Under the Surface: Fracking…, by Tom Wilber
Under the Surface: Fracking, Fortunes, and the Fate of the Marcellus Shale by Tom Wilber.
Cornell Univ Pr (2012), Hardcover, 272 pages
Wilber, a journalist for seventeen years with the Binghamton (NY) Press & Sun-Bulletin, has written an account of the impact of natural gas fracking in the Marcellus Shale of New York and Pennsylvania. [Fracking has also ocurred in many other states including Texas, Oklahom,Wyoming, and Colorado, with some of the same problems appearing.] Focusing mostly on the stories of individuals, he explores the science of fracking, the actions of the landmen who come offering leases, and the arrogance of the oil companies when confronted about problems such as torn up roads and exploding wells. He also discusses the effects of fracking on land owners and communities, the differing regulatory response of Pennsylvania and New York and the conflicting interests of different industries about creating new markets for natural gas.
Wilber’s focus on individuals makes his story easy to read and follow, and he presents different sides of most of the issues. He describes people who become millionaires from lease money, but then find themselves dealing with their property being covered with tens of millions of gallons of chemically laden brine water. Others found they could end up with an explosion in their barns, or even their houses. Some discovered that a damaged well could mean disruption of their property, but no additional money from production. Many found their water wells contaminated.
Wilber describes the effect of these sorts of problems on neighbors, on communities, and on state regulatory agencies. Focusing on the community of Dimock , Pennsylvania, he details the problems of organizing to get a better treatment from the oil companies. People were frustrated by oil companies, who frequently denied that they had caused a well to be contaminated, told by the state to contact the industry, and told by the industry that it was “all regulated”. In response to this type of run-around, members of the community organized to pressure the state to regulate the industry better. Some residents were angered by the community’s actions, because it slowed down their hopes of cashing in on the boom. Tensions also emerged between those who trusted that the filtration systems furnished by industry would clean up their polluted wells, and those who didn’t trust them and wanted the comanies to be required to build a piieline bring in clean water.
Partly in response to the problems in Pennsylvania, New York declared a moratorium on fracking until a review of the problems it created and a regulatory response was prepared. While many welcomed the moratorium and hoped for strong regulations, if not an outright ban, others living close to the Pennsylvania line resented the delays that they felt was costing them money. Wilber explains many of the issues in New York, focusing most on the fact that Syracuse and New York City get their drinking water from sources that could be effected by drilling.
Wilbur’s book is not a analytical survey of what fracking is, how it should be regulated, or if it should be totally banned. His journalistic training causes him to follow the story, rather than to analyze it in depth. It suffers from the problem of any book dealing with a current topic, in that it has to stop its story at some point.
I recommend the Under the Suface to those who are new to the issue of fracking and want to understand its complexity. I read it on my Nook as a review copy from Netgalley.
Reading across Borders, by Shari Stone-Mediatore.
Reading across Borders: Storytelling and the Knowledge of Resistance, by Shari Stone-Mediatore. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
A theoretical book arguing that storytelling, especially by those marginalized by society, is a valid way of knowing and sharing knowledge, despite its criticism by both empiricists and deconstructionists. This is a major contribution to “feminist standpoint theory” and the attempt to “think from others’ lives.”
Stone-Mediatore is an academic philosopher steeped in “western civilization” and involved in debates about how we know what is true. Her prose is dense and can be slow going for individuals outside those debates. The points she makes, however, are critical to the decisions we all make about whom we can trust. Stone sets out to affirm the value of well-told stories in our pursuit of knowledge and to establish guidelines for considering them.
For Stone-Mardiatore a story points out the relationship of facts to each other and chooses which to prioritize. A story is an invitation to “look at it this way,” not a absolute truth but an “imaginative guide” which can “throw new light on familiar words.” Stories by those who are marginalized challenge and contradict the categories of thought which we assume are true. Because we temporarily identify with their authors, they force us to see biases and pain that we, and those in power, want to pretend do not exist. They challenge the “common sense” of a dominant society and point out the ways in which the “objective categories” of that society leave out essential human experiences. They force us to see biases and pain that we, and those in power, want to pretend do not exist. Stories can “respond to the inchoate, contradictory, unpredictable aspects of the human experience and can thereby destabilize ossified truths and foster critical inquiry into the uncertainties and complexities of historical life.”
