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Pagans join the protests against fracking

Heather Greene By |

In March 2014, the Pagan Environmental Coalition of New York City (PEC-NYC) formed after being inspired to action by Gasland (2010), a documentary on the U.S. fracking industry. It became their mission to pro-actively promote the development of renewable, clean energy alternatives.

In 2013, a group of U.K. Pagans held a ritual at Glastonbury Tor to raise awareness about fracking. The event turned global with Pagans around the world joining the ritual from their own space.The organizers wrote, “We felt it a shame to let the energy go to waste and so consolidated ourselves into a pagan anti-fracking pressure group; thus was the Warrior’s Call born.”

Both the PEC-NYC and The Warrior’s Call are dedicated to passionately campaigning against fracking. They have joined a fervent and outspoken global movement to end this relatively new process of energy extraction. Collectively these people are often refer to as fracktavists. But what exactly is fracking? Why is there so much controversy around its use?

"Rig wind river“ Wyoming. [Public domain via Wikimedia]

“Rig wind river“ Wyoming. [Public domain via Wikimedia]

What is Fracking?
Hydraulic Fracturing, or “Fracking,” is the extraction of fossil fuels from subterranean shale rock. The complicated process involves the injection of a high-powered fluid, containing water, sand and chemicals, into the earth. The combination of chemicals and pressure cause the shale to fracture and release trapped fossil fuels, which are then collected at the well site.

The basic technology behind fracking has been around for decades. According to Wall Street Journal senior energy editor Russell Gold, the concept on making wells more productive through fracturing rock began in the 1800s. However, the “modern age of hyrdraulic fracturing” did not begin until in 1998. And it has only been in the last 10 years that the United States has seen a surge in the use of fracking wells.

Fracking processes are found in areas where geologists have identified trapped fossil fuels within the subterranean shale beds. In the U.S., hydraulic fracturing is mostly used in Texas, Oklahoma, Pensylvania, Ohio and West Virginia. Other countries with identified shale beds, such as Canada, Bulgaria, China and Australia to name a few, have also been using this new fracking technology.

Why Frack?
At its base level, the push to employ hydraulic fracturing is driven by society’s dependence, or overdependence as it were, on fossil fuels. As the world’s population increases the demand increases, and alternative energy processes have yet to become viable replacements for these traditional modalities, due to economic, technological and practical reasons. The industry is desperate to find new sources of fossil fuels to feed our insatiable need. Fracking answers that call.

"US Natural Gas Production 1990-2040" by US Energy [Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons]

“US Natural Gas Production 1990-2040” by US Energy [Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons]

While fracking does pull oil from the shale rock, it is more commonly known for its use in extracting natural gas. According to the EIA, as noted by writer Brad Plummer, the U.S.natural gas stores “have reached historic highs.” The data show the fracked gas has increased 5x since 2007 alone, while coal and other traditional wells have decreased production.

Proponents argue that this boom is helping decrease our dependency on international energy. It has also reduced the price of natural gas, even at the consumer level. Due to the lower cost, many industries are converting their coal burning plants to natural gas, which burns cleaner. Experts believe that this change has contributed to the moderate decrease in overall U.S. carbon emissions since 2007. And finally, proponents also argue that the fracturing bonaza, as it has been called, has bolstered local economies and created new jobs.

Why the controversy?
While there are a Pagans who are conflicted with regards to the use of fracking, we could not find one who was decidedly pro-fracking. If they exist, they appear to be a non-vocal minority. The majority of Pagans who are publicly talking about the fracking boom, are vehemently opposed. The Warrior’s Call and PEC-NYC are just two examples.

Courtney Weber, a member of PEC-NYC, spoke with The Wild Hunt about her organization’s position and recent actions. She said, “I can’t imagine Pagans allowing their temples to be smashed. The Earth is being damaged…We have to fight to protect it.” Weber is one of key organizers in the PEC-NYC’ mobilization against fracking and for renewable energy – specifically wind. PEC-NYC is working on a petition to ask New York Governor Cuomo for his support of wind energy. The group is also sending members to a Nov. 1-7 Beyond Extreme Energy rally in Washington D.C.

"Witches Want Wind" Courtney Weber at a Cuomo Rally, 2014 [Courtesy Photo]

“Witches Want Wind” Courtney Weber at a Cuomo Rally, 2014 [Courtesy Photo]

For Weber and others like her, the reported benefits of fracking do not justify the known environmental and economic damage, both immediate and long term. With the help of Food and Water Watch, PEC members visited fracking sites in Susquehana, Pennsylvania. Weber said, “They had headaches in 15 minutes. There was no wildlife. No insects. No birds … It smelled as if you put your face in a gallon of glue.” What she describes is not a thriving metropolis living off industry profits, but a broken region gutted and stripped of life.

