William Blake was thinking of Jesus when he wrote these seminal words, but many English rural dwellers are thinking of Blake’s prose now as fracking threatens to come to Albion’s countryside.
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk up England’s mountain’s Green
And was the holy lamb of God,
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?
– And did those feet in ancient time.
(William Blake, 1757-1827)
The next verse of Blake’s work, often referred to as England’s “national poem,” asks “And was Jerusalem builded here, Among these dark Satanic Mills.’
The ‘dark Satanic Mills’ that Blake referred to are generally interpreted as describing the early Industrial Revolution’s destruction of Britain’s once pristine countryside. Blake had a serious aversion to cotton mills and the environmental damage they wreaked. He also believed they enslaved workers.
The modern UK is enslaved too, but to money, and recent policy choices in London are designed to destroy more “pleasant pastures” to obtain filthy lucre from a controversial practice called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. With the Scottish oil and gas fields almost depleted and Scotland’s very place in the UK in doubt, fracking has the potential to generate trillions of pounds of liquid gold and energy security for the country, or what’s left of it.
It’s not a new technology (it was first attempted as long ago as the 1860s), but it’s only in the last two decades that it’s been perfected and it wasn’t until the last few years that it became economically viable.
With the nation’s GDP only recently returned to pre-Lehman’s levels and doubts that the recovery is even genuine and not a mirage created by printing money, the UK urgently needs something to generate real growth. Given that the industrial base has been gutted and the country is largely dependent on London’s financial industry to pay the bills, the bean counters and politicians have apparently decided that fracking is the answer to their prayers.