She wants to promote a “more responsible public storytelling” that “not only attends to historical facts but questions received ways of interpreting the facts, explores aspects of the world that are incongruent with received narrative frameworks… and fosters democratic communities in which we continually rethink our common histories and project in light of each others’ stories.”
Hannah Arendt, a German philospher, has been an influence on Stone-Mediatore, who uses her work as an example of the value of stories. Arendt turned to narrative thinking to explain how and why the Nazis acted in such “unthinkable” ways because ”Enlightenment principles of equal respect and moral responsibility could not stop people from killing their neighbors.“ She looked at the concrete historical situation in which Nazi ideas and practices emerged, and identified how racism and social disintegration opened the door for people to indulge in illogical, totally deductive thinking.
Stories, however, have been discounted by empiricists who insist that only “objective” knowledge is valid and admissible and thus reject narratives as “tainted” with personal experience. Such criticism has developed out of the “positivist” tradition and is rooted in any Enlightenment faith in reason. Stories as a means of knowledge are also dismissed by more recent theorists who identify with the “deconstructualist” approach which claims generally that all statements are only subjective. Stone-Mediatore sets out to prove that both the empiricists and the deconstructionists go too far in their refusal to take stories seriously as an important source of knowledge, especially the stories of those seeking redress from social oppression.
While seeing value in the insights of deconstructionists, Stone argues that they are wrong in claiming that social discourse can not be challenged. Reviewing the examples which historian Joan Scott used to prove social definitions are inescapable, she identifies flaws in Scott’s position. Scott had argued that Steven Langley’s memoir only reflects or reverses the ways in which society defined him as a gay, black writer. Stone argues that Langley simultaneously challenges those categories and reveals how they contradict with his own lived experience. In A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn continues to accept societal definitions of race and gender, but he challenges our belief that such categories define individuals as inferior and passive.
In developing her ideas, Stone-Mediatore draws on the writings of transnational feminists like Chantra Mohanty and Seyla Benhabib. She distinguishes such writers as not being from the “global sisterhood” of European-American feminism, Third World nationalism, or post-structural feminism. For them the goal is not simply to empower women or to analysis gender but to the end of patterns of domination. As change envelopes the world, they are seeking to ensure that women have a voice in post-colonial movements.
My favorite part of this book was Stone-Mediatore’s use of examples from the writings of marginal women to explain how narratives challenge the status quo and change our understanding of concepts like agency and empowerment. For example, Gloria Andulzala challenges dichotomies that define her as a Mexican American woman. By describing the divided nature of her “borderland” existence, Andulzala pushes readers to consider realities that are not publicly recognized. She finds purpose in bridging the multiplicity of her identify rather than allowing others to force her to choose between them. Andulzala recognizes that telling a meaningful story is hard work and requires the support of a community who share her values.
Domitla Barrios de Chungara is a Bolivian miner’s wife without formal education. Her activism began by talking with other women like herself, a simple beginning that gradually developed into a social movement. Organizing as mothers and housewives, the women blurred recognized lines between public and private, forcing political leaders to consider their personal stories. When her child goes to jail with her and when her baby dies, Barrios demands political solutions. She claims that her story is not “only” personal because “my life is related to my people. What happened to me could have happened to hundreds of people in my country.” Sadly, her account is only available in Spanish.
Not all stories are equally valid, however, and Stone-Mediatore points out that we should not passively accept the stories of others. Here she draws on the writings of Sandra Harding, Dorothy Smith, and Patricia Hill Collins. Harding points to the value of “thinking from the lives of others.” She would not have us, robot-like, simply take the side of the victim, but “develop a more critical standpoint on our own lives and world.” She uses the metaphor of using the “lens” of the other person. Historian Elsa Barkley Brown similarity suggests that we “pivot” into the another’s life, and then pivot back. Doing so gives us a new sense of the social hierarchies at work in all our lives. Going back to a Kantian concept, we can come away with “an enlarged view” of our world. The real culprits, according to Stone-Mediatore, are the rigid ideologies, “distributed by powerful social institutions and that have come to be accepted as common sense, but actually serve the interests of dominant social groups”. This book helps us see how to begin to challenge those ideologies.