Opponents believe that the economic claims are wrong. Jobs are not being created, roads are being destroyed by industry vehicles, and the townspeople are reaping no benefits. They add that, even with the increase in gas stores, the U.S. will not ever be energy independent as is often claimed.

Additionally, opponents point to some serious and very immediate environmental concerns. There have been cases in which the local water has been tainted with the toxic waste fluid from the shale gas extraction, and the air has been polluted with both methane and benzene gases. Weber pointed out the number of trucks needed to transport the millions of gallon of water. She noted that these trucks increase the carbon footprint of entire process and the water usage itself can potentially strain resources in many drought-ridden areas.

From PEC-NYC Pennsylvania trip. [Courtesy PEC-NYC]

From PEC-NYC Pennsylvania trip. [Courtesy PEC-NYC and George Courtney]

Finally, opponents will also quickly point out that, while natural gas does burn cleaner, it still does produce “greenhouse gases.” Weber says, “It’s kind of like quitting smoking and then starting heroine instead.” She questions the wisdom in supporting an industry that appears to be just another dangerous substitute. Like others opposed to fracking, she fears that any support given to hydraulic fracturing will only detract from the development of economically viable, clean and renewable energy solutions.

Weber added that, as an activist, she can’t fight every battle. She says, “I can’t fight for bees, deforestation and the black rhino. Philosophically I can. But practically I can’t.” Energy is what she picked and says to others, ‘Pick what’s local. Pick what makes you mad.” Fracking made her mad.

So where do we find an answer?
Fracking is happening and at an increasing rate. The U.S. is on its way to having record natural gas resources. While that will not make us energy independent, it will increase U.S. exports, decrease prices and help the national trade deficit. Coal-based plants are closing down and the U.S. has lowered its overall carbon emissions. And, there is talk using natural gas reserves to help countries still struggling to control their own carbon emissions.

However, those benefits are measured purely in numbers and do not take into account the negative externalities of fracking.They do not measure methane cleanup; water pollution; property damage; local economic fallout; road maintenance; water resource limitations and the many environmental unknowns. What are the long-term affects? Will the progressive fracturing of subterranean shale rock create ground instability, leading to earthquakes?

While the Environmental Protection Agency and other private organizations are studying these issues, debates rage on in the world’s political arena. Many states and countries have banned or severely regulated the process or, like New York, have placed a moratorium on fracking until further data are collected. At the same time, organizations like PEC-NYC and The Warrior’s Call join The Sierra Club, Green Faith, Sane Energy Project, Food and Water Watch and others continue to oppose the process altogether.

This article only grazes the surface of a very complex global problem. Due to our society’s addiction to its fossil-fuel based energy infrastructure, we are stuck, so to speak, between a rock and hard place of our own making. We have yet to find a perfect solution that will allow us to maintain both a healthy ecosystem and our current energy-hungry systems. There is no easy button; no magic wand; no panacea … no injection drill that will extract that solution.

 

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42 thoughts on “Pagans join the protests against fracking”

  1. I can understand how an overzealous frac job can damage the environment, but what alternatives are there? This must be weighed against the problems inherent in not achieving energy independence.

    I’m not like an expert at this or anything, but a lot of oil is found in the shales. Fracing is one of the only ways to get at it. Come on, people need oil, or else we’ll have another Fukushima. Sure it smells but why not talk about safe fracing rather than no fracing at all.

    • We also need water, ya know, to live and stuff. According to engineers the cement that they use to insulate the pipes where the chemicals are pumped into the wells is sure to leak. It’s a matter of when not if, considering the earth is plastic and cement is static and comparatively brittle. I don’t think I need to explain how well that goes with the groundwater. Those chemicals, some of them cannot be cleaned out of the water. Ever. Take into consideration that the world is already experiencing a water crisis and it takes anywhere from 2.5 to 7.5 million gallons of water per frack, that makes the practice seem that much more suicidal.
      On another note, thanks to fracking in neighboring Ohio, SW West Virginia experienced its first earthquake a couple years ago. WV does not have naturally occurring earthquakes.

    • Stop using Fukushima as some sort of boogey man. Considering that it went through an earthquake and tsumani and came out a lesser disaster than Chernobyl and all for a 40 year old reactor I think Fukushima is possibly a better option – albeit away from earthquake zones.

      Nuclear fission really is our best short to mid term option before alternative fusion and next gen reactors replace them. That coupled with solar, tidal and wind should hopefully meet our needs in the long term. we really need to begin weaning ourselves off hydrocarbons.

