Dakota Fracking Oil

Last year, I wrote a post, Bound For Glory, after travelling through North Dakota on our way home from southern Ontario about the visible impacts of the industry on the landscape.

Earlier this year, I went to Liz Logan's presentation on the impacts of the fracking boom in BC's northeast. She tackled the issue head-on - talking about the work the industry provides and the cost of that employment. Her people are beginning to wonder if the benefits outweigh the costs.


In Brick's winter issue, I came across an article and photographs by Elizabeth Farnsworth and Terry Evans which dug much deeper into the conflicts people are facing within families and communities about the fracking oil boom in Dakota. I was happy to find this is available online: Dakota Fracking Oil Boom.

You might want to check it out.

Louder!

I came across this marvelous, terrifying poem in Brick: A Literary Journal No. 93, Summer 2014. Brick has long been one of my favourite journals. Jan Zwicky has long been one of my favourite poets. They both have kindly given me permission to post "Near" below.

You don't read poetry, you say? This will change your mind. Read in a quiet corner, read it out loud to your friends, read it even louder in the town square.Take it out into the world where it belongs. Where you belong.

Near by Jan Zwicky

It arrives. The far dream
     that terrified us—that put the steel
in our forearms, and we woke each morning
     to its distant shuddering—

is far no more. Heavy-limbed, it sprawls
     across the daylight, brushes back
the damp hair from our foreheads, stares
     and laughs. And the axle of our will

is seized, the wheel splintered, an engine
     that does not, does not
turn, and when we go below decks, find
     it is missing, a hollow, a dark sift

of emptiness, and the ferry is slammed 
     against its moorings, helpless, the contagion spreading,
and the one who knows, the one who has been readied,
     is absent from the table.

Near is the hard grief, the grief
     from the pit, whose hands shake, which cannot find
the knife, which cannot stand, or kneel, or lie,
     the grief that is tearless, that gags.

The clearcut, the dead zone, the gas-contaminated
     well, the salt earth, the foreign
investment protection, the child soldier,
     the rape, the spin, the addiction

to speed, the saving of labour, the image,
     the image, the image, the image,
the genetic modification, the electromagnetic
     field, the sense of entitlement, greed. The present

is thick-lipped and stunned; it sweats. The voice 
     of the century is a wild clanking, a loose stink that lifts
and settles in our mouths. Did you raise your hand? Did you
     say something? Louder. Louder.