I like books that make me think and change how I think. Stone-Mediatore, and Gloria Andulzala, have me thinking about the ways in which contradictions have shaped my own life story and how I have bridged them.
I highly recommend Reading across Borders to anyone interested in theoretical analysis and willing to engage in it. Stone-Mediatore’s ideas are also important for the rest of us, however, and I will be looking for and reviewing more readable books that explore ideas like hers.
BOOKS BY AUTHORS MENTIONED:
The Origins of Totalitarianism, by Hannah Arendt.
Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, by
Chandra Talpade Mohanty.
Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics, by Seyla Benhabib.
The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, by Sandra G. Harding.
Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, by Patricia Hill Collins.
The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology, by Dorothy E. Smith.
La frontera / Borderlands, by Gloria Andulzala.
Bruised Hibiscus, by Elizabeth Nunez.
Bruised hibiscus , by Elizabeth Nunez. Seattle, WA: Seal Press, 2000.
An exciting Caribbean novel filled with the complexities of colonization and patterns of dominance as they are experienced in the lives of individual men and women.
Elizabeth Nunez writes of life on her home island of Trinidad, as she does in Prospero’s Daughter. This novel, however, has a larger cast of characters. The narrative alternates between two women and the men who abuse them and other happenings on the island. External events crash on private lives. Where Prospro’s Daughter is tight and elegant, Bruised Hibiscus sprawls, exposing a variety unresolved issues. Both books reveal just how good an author Nunez is, showing her concern for personalizing the meaning of colonization and her ability to create characters we care about.
Two women endure abusive husbands. Despite their differences, they had been close friends for a brief time as children, and when they meet again as adult they are able to share their troubles. Rosa, the daughter of the plantation overseer, is married to a black teacher. Zeula, taken as a child from a Venzulaen village, is the wife of a Chinese merchant. When another woman is killed, they both face new challenges as they cope with increased anger from their husbands and their own rising anger against them. Rosa’s old nurse, Mary Christophe, is there for both women, a substitute for the mothers neither had. Ultimately, she can nurture them but not save them. Meanwhile, blacks on the island are restive as they face yet another example of white prejudice and disdain.
Nunez takes her readers back into the lives of her main characters, into a convoluted past that produced the confusion in which the women live. The arbitrary nature of authority under colonization lays the foundation for ongoing anger and envy. The past still cements individuals in pain and confusion. Concepts of who is black and who is white are shown to be as fragile and changeable as definitions of good and bad. In the end, whiteness can not protect.
But colonization is only part of the problem. Domination of men over women can mirror colonization’s ugliness and unfairness, but the color of the dominator can change. A black man and a Chinese man are the ones destroying Rosa and Zuela. The question of who will survive, and how, contributes to the suspense of the book. Certainly there is pain in this book, but there is joy as well. Saying more would give away too much.
Elizabeth Nunez is a fine writer. Like other Caribbean authors her description of the landscape is riveting. She also is a master of probing individuals’ motivations and feelings and revealing parts of their personality that they themselves would rather not face. Although obviously sympathetic to Rosa and Zuela, she is sensitive to the forces driving the men who abuse them.
I strongly recommend this book as wonderful story to read for pleasure and for the inside look at colonization and male domination that it provides.
>Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, by Rodolfo F. Acuna. Second edition. Harper & Row, 1981.
A well-documented, alternative history of Chicanos in America told from their point of view rather than that of the dominant culture, which explods many commonly held myths about them.
Rudolfo Acuna’s Occupied America has a clear thesis. The four states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California are territory captured and occupied by the USA in the mid-1800s. Ever since, Mexicans living in those states have lived under the domination of their invaders sometimes acquiescing, but often resisting their domination.
That is not the story most of us learned from our US history classes. Yet much of the story is familiar. We read of Anglo slaveowners moving into Texas and fighting for their independence and the Mexican War leading to the US acquisition of New Mexico, Arizona, and California. This time, however, we see the events from a different viewpoint, that of Mexicans living in those regions. We get more details about some aspects of the story, such as long-term conflicts that emerged as Anglos sought additional lands and the extreme numbers of Mexicans killed in Texas and in the conquest of Mexico. Essentially Acuna tells another version of the same story. Versions differ but less in essential content and facts than in emphasis and interpretation. We are accustomed to differences between versions of events; between the movie and the book, between different characters in a novel, between different observers at a crime scene. Acuna has given us a different version of US history that forces those of us who are Anglo Americans to question what our country has done. For those who are of Mexican descent, this version of their past presented their ancestors as engaged participants.