      • This. I’ve seen coverage of some of the new (what is it, 4th generation) reactor technology and the panic over nuclear in the US frustrates me because it seems a clearly better option– if built properly, overseen properly, and placed properly– than hydrocarbons.

    • And there are much, much safer nuclear reactor designs that exist, ones that produce far less waste, and only waste that degrades very quickly — as in ten years. The reason they’re not already in production is the difficulty in getting permits to build the new designs. Fukushima, and indeed pretty much all the nuclear reactors currently running, are products of the arms race, meant to use the byproducts of producing weapons-grade materials. Nuclear power genuinely can be very clean. Fracking cannot.

      • You pique my interest. Are you in possession of any technical details? Like, what elements, what isotopes? I’ve always been irked that breeder reactors could produce some very non-bomb-grade plutonium if they just left it in the “oven” a bit longer because of the isotope mix.

        • My wife is the one who keeps track of these things, since she has the physics background. I’ll ask her and try to get back to you.

          • Thank you! Ask her if she can confirm the rumor of a successful (ie, commercial applicable) thorium reactor.

        • I have a friend who has an almost obsessive interest in this. Do you have an email address you’d be willing to give? I can pass it along to him and see if he could send you a curated list of links.

    • Energy independence has little or nothing to do with it. Look at what happens to the oil and NG after it’s extracted. Most of the oil and gas refineries are located on coasts near ports, so that petroleum products can be shipped out to the international market. It’s completely legal to do this. No one in politics is even talking about the possibility of export controls or taxation or incentives to keep the petroleum in the country where it was taken out of the ground. You can be sure that any politician who suggested such a thing would have a very well funded opponent in the next primary election.

      The industry that opposes any controls on fracking also wants to build a pipeline from a fracking site across Canada and the US to a coastal refinery on the other side of the continent. The same industry also wants to build new plants on the coasts to liquify natural gas for shipment overseas. There is no reason to build the Keystone pipeline except to export the oil and gas. If it was being fracked for domestic use, they could use the pipeline money to build a refinery near the wells. A lot of the coal mined in North America is also exported.

      It’s about making money. it’s always about making money.

      Fossil fuels are nonrenewable resources. They took hundreds of millions of years to form. We are using them up in a few centuries. What then? Our descendants will have to rely on renewable energy as our ancestors did, and a lot less of it than we have become accustomed to. If, in the process of using up what remains of the economically extractable fossil fuels, we wreck more of our productive land in water, our descendants will be even poorer.

      • Energy independence is a pipe dream left over from the Arab oil boycott of America in the 1970s. We had no real alternatives and, of course, the oil industry made out like a bandit. It’s haunted our energy policy ever since. The best response we came up with was a homeowners tax credit for insulating interior hot pipes; that cut into our energy consumption noticeably but, gee, somehow it’s been forgotten. In any event, the world is rushing (or stumbling) toward a globalized world economy; how can America expect to carve out an exception for energy?

        • Energy Independence is a pipe dream on a state level, what we should be looking at doing is creating energy independence at a local or personal level. Micro generation via solar or wind should really be pushed, were I to own my own place (fat chance in London!) solar panels would be one of the first things I would get sorted out. Not only offering me my own energy independence but also taking generation power away from large corporations. Power to the people! literally and metaphorically.

          • There are technical advantages to localized generation when the power sources are renewable. Centralized power grids that were built to be powered by burning fossil fuels and big water dams also work for nuclear power, which for safety reasons has to be produced on a large scale in a single location away from where people live. Those grids and big power plants are very inefficient for solar power and biomass compared to decentralized systems. It’s not as simple as switching from coal to oil to natural gas to nuclear power may have been. The entire infrastructure has to be rebuilt, which is a huge challenge, and it means getting power from a bunch of different sources rather than one big regulated utility. That is part of the reason why the utility companies don’t want to do it.

            Renewable sources of energy are not very concentrated, so transmission losses over long power lines eat up too much of the generated power. Wind and solar power aren’t available 24/7; if they are the only power sources, those huge power plant turbines have to be shut down and spun up again, which wastes an unacceptable amount of power. Biomass can be burnt 24/7, but it is much less concentrated fuel than coal, oil or natural gas. Biomass needs to be burned or digested into methane close to where it accumulates and the resulting power used nearby too; otherwise the energy losses from transporting the fuel and transmitting the power eat up most of the energy.

