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For further discussion of the issues raised in Making It, please visit the magazine website at www.makingitmagazine.net and the social networking Facebook site. Readers are encouraged to surf on over to these sites to join in the online discussion and debate about industry for development. well water for entire communities. What wasn’t mentioned was that every fracking injection creates a mini-earthquake. They often trigger local fault lines to cause more serious earthquakes. In north Texas there have been 24 since 2006, compared to just one in the previous 100 years. These quakes allow gas and toxic wastewater to escape from their shale strata, into aquifers or even escaping to the surface. Health problems can result from fracking pollution. For example, the biologist Sandra Steingraber says, “There are reasons to suggest that air pollution and other stressors from drilling and fracking operations in the Barnett Shale
area of Texas may be playing a role in the story of breast cancer.”
● Ray Evans, by email
The real currency of life Making It issue number 6 (“Agribusiness: from farm to fork”) had a fascinating interview with the eco-activist Vandana Shiva in which, amongst other things, she talked about how to “feed the cities”. In The Guardian newspaper, at the beginning of November 2013, she wrote about “anti-life economics” and how “limitless growth is the fantasy of economists, businesses and politicians.” She
especially questioned how we use the gross domestic product (GDP) to measure the wealth of nations. As she puts it, “...nature’s amazing cycles of renewal of water and nutrients are defined as non-production. A living forest does not contribute to growth, but when trees are cut and sold as timber, we have growth.” She argues “growth is based on creating poverty both for nature and local communities”, and goes on to look at water extracted beyond natural capacity to create soft drinks; modified seeds which lead to debt for poor farmers; and the privatization of public systems leading to costlier services for people who find it difficult to
heat their homes any longer. For those of us working to develop industry to benefit the planet’s ever-growing population, we need to listen to people like Vandana. As she says, Nobel prize-winning economists like Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen have admitted that GDP does not “capture the human condition” and have urged the creation of different tools to gauge the well-being of nations. We need to create measures beyond GDP, and economics beyond the global supermarket, to rejuvenate real wealth. We need to remember that the real currency of life is life itself.
● Lesley Allen, London, UK, by email
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