Much of what Anglos think we know about the history of Mexicans in America is based less on facts than on ideologies of Manifest Destiny and the alleged superiority of European ancestry and white skins. When Acuna does challenge what we think we know, it is these myths that he questions. By adding factual information, usually left out of history books, he shows us a new side of history.
The first section of Acuna’s book focuses on the conquest of the land that became the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California and of the fierce resistance with which Mexicans fought it. The Texas Rangers and other Anglos wanting their lands called them “outlaws” of an “inferior race,” but Acuna describes them as a guerilla force trying to preserve what was theirs. In the second section Acuna looks at Chicanos in twentieth-century America around topics of immigration, labor, and politics. He positions changes in immigration and in immigration policies in relation to US investments in Mexico and the demands of Anglos for cheap labor. His sections on labor and political activism highlight the ongoing violence used against those of Mexican heritage.
The edition of Occupied America that I read was published in 1981. Since then the book has become a classic with eleven editions printed. Given all that has happened in the past thirty years for Chicanos, it seemed dated. A newer edition would have a better choice.
Theremoval of other books I have read that have been banned by the Tucson school district have seemed just silly. Occupied America, however, offers a challenge to the myth of America which the Arizona authorities want to promote. This is a powerful challenge, well grounded in facts, but from the viewpoint of the oppressed rather than the dominant group in our society. It needs to be read by students and citizens, whatever their ethnic background if we as a nation are ever to move toward equality. Anglo students, perhaps even more than Chicano ones, could view our nation more realistically if they read this book.
I strongly recommend Occupied America to everyone. I would love to teach it in a classroom alongside a more standard US history text so that students could assess the differences between the versions.
Being Well (Even When You’re Sick): Mindfulness Practices for People with Cancer and Other Serious> Illnesses, by Elana Rosenbaum. Paperback. Shambhala Publications | 06/12/2012. 
A warm, clear presentation of the Mediation Based Stress Program, designed for those coping with serious or chronic health problems.
Being critically and chronically ill, and enduring debilitating medical technologies takes a toll on the mind as well as the body. Faced with extreme uncertainty and pain, normal coping skills evaporate. Fragility and dependence on others chip away at self-esteem. Hopelessness takes over. Aware of the importance of mind-body connections, the Massachusetts Medical School Hospital has developed a well-regarded project to alleviate their seriously ill patients’ emotional pain. Its Meditation Based Stress Reduction program is an adaptation of Buddhist practices to teach patients how to remain calm without denying the suffering and uncertainty inherent in their situations. Being Well makes that program available to readers everywhere.
Elana Rosenbaum was one of the clinicians who developed the MBSR program and has taught in it for years. In addition, she suffers from lymphona, a deadly form of cancer and has undergone extensive chemotherapy, stem cell replacement and other extreme medical procedures for it. She continues to face the likelihood the disease will return. Her book takes readers through the steps she teaches to those in the MBSR program. In each chapter she lays out a few basic ideas, gives examples and provides a guided meditation or thought exercises. By repeating the meditations and exercises readers can gradually learn to accept and cope with their illness.
In general, MBSR is designed to help a person become calm by focusing on his or her breath or other non-threatening details like the sounds and images in a room. Doing this on a regular basis, a person can allow good and bad thoughts and feelings to flow in and out of consciousness. Pain, grief, and fear can be acknowledged and released. Denial and control are replaced by release of suffering. The ability to remain calm is empowering. Throughout the process, Rosenbaum advises readers and sufferers to show loving acceptance to their bodies.
MBSR is grows out of Buddhist teachings and practices, but absolutely no religious beliefs are required for its use. The ideas and activities of mindfulness are widely accepted among psychologists and in the general public. There is little new or revolutionary here. What is unique about MBSR and this book is the clear practical manner in which mindfulness is made accessible to a group of people in particular need of it. Rosenbaum makes the program eminently do-able, even for those with serious physical limitations.
