Fracking Our Food Supply

[xchrom]

http://www.thenation.com/article/171504/fracking-our-food-supply


Healthy cattle on the Schilke ranch in North Dakota, before fracking began

In a Brooklyn winery on a sultry July evening, an elegant crowd sips rosé and nibbles trout plucked from the gin-clear streams of upstate New York. The diners are here, with their checkbooks, to support a group called Chefs for the Marcellus, which works to protect the foodshed upon which hundreds of regional farm-to-fork restaurants depend. The foodshed is coincident with the Marcellus Shale, a geologic formation that arcs northeast from West Virginia through Pennsylvania and into New York State. As everyone invited here knows, the region is both agriculturally and energy rich, with vast quantities of natural gas sequestered deep below its fertile fields and forests.

In Pennsylvania, the oil and gas industry is already on a tear—drilling thousands of feet into ancient seabeds, then repeatedly fracturing (or “fracking”) these wells with millions of gallons of highly pressurized, chemically laced water, which shatters the surrounding shale and releases fossil fuels. New York, meanwhile, is on its own natural-resource tear, with hundreds of newly opened breweries, wineries, organic dairies and pastured livestock operations—all of them capitalizing on the metropolitan area’s hunger to localize its diet.

But there’s growing evidence that these two impulses, toward energy and food independence, may be at odds with each other.

Tonight’s guests have heard about residential drinking wells tainted by fracking fluids in Pennsylvania, Wyoming and Colorado. They’ve read about lingering rashes, nosebleeds and respiratory trauma in oil-patch communities, which are mostly rural, undeveloped, and lacking in political influence and economic prospects. The trout nibblers in the winery sympathize with the suffering of those communities. But their main concern tonight is a more insidious matter: the potential for drilling and fracking operations to contaminate our food. The early evidence from heavily fracked regions, especially from ranchers, is not reassuring.

[peacebird]

1. I posted this on FB earlier this morning... Very important topic, needs much more coverge.

[Champion Jack]

2. Hopefully this is getting some much-needed attention

This Fracking business is no good ,so now it's affecting the animals next will be children and elderly .we're all being poisoned so that multinational corporations can sell our resources overseas. 100 years of energy independence? Bullshit

[daleanime]

3. Its like a race....

how fast can we destroy the world?

[octoberlib]

4. Excellent article!

I have a particular interest in this since the NC legislature approved a bill that would legalize fracking in the state within several years. I live in Charlotte and ran into two people at the airport a few weeks ago who had "Gas Exploration" on their jackets. I feigned ignorance and asked them what they were doing in the area and they told me cheerily that they were bringing gas pipelines tothe state of NC. This made me sick. I have a friend who's involved with a group who's trying to ban fracking in Michigan. We're both going to be working to do the same in NC.

[WillyT]

5. More Here: - K & R !!!

This cow on Jacki Schilke's ranch in northeast North Dakota lost most of its tail, one of many ailments that afflicted her cattle after hydrofracturing, or fracking, began in the nearby Bakken Shale.

Link: http://openchannel.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/11/29/15547283-livestock-falling-ill-in-fracking-regions?lite

The Study: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22446060