            Big power plants that feed into a long distance grid can’t be powered exclusively by renewable energy unless they have big batteries or some other method of storing the energy to be available when it’s dark and the wind isn’t blowing. That adds expense. If we had a means of harnessing tidal power, that might be a continuous power source, but they’ve been working on that for decades and no one has figured out a practical design. With the exception of hydroelectric power plants, there are no big power plants that can run night and day on renewable sources of energy.

            With a small local plant, the transmission losses are lower. The heat from power generation can be put to use too. You have to arrange your life and work to use more of the power when it is being generated, rather than any old time. This can be done right now with proven technology, but it requires doing more with less.

          • Large scale storage requires more capital expense than operating expense, if the technology were available, but at present it’s not. Ditto low-loss long-lines. Utilities must lay out capital whatever they do; their choice not to develop these alternatives ties into the reasons you outline above.One large scale storage scheme already exists: pumping a hydro plant backwards during hours of excess generation and tapping it during lean hours. Unfortunately it needs friendly terrain (as well as doing unfriendly things to that terrain).

      • It has something to do with this only insomuch as “energy independence” is being used to sell it to Americans by politicians. I think some of the more conservative voters that support it wouldn’t if they were told it was for export.

  2. The imposed industry secrecy over what chemicals they are using aces it impossible to tell just how bad we are being hurt Not to mention the over use of water is leaving communities without a source of clean water.. And open and honest industry would be worth a bit of trust but a secret industry was there is something to hide. Also the oil and natural gas we are exporting half of our natural gas and the majority of our oil is leaving us will little to no back up bad when foreign sours start slowing dow as we expect the to do. Have people already forgotten the pollution of Central Valley water in California by billions of gallons of chemical polluted fracking water, in a state suffering a long term sever drought.

  3. The mineral-extraction history of the United States is replete with sacrifice zones. A north-to-south strip of Western states has little natural wealth other than mineral. Appalachia lacks the political clout to resist mountaintop-removal coal mining. The rest of the country can lean back, say “Not in my back yard,” and ignore the issue. Shale gas is in a whole lot more back yards than the previous examples, and it is fated that environmentalism and populism join hands against fracking. Pagan activists are at the tip of the spear.

  4. In one hand, energy Independence is a good thing if it means being less dependent of Evil regimes such as Saudi Arabia and intolerant ones like Russia, but again, it seems that there are little if any long-term consequences assessments going on there. The fact that the technology has been around for less than 20 years makes me think that those Oil-People might not know, or care about what happens to the communities (increase in jobs in the long term, nothing remains in the short term) and the environments (pollution or destruction in both the short and the long term). If there’s really one thing that annoys me about America is to see how powerful the corporations are. I find it strange too, that people who (often legitimately) protest big government say nothing about bigger-than-governments corporations.

    • “If there’s really one thing that annoys me about America is to see how
      powerful the corporations are. I find it strange too, that people who
      (often legitimately) protest big government say nothing about
      bigger-than-governments corporations.” < Word.

    • Energy independence can also be had through conservation. But back in the late 1980s and early 1990s when the Sierra Club (among others, I assume) called for a 4% increase in the fuel efficiency of cars, not only did the automakers balk, they began marketing bigass SUVs and then every American with a 2-year-old and a soccer ball felt it necessary to drive an overly large vehicle.

      That 4% would have completely ended our need for Saudi Arabia. And I often think that at least 15 their angry young men wouldn’t have directed that hatred toward the World Trade Center.

  5. The next Congress will probably pass a ban on state regulation of fracking and render the protests impotent.

  6. I’ve been very impressed with Warrior’s Call’s steps at rallying pagans to work together magically to address fracking. It felt good to take part in their global Full Moon, knowing so many others were joining in with their own efforts.

  7. Still isn’t going to stop me from looking into buying Exxon Stock. Man made global warming isn’t a myth, it’s an out right lie!

    • Is the global average temperature increasing?

      If yes, what is causing it do you think? If no, please provide information which falsifies ALL climatic data by everyone for the past 100 years

      • Whoa, dude. Let’s not get exclusivist. One of the joys of this site is the fact we can have many different beliefs and ideals meeting and conversing.

        Rather than shutting someone down, perhaps attempts of education would be better?

        • I guess, but seeing someone discussing the greatness of financial speculation here is somewhat unnerving and feels rather provocative. I guess I somehow identified this individual as an “other” with whom I share very little in common and pose a potent threat. a.k.a. a Troll.

          • Oh, not denying the “other”, but that could well be a political rather than religious other. Even so, having others around makes more more interesting discussion, rather than a bunch of people all agreeing, don’t you think?

            Or am I one of those weird people who learns through adversity?

  8. Imagine if fossil fuel subsidies were stopped, and that money channelled into sustainable technology – not just energy generation but also ways to minimise energy consumption.