A FIELD PHILOSOPHER'S GUIDE TO FRACKING
How One Texas Town Stood Up to Big Oil and Gas
Adam Briggle
Liveright Publishing
336 pages (illustrated); $26.95
Because he wanted to see the workings of an actual frack site, Adam Briggle rode his bicycle up to Interstate 35, in Denton, Texas, ran across one side of the highway and lost his shoe in the mud in the median, between cars zooming north and south. Mr Briggle had never even heard of fracking when he was hired as a professor of philosophy at the University of North Texas, in 2009. But with around 250 gas wells drilled within Denton's city limits, the subject was thrust upon his consciousness. A member of the City Council asked him to form a citizens' advisory group for gas-well regulations, and Mr Briggle became a field philosopher, running across highways, helping collect air samples from backyards, consulting not only Mary Shelley and the theologian Duns Scotus to help guide him along "the arduous trail that is thinking" but also scientists, engineers, mayors, neighbours and his daughter, Lulu, a two-year-old rogue impervious to propaganda.
A Field Philosopher's Guide to Fracking represents Mr Briggle's impressive effort to match the scope of thought to the scope of the "real-world experiment" suddenly being conducted close to playgrounds and neighbourhoods. Much of his book stays in the muddy median of the fracking debate, resisting simplification, considering both the bane and the boon of drilling. Because of fracking, Texas has surpassed Iraq as an oil producer; water wells are contaminated, but gas prices are down; earthquakes are up, but so is employment; and energy independence seems almost possible. Mr Briggle adroitly explores both the conflict without and the conflict within - between doubt and certainty, philosophy and activism.
"The philosopher must never become a fundamentalist," he writes. "Once you are advocating for a cause, doubt and questioning, arguably the philosopher's bread and butter, become liabilities. ...It's a pickle."
In a debate obsessed with the means of getting energy, Mr Briggle, influenced by Socrates, focuses on the ends: "But the problem isn't just the recklessness of the means; it's also the mindlessness of the ends." Americans, he writes, are not clearly "happier now than we were 60 years ago when we consumed half as much energy and half as much stuff." Cruder than the oil is our use of it. Between the Yes and the No there is a Why - dangerous, muddy and melancholy.
Mr Briggle lucidly explains how starfish and ferns of old got pressed into the Barnett Shale beneath North Texas; how by blasting sand and water and chemicals down into that rock of ages we may now avail ourselves of the gas of ages. It is upsetting to hear about all the noise the drilling makes - "boom" is the right word - and about the stink and nosebleeds and asthma that many people with what Mr Briggle calls "indigenous knowledge" of fracking associate with it; it is harrowing to hear about families paid by the industry to keep quiet about their experience, about the woman whose "tap water turned black and slimy" soon after she agreed to allow fracking on her property.
Harrowing, too, is the account of all the meetings the philosopher must attend once his research and conscience compel him to choose a side and help lead Denton's anti-fracking campaign. Meeting and thinking, both arduous, seem broadly incompatible. (I am reminded of what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote about his time in the gulag, where he was able to think: "Because, and this is the main thing, there are no meetings. For 10 years you are free from all kinds of meetings! Is that not mountain air?") Once the philosophical pickle is replaced by a good cause, there is more meeting than thinking, though there is plenty of camaraderie and civic exhilaration thereafter, and it is nice to know that some consolation - the consolation of policy - attends those who devote 13-hour days to meetings at City Hall and pass out thousands of fliers and choose slogans and participate in other purgatorial activities (about which the book is dauntingly detailed). For this is how to get things done: not logos but logos.
In his investigation of what determines people's attitudes toward progress and technology, Mr Briggle makes an illuminating distinction between "precautionaries" and "proactionaries": "Precautionaries look down to our roots in the animal kingdom. Proactionaries look up to our future in the stars." Precautionaries identify with the creatures, fragile and finite, and they moderate their ambitions and appetites accordingly. Proactionaries identify with the immeasurably energetic stars: "For the proactionary, 'enough' is a dirty word." But animals and stars are hard to mobilise; politically they are quietists. When it comes to policy, both the animal-minded and the star-minded are forced to identify with people, as they're the ones who might see your logo, stop the pickup and vote Yes or No.
