Before 2008, Oklahoma used to experience about one or two earthquakes a year, each equal to or greater than magnitude 3.0. That jumped to 20 earthquakes in 2009. In 2014, five hundred and eighty five quakes hit the state, which is three times the number that hit California the same year. If one counts quakes that are less than 3.0, the number of quakes in Oklahoma rises to 5,000. In 2015 two earthquakes a day of magnitude 3.0 were recorded in the State. These are not just abstract statistics. On November 5 of last year, there was an earthquake in the town of Prague, Oklahoma that hit 5.6 and although it killed no one, the quake destroyed 16 houses and brought down a spire on a building at St. Gregory’s University. These earthquakes since 2008 have been confirmed as man-caused. The United States Geological Survey sets forth with certainty that the increased seismicity in Oklahoma is due to the way in which oil and gas are being extracted from the earth.

Some of these quakes are produced by fracking (hydraulic fracturing) and others are produced by the use of disposal wells where brackish water pulled up by the fracking process is forced back into the earth under great pressure, sometimes penetrating what is known as basement rock. Because fracking is occurring in many states throughout the United States, the relationship between this process and increased seismicity should be of concern to us all — in this country and around the world. The problem is that fracking, disposal wells, and increased seismicity together are not just technical matters that need to be addressed. What needs to be addressed is the broad spectrum of the human condition. Here’s what I mean:

Lots of money is flowing into Oklahoma as lots of oil and gas is flowing out of the state. Harold Hamm is the son of a sharecropper in Oklahoma. In 2014 his net worth was $14 billion dollars while the budget of the entire state was $7 billion. Money talks . . . and this fact was set forth with clarity in an April 13, 2015 New Yorker article (upon which this blog is partly based): “In State government, oil money is both visible and invisible.” It is interesting to note that the Governor of Oklahoma in 2013, Mary Fallin, urged Oklahomans to purchase earthquake insurance. That sounds like responsible action to protect the citizens. However, it seems Governor Fallin failed to inform purchasers that earthquake insurance in Oklahoma happens to exclude coverage for induced earthquakes. The human condition.

The New Yorker article goes into considerable detail about the interrelationship between money, government, investors, scientific agencies and quasi-scientific agencies as relates to the seismic consequences of the world’s search for oil and gas. As I read the article, it brought to mind a report called the Limits of Growth that was originally written in 1972 and updated in 2004. I never read the entire report/book and am not qualified to analyze or comment on it. But I quote the following from a Wikipedia entry on the report for you to consider:

“The book used the World3 model to simulate the consequence of interactions between the Earth’s and human systems.

“Five variables were examined in the original model. These variables are: world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion. The authors intended to explore the possibility of a sustainable feedback pattern that would be achieved by altering growth trends among the five variables under three scenarios. They noted that their projections for the values of the variables in each scenario were predictions “only in the most limited sense of the word,” and were only indications of the system’s behavioral tendencies. Two of the scenarios saw “overshoot and collapse” of the global system by the mid to latter part of the 21st century, while a third scenario resulted in a “stabilized world.””

My sense is that today we are not living in stabilized world. China, for instance, has entered the equation since the Limits of Growth was first published and their hunger for resources and the concomitant production of pollutions is significant. Moreover, global warming and its effects are now scientific facts. So I ask myself and I ask you: Are we now on the cusp of the Limits of Growth for what Buckminster Fuller called Spaceship Earth. Do we need to deeply rethink our entire approach to growth, population, consumption. It seems apparent we need a new earth ethic before violent resolution convulses our planet. And what I mean by violent resolution is not just wars for resources but violent alterations in our environment – above our heads, in our seas, and below our feet.