Residents are right to fight fracking proactively

To the editor, Congratulations and thanks to our First Nations brothers and sisters for their resistance to the shale gas industry. Kudos to Inverness County residents too.

They are not taking the word of any company or government that this type of exploration and extraction is safe. Nor do they accept that such a site will be put back the way it was before the drills and pumps moved in.

All of the gas that’s easy to get has been retrieved. Because there’s so much money for them to make, the energy barons have been willing to use the fracking method of mining. It is a devastating process. They pump millions of gallons of fresh water into the ground with enough pressure and additives in it to break massive amounts of rock beneath our Earth.

This breaking of the rock releases the gas and it is “collected.”

It doesn’t take a geologist to realize there will be changes below the surface with unknown effects, and that the “collection process” cannot and will not be complete.

When the uncollected gas and chemicals find the water, the water will be lost.

So, they pollute huge amounts of fresh water in the fracking process, that tainted water is put into the ground to release gas which will ruin more fresh water, and the product they are after will too soon be exhausted and the company will leave with their bags full of money and us without employment or water. I can’t see the good side.

In order to keep their jobs, industry spokespeople lie. They lie to us about the consequences of their work, and they lie to us about remediation after they’ve finished with our land. Influence from oil giants has restricted renewable energy development.

If we had clean energy, they wouldn’t get the world-changing profits they extract from us daily. Their god is the almighty dollar and their pursuit of profit is what drives them. Anything else they say is a lie meant to win us over to their dark side. Don’t believe them.

Clean water is what we need now and in the future. We cannot survive without it. The short-sighted view to get energy companies revenue at the expense of our most precious underground resource is not one we should accept.

When fools in government buy into the industrial hype, brave citizens have to demonstrate their disapproval. The water won’t come back and the industry doesn’t care. Tell the government to tell the barons to develop renewables so 100 years from now, people can still turn on a tap or swim in a lake.

It should be noted that bottled water can be as expensive as gas at the pumps. Who would have imagined that? We don’t need to lose our lifestyle to industry. For the sake of the planet, they must be stopped.

Joe Orkish Sydney River