fracking

Venezuela, Equality, and Oil

Recently I was invited to post blogs focusing on Latin America on the Tikkun Daily Blog. My first post is HERE, a slightly revised version of my “Ten Things I Learned from Hugo Chávez.” (NOTE: If you do a quick read of the ten headings, you may be able to spot one “tone-it-down” revision in the Tikkun version as compared to my original, here.)

Lawsuit Filed by Texas Family Injured in Fracking-Related Explosion Last Summer

Last August, Cody Murray and his father, Jim, went to investigate a pump house on Cody’s Perrin, North Texas, property when they saw water spraying from it. Built-up methane gas caused the water well to explode, sending flames 30 feet in both directions, catching Murray’s t-shirt to catch on fire and causing serious burns to his father, wife, and four-year-old daughter.

Where’s the Nurture?

Nature versus Nurture is still used to broadly categorize the influences on human development, literally, what make us human. It is a question tied with the past (even back to Shakespeare) when the understanding of the genetic blueprint was vague, a gap we’ve filled in with theory. Nature was what you inherited from your parents and nurture was everything else – total environmental influences.

Hey, I Have an Idea Where They Can Stick the Atlantic Coast Pipeline

Governor Terry McAuliffe of Virginia campaigned on green energy (and I hear some people may have believed him, though I haven’t met one) and then immediately backed the proposed construction of a giant fracked-gas pipeline through the mountains and farms of Virginia to carry fossil fuels from West Virginia to North Carolina.

Study: People Living Near Fracking Sites Suffer Severe Health Problems

Research shows that people who live near hydraulic fracturing (fracking) sites have more severe health problems than those who don’t, and wind up in the hospital more often.
Researchers from the University of Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania wrote in a study published in PLOS ONE that those who live close to the natural oil and gas drilling sites are more likely to suffer from heart conditions, neurological illnesses, and cancer. [1]

A Single Change

If you could make a change, a single change to society that could illuminate its most pressing issues, bring them to the forefront and propose new solutions to many of society’s oldest problems, you would do it, wouldn’t you? If this change could help many, even if none of the people helped were you, yet no one could be harmed, you would quite probably wish for this change to occur, would you not? Perhaps even take action to help enact it? Vote on it? Sign a petition?

Global Warming: A Threat to Humanity?

For human beings… to destroy the biological diversity of God’s creation; for human beings to degrade the integrity of the earth by causing changes in its climate, by stripping the earth of its natural forests or destroying its wetlands; for human beings to contaminate the earth’s waters, its land, its air, and its life – these are sins.
— Encyclical Letter of the Holy Father Francis on Care of our Common Home, June 2015