While I don’t have cancer, I do have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and know how difficult it is to cope emotionally with major, chronic limitations. I have experimented with meditation enough to realize its potential, but I have not been able to put together a coherent practice. Most books and tapes give too little or too much instruction. Being Well presents a simple, manageable set of practices and ideas which I believe I can actually incorporate into my life.
I read Being Well on my Nook as a review copy from NetGalley. I have decided to actually buy a hard-copy so that I can get the DVD and practice the guided mediations.
I recommend Being Well to anyone, not only those with cancer and other extreme illnesses, but to anyone facing the limitations of illness, disabilities, and aging. In fact, Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction would be good for anyone whatever their need, and Rosenbaum teaches it with particular grace and understanding.
Remember the Tarantella, by Finola Moorhead.
Remember the Tarantella, by Finola Moorhead. Spinifex, 2011.
A wonderful, swirling dance of a novel about a community of lesbian women exploring their inner and outer worlds, and finding ways to live both as individuals and as part of a larger caring community.
Australian author Finola Moorhead set out to write a different kind of novel, one that would reflect a how a group of lesbian women were creating a new style of living that encompassed global travel and the establishment of a home community in the Blue Mountains of Australia. In her book, she presents a “feminist aesthetic,” grounded in a nonlinear, rooted web of connections rather than conflicts. Instead of experimenting with a female language or use extensive stream-of-consciousness. Instead, writing in powerful, but traditional prose, she has structured her book to allow a variety of women’s voices to circle and interact. She does not provide a plot about a handful of characters, but writes a “we” book, featuring a whole group of sharply different women interacting across global boundaries.
As she describes in her afterword, Moorhead started work on this novel with diagrams and mathematical drawings of circles and triangles, then added some nouns and finally text. She structured her writing by using the zodiac, tarot cards and other more esoteric patterns. Overall, she spent eight years creating Tarantella, three of them listening to and incorporating the responses of women readers. First she expanded her book and then she cut it back. Little of her creative search for structures was evident to me as I read Tarantella, but somehow she manages to achieve a unity that underlies a sometimes chaotic and confusing surface. In addition, Moorhead is a fine wordsmith. The book is filled with sentences and phrases that I wanted to capture and keep. Her story is often rooted in the natural world and her description of the Australian landscape are moving. Her characters, admittedly sometimes strange, are real comprehensible individuals.
Moorhead lists twenty-six women as the cast for Tarantella, one for each letter of the alphabet. Some are Australian, but others are from Spain, Switzerland, India, the United States, and Brazil. They belong to different generations and cultures. Politics and personalities are also varied. As one woman describes them, they are “a ragged band of beggars trooping toward the sunset, as clever as gypsies, plucking mandolin strings and blowing mouth organs, making fires and cooking grains, the sisters, the spinsters marching in freedom.” Men are present around the edges, able to impregnate and cause damage but never fully drawn characters in the book.
All are the women are lesbians, and lesbian life is their common ground. Sexuality is present and taken for grant as important, but not highlighted. There are no diatribes against men or patriarchy or against women who choose to be straight. In a rare section near the end of the book, Moorhead expresses why being lesbians is critical to the women’s lives, but she does so in political, not sexual terms. As Etama starts to organize a movement against nuclear weapons and US military bases in Australia, she explores her own motivation. Viewing men as more willing to encounter death, she explains “But for women sex is a new beginning. It is new life. Engendering, giving birth, nurturing.” She was “aching for the new depth, the myth that got murdered, judged and silenced out of existence, but that’s always been there, the archetype, Artemis, the lesbian goddess, and the Amazons who were the first feminist branch of the human family.”
Moorhead does not give equal attention to all her diverse cast. Instead, she alternates brief chapters which highlight five women, the ones whose names begin with vowels, treating each with a different type of writing. Etama, traveling in Europe, writes letters. Arnache, imprisoned in Saudi Arabia, writes semi-coherent notes, perhaps in the sand. Ursuala, disfigured and isolated by an ugly scar across half her face, keeps a diary. Iona, a taxi driver and aspiring author is described in third person. So is Oona, an Aboriginal woman who had squatted on the land in the Blue Mountains before it was purchased by the “white dykes” who create a camp there.
