Hope

Tonight I gave a short presentation on hope for the start of Advent.  Not much of a religious man I know (well maybe you don't actually know this old Presbyterian that well) but I was invited.  I spoke about how hope can be a prison.  How action is much better.  How we all have power if we only knew it.  I still don't know it I think.  

And then I read this.  I know a thing or two about fracking and you might want to know something about it too.  Particularly if you live in a rural area.  I guess the hope is almost all squeezed out of me.  

I see where we are going thanks to fracking.  People are poisoned, slowly but surely, wherever it spreads.  And shale (and therefore gas and oil) is everywhere.  Maybe there are some places with tiny shale reserves under the ground, inefficient to extract.  For now.  But to keep the party going we are going to frack everywhere.  Force out every last cubic metre of gas, every last barrel of oil.  And we're going to burn them and party until we can't.  I expect that this will mean that all the humans will leave the countryside for cities and towns.  Easier to police of course.  And then there will be no one to require public meetings and public information sessions.  Lakes will be drained and turned into frack fluid.  The air will be thick with chemicals.  Many animals will die.  But the city lights will stay on.  This is where we are choosing to go. 

Makes hope an attractive thing.  But I'm not going anywhere.