Part Two: Ruminations on Money & Morality

Another situation in the news that further advanced my disappointment in moral decision-making when money is involved, is the natural gas boom that's going on locally and the notorious fracking technique used for natural gas production.  I have been skeptical about the gas industry's entry into the Ohio Valley ever since the entry began.  Why?  Historically speaking, no industry or corporation overpays or even properly compensates those who provide resources.  As such, the buzz and excitement surrounding how much money was out there for those willing to sell their land's mineral rights to these companies made me feel a certain level of discomfort.  The local economy has been depressed ever since the local industries slowly died, and so the fact that these gas companies were coming in and offering pennies on the dollar for people's land rights and were heralded as breathing life back into the Valley, to me, has remained ridiculous.  The differential that results between what these "booming" companies have to give versus what, in reality, they're offering promises to be pretty large.  And they play off of the fact that these are people who have struggled for decades now.  Taking advantage of struggling citizens is frowned upon.  Unless there is a bundle of money to be made.

My feelings on this unfolding situation grew even more uneasy as I listened to a news story on NPR last week.  Christopher Joyce reported a story on All Things Considered, titled "Rising Shale Water Complicates Fracking Debate."  While there is a lot discussed in this story that is of interest, the overall message, for me, is that there is little to nothing known or confirmed about the environmental or human effects of fracking.  There has not been enough time for full studies to be conducted before these companies moved in to various locations and started drilling away for their golden resource.  Do we use widespread medical treatments on patients before they've been properly studied on a small number of people to ensure humanity's well being?  No.  Why?  Medical ethics.  So, why then is it widely accepted for billion dollar industry moguls to set up camp, disrupting ecosystems and virtually every other part of life, without proper assurance that people will not actually suffer as a result of this novel approach to extracting resources?

Money and its worth have always been interesting to me in relation to the actions of humans.  It is such a temporary commodity (because we gobble it up then spend it), and yet we seem so willing to toss our morals out the window if we can just get some more of it.  In the meantime, the currency that really matters, our relationships with one another, take a backseat.  Our relationships with one another, our relationship with the land and our responsibility to promote the positive and growth in both...these are the things that matter most--at least in my mind.  My fear is that there are a lot of people who will someday reach their end, and it will only be then that they realize the damage they've done by placing their relationship with money above all of this.