leashing nature

can you put a leash on this?

By now, I bet most humans have seen the footage of the ongoing flooding in the South. These days, I’m usually covered in mud, so my master makes me sit on the porch and look through the sliding glass door when I want to watch the television. One thing that gets to me is how incredibly powerful the forces of nature truly are.

The existence of these potentially destructive forces of power and energy ‘trapped’ in the earth simply cannot be debated. The question of what to do about them seems to have realllllly stumped humans. If you have been reading my blog, then you will be able to guess what I’m going to do next– tell you how to handle questions such as this from a dog’s point of view…

or how can this be harnessed?

So, what do we do about the energy extant below ground, in water, through air,  by sun? How does physics–like gravity or inertia–shape our point of view? What types of truths do humans believe about nature? How did humans come to believe them?

Do you believe that humans can actually put a leash on the power of nature? Or, are humans just attempting to influence it? Is that even possible? Do you believe that nature will do as nature does–regardless of what humans do?

Answers to these questions– and the deeper question of “What influenced my belief this way?”– might provide reasoning for why some people approve of unconventional natural gas extraction using high volume, long lateral, slickwater hydraulic fracturing while others do not.

It’s important to call fracking by its technical description– that way the gas companies know you’re talking about the type of operations that were only recently combined in 2007 in PA to begin the first of many unconventional fracking jobs in the Marcellus Shale region of PA. We’re not talking about the 50 year-old version of fracking; this is new stuff to PA. Unproven, dangerous stuff.

So far, humans are not winning the battle against nature when it comes to taking natural gas stored in Marcellus Shale. They seem to have a lot of trouble with stuff like gravity and inertia right here at the surface: containments overflow, sediment flows down hill, and things sometimes go boom. A dog only need imagine what’s going on a couple thousand feet down below the earth’s surface where nobody–human or dog–can really tell what’s going on.