The other women move in and out of the story, revealing surprising interconnections between characters and situations. On one hand each of the women is on her own journey. As Grunhilda states, “Following your dreams is a matter of trial and hard work, solitary, thankless and rewarding only in the eventual, inevitable understanding that, at least, you attempt to take your destiny in your own hands.” At the same time, all the women are part of a loose web. Physically, the land at “Moonmares,” is a place of temporary retreat and coming together, but it functions more as a touchstone than as a permanent, closed community. The women come together there, or Australian cities, or in lesbian-friendly households around the world,
Of course there are internal conflicts of many kinds; between generations, political factions and former lovers. The women, individually and as a group, face attacks from outsiders. But the book is an amazingly happy one. When couples break up, partners find someone new to love and be loved by. Characters put forth elaborate mystical schemes, but no one argues about theory. Together the women can create an electric atmosphere, “The conversations move, showing emotions, reactions, point and counterpoint. There is short story upon short story in the layers of the party, vibration crossing vibration, swelling into waves and receding into many little endings. Freshness of intellectual engagement, a spectrum of accents and attitudes from cynicism to commitment expressed, short of the need for disagreement.”
Just as Moorhead creates a unique structure for her book, she challenges the way we think about ourselves as women. She has not written a realistic portrait of a lesbian community, much less a community that includes a range of sexual diversity. She has not created a lesbian utopia, but raises questions for which she offers no practical solutions. What she has accomplished is to challenge her readers’ assumptions about what it can mean to be a woman and what women need in their relationships. Moorhead’s characters are fundamentally single and self-determining but they function within a larger supportive network of other lesbians wherever they go. They form close loving couples, bound to each other sexually and emotionally, but those partnerships do not limit their individual actions and they are not expected to meet all their needs. In other words, the couples do not function as traditional marriages. Some of the women have ties to their mothers and other family, ties which can hold them in painful situations. Iona, at least, seems to find a way to meet such obligations in ways that allow her continuing involvement with her close friends. Although the community of women welcome the birth of a new daughter, Moorhead avoids any real treatment of how motherhood and children fit into the community she envisions. None the less, she offers an alternative vision that differs sharply from those who would claim that woman, and by implication men, have to choose between individual goals and meaningful involvement in a supportive family or community.
Spinifex Press has reissued this book, initially published in 1987, and made it available as an ebook as a feminist classic. I read a review copy on my Nook.
Tarantella receives my highest recommendation. It is warm and fun and can awaken us all to fresh possibilities, whether or not we are lesbians. Unless you are too conventional to rise to its challenges, do read it. I love this book and can’t wait to read it again and discover what I probably must have missed the first time.
A New Map of the Universe, by Annabel Smith.
/A New Map of the Universe, by Annabel Smith. University of Western Australia Press (2005), Paperback, 247 pages. 
A perceptive, lyrical novel about silences and different kinds of love by a new Australian author.
At first Amanda Smith seems to have written a set of short stories, each of which can stand alone. Finally the linkage between the stories is revealed and other patterns that repeat in them becoming apparent. These are stories about loss and grief and how individuals may close in on themselves to avoid the pain of their memories. And these are stories about how such attempts to shield oneself from pain can hurt others. Children growing up in face of such silence will be scared and need to be loved in order to heal. Only by facing the pain rather than hiding in the silence can new love be built. Only then can a person acquire “a new map of the universe” that will allow moving on.
Smith is a fine writer. Her descriptions of her characters and their silences are sure and her descriptions of the landscape are moving. As a non-Australian, I was particularly moved by her depiction of the car trip from Perth to Melbourne; the cold, lonely southern coast which I had never imaged and how long it takes to drive the distance.
After finishing this novel, I took several days letting its pieces fall into place. Although it is written in traditional prose, I needed time to sort out the connections. One of the pleasures of blogging is that I find myself mulling over what I read and getting the extra pleasure that a book like this can offer.
Thanks to Lisa at http://anzlitlovers.com for convincing me to read this book.
I recommend A New Map of the Universe to anyone who enjoys a meaningful, hopeful, and lyrical novel.
