We drain her veins; shoot her up with unknown cocktails.
We hide our poisons deep within.
No one will know the truth.
Daily demands on mother earth.
She’s got nothing left to give.
* *
*
Gas companies involved with fracking in Pennsylvania, the
state that has served as my home for the past eight years, are trucking
millions of gallons of wastewater to Ohio, the state I consider my true home.
How can we afford to ever consider water waste?
Fracking water, laced with hundreds unknown chemicals and
brine, is pumped into injection wells deep below the surface of the water. If these wells fail, the chemicals will
pollute our waterways, seeping into local streams and rivers; eventually making
it to lakes and oceans.
If the gas industry has its way, people getting sick from fracking
water will not have the right to know precisely what is poisoning their
bodies: That information is considered proprietary.
In his essays, Wes Jackson often writes of the environmental
deficit under which we live. He mentions
that to begin to reverse this thing we’ve created, we all need to reduce our
energy consumption by eighty percent.
I wonder which of us will be willing to do this.
And when we’ve squeezed the last of the natural gas from
beneath our land; when the injection wells are full of unusable water, I
wonder…
Where do we next turn?
This was written in response to this week's Trifecta Writing Challenge. We were to write a 33 word piece including as one of our words mother.
Labels: Trifecta Writing Challenge