Well and Truly Fracked | John Michael Greer

[Tace]

Aug. 21, 2013 (Archdruid Report) -- The reduction of contemporary debates about the future to ritual theater, the theme of last week’s post, isn’t limited to the specific technological issues I discussed in that essay -- the increasingly dubious quest for fusion power, on the one hand, and the prospects for the internet’s survival in an age of economic contraction and resource scarcity, on the other.

Across the landscape of contemporary (mis)understandings of the future, just about every issue you care to name has been turned into yet another modern morality play in which progress gets to act out one more symbolic triumph over its eternal enemies.

To describe that habit as unhelpful is to understate the case considerably. Modern industrial civilization faces serious challenges in the years immediately before us, as the paired jaws of resource depletion and environmental disruption clamp down ever more tightly on it, and the consequences of decades of bad decisions come home to roost. In order to deal with those challenges, hard questions need to be asked and realistic answers considered -- and this isn’t furthered at all by the tendency on the part of so many people these days to lapse into cheerleading instead. It’s rather as though you were trying to have a serious discussion about educational policy with someone whose only response to anything you said was to shout, “Central High, Central High, rah, rah, rah!”

Any number of examples of this could be quoted, but the one I’d like to discuss here is the way that fracking -- hydrofracturing of oil and gas-bearing shales, to give it its more precise moniker -- has been transformed, at least in the popular imagination, into the conclusive answer to those annoying little worries about the impossibility of extracting an infinite amount of petroleum from a finite planet. That’s worth discussing just now for at least two reasons.

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http://worldnewstrust.com/well-and-truly-fracked-john-michael-greer

[Laelth]

1. k&r for exposure. n/t

-Laelth