© The New York Times News Service, 2015
How One Texas Town Stood Up to Big Oil and Gas
Adam Briggle
Liveright Publishing
336 pages (illustrated); $26.95
Because he wanted to see the workings of an actual frack site, Adam Briggle rode his bicycle up to Interstate 35, in Denton, Texas, ran across one side of the highway and lost his shoe in the mud in the median, between cars zooming north and south. Mr Briggle had never even heard of fracking when he was hired as a professor of philosophy at the University of North Texas, in 2009. But with around 250 gas wells drilled within Denton's city limits, the subject was thrust upon his consciousness. A member of the City Council asked him to form a citizens' advisory group for gas-well regulations, and Mr Briggle became a field philosopher, running across highways, helping collect air samples from backyards, consulting not only Mary Shelley and the theologian Duns Scotus to help guide him along "the arduous trail that is thinking" but also scientists, engineers, mayors, neighbours and his daughter, Lulu, a two-year-old rogue impervious to propaganda.
A Field Philosopher's Guide to Fracking represents Mr Briggle's impressive effort to match the scope of thought to the scope of the "real-world experiment" suddenly being conducted close to playgrounds and neighbourhoods. Much of his book stays in the muddy median of the fracking debate, resisting simplification, considering both the bane and the boon of drilling. Because of fracking, Texas has surpassed Iraq as an oil producer; water wells are contaminated, but gas prices are down; earthquakes are up, but so is employment; and energy independence seems almost possible. Mr Briggle adroitly explores both the conflict without and the conflict within - between doubt and certainty, philosophy and activism.
"The philosopher must never become a fundamentalist," he writes. "Once you are advocating for a cause, doubt and questioning, arguably the philosopher's bread and butter, become liabilities. ...It's a pickle."
In a debate obsessed with the means of getting energy, Mr Briggle, influenced by Socrates, focuses on the ends: "But the problem isn't just the recklessness of the means; it's also the mindlessness of the ends." Americans, he writes, are not clearly "happier now than we were 60 years ago when we consumed half as much energy and half as much stuff." Cruder than the oil is our use of it. Between the Yes and the No there is a Why - dangerous, muddy and melancholy.
Mr Briggle lucidly explains how starfish and ferns of old got pressed into the Barnett Shale beneath North Texas; how by blasting sand and water and chemicals down into that rock of ages we may now avail ourselves of the gas of ages. It is upsetting to hear about all the noise the drilling makes - "boom" is the right word - and about the stink and nosebleeds and asthma that many people with what Mr Briggle calls "indigenous knowledge" of fracking associate with it; it is harrowing to hear about families paid by the industry to keep quiet about their experience, about the woman whose "tap water turned black and slimy" soon after she agreed to allow fracking on her property.
Harrowing, too, is the account of all the meetings the philosopher must attend once his research and conscience compel him to choose a side and help lead Denton's anti-fracking campaign. Meeting and thinking, both arduous, seem broadly incompatible. (I am reminded of what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote about his time in the gulag, where he was able to think: "Because, and this is the main thing, there are no meetings. For 10 years you are free from all kinds of meetings! Is that not mountain air?") Once the philosophical pickle is replaced by a good cause, there is more meeting than thinking, though there is plenty of camaraderie and civic exhilaration thereafter, and it is nice to know that some consolation - the consolation of policy - attends those who devote 13-hour days to meetings at City Hall and pass out thousands of fliers and choose slogans and participate in other purgatorial activities (about which the book is dauntingly detailed). For this is how to get things done: not logos but logos.
In his investigation of what determines people's attitudes toward progress and technology, Mr Briggle makes an illuminating distinction between "precautionaries" and "proactionaries": "Precautionaries look down to our roots in the animal kingdom. Proactionaries look up to our future in the stars." Precautionaries identify with the creatures, fragile and finite, and they moderate their ambitions and appetites accordingly. Proactionaries identify with the immeasurably energetic stars: "For the proactionary, 'enough' is a dirty word." But animals and stars are hard to mobilise; politically they are quietists. When it comes to policy, both the animal-minded and the star-minded are forced to identify with people, as they're the ones who might see your logo, stop the pickup and vote Yes or No.
© The New York Times News Service, 2015