”

They recommend further monitoring.


Trinity La Fey is a smith of many crafts, has been a small business creatrix since 2020; published author; appeared in protests since 2003, poetry performances since 2001; officiated public ceremony since 1999; and participated in theatrical performances since she could get people to sit still in front of her.

References and/or Suggested Reading:

Featured image: fracking in progress by Joshua Doubek, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.

ConocoPhillips’ oil drilling scheme in Peruvian Amazon threatens water supply for 500,000 people

By Amazon Watch

Grassroots opposition is mounting as ConocoPhillips’ plans to drill for oil within the fresh-water source for Peru’s largest rainforest city, Amazon Watch said today on the occasion of the company’s annual shareholder meeting in Houston, Texas. Conoco is currently advancing plans to drill exploratory oil wells in Blocks 129 and 123, found within one of the most ecologically sensitive regions in the world.

According to a May 2012 map produced by PROCREL, the Loreto regional environmental authority, ConocoPhillips is planning a total of 16 oil platforms and 48 wells between Block 129 and the adjacent Block 123. Thirteen of these platforms are found within the Upper Nanay-Pintuyacu-Chambira Regional Conservation Area.

“Conoco’s shareholders need to understand that the company’s plans in northern Peru are being met with increasing popular opposition across the region,” said Robert Collier, Corporate Campaigns Director at Amazon Watch. “The reputational risks for Conoco grow by the day.”

“The oil company’s installation and Block 129 in the Nanay watershed has alarmed us because we all know the consequences of oil extraction in other Amazonian watershed,” said José Manuyana, president of the social organization Colectivo Amazonía in today’s local paper La Región. “We know the devastating results and are worried this will happen in the Nanay headwaters which provide drinking water to all of Iquitos’ 500,000 citizens.”

In March of this year citizens of Peru’s Loreto region organized themselves into the Iquitos Water Defense Committee, specifically in response to Conoco’s plans. Today the Committee demanded that the regional government hold a public hearing to explain why they are allowing ConocoPhillips to advance with the exploration. They have also asked that information about Conoco’s plans be made public and that the Regional Government respect prior decisions to exclude mining activities from ecologically sensitive areas.

According to the Iquitos Declaration, issued by the Iquitos Water Defense Committee on April 24th of this year, “The situation is currently getting worse. ConocoPhillips has an oil concession in the headwaters of the Nanay River, even though the first article of the Regional Order No. 020-2009-GRL-CR of October 15th 2009 declared of regional public interest the conservation and protection of the headwaters of watersheds found in the Loreto Region. For us, this river is the primary source of water supply for the city and source of other resources like fish, bush meat, and wood for our house construction.”

International scientific experts are also expressing concern about the probable impacts of oil activities on this ecologically sensitive area. According to Bob Stallard, a bio geochemist who has sampled and analyzed waters from throughout the Amazon and Orinoco river basins since 1976, “Great cities try to protect their water supplies, and Iquitos has one of the best. Based on hundreds of published analyses of dissolved salts in rivers, the Nanay is among the purest rivers in Amazonia. Spills of formation waters and wastes associated with drilling could damage the Nanay as a drinking-water supply.”

The Iquitos Declaration cites information that seismic testing has carved 778 kilometers of lines through the jungle, clearing over 180 hectares of forest cover and detonating more than 15,500 seismic explosives. The statement continues, “now they are trying to get the approval to drill 18 exploratory wells that would function from six platforms within Block 129.”

“Biodiversity in the Nanay basin is spectacular. In three weeks we recorded more than 1,800 species of plants and animals. Because the Nanay River begins in the Peruvian lowlands – not in the Colombian or Ecuadorian Andes like many other rivers in Loreto – it created a singular opportunity to conserve almost the entire watershed,” said Corine Vriesendorp, Ph.D., Director of the Andes-Amazon Program at The Field Museum in Chicago. “Clean water and robust fisheries were the rallying cries for creating the regional conservation area. Now oil activities threaten to negatively impact both water quality and fish stocks, critical for forest dwellers in the Nanay basin and urban residents in Iquitos.”

From Amazon Watch: http://amazonwatch.org/news/2012/0509-conoco-drilling-threatens-water-source-for-half-million-in-peru