The Re-branding of a Cowtown

Submitted by don on Wed, 09/16/2009 - 10:12pm.

It has been very frustrating to witness my hometown, Fort Worth, Texas, being transformed into an oil and gas town in three short years. Besides the usual list of environmental and safety concerns, there is also a new level of greed that concerns me. Not your average everyday greed, but one of a slightly different shade.

Consequently, there is now a united front by the "establishment" to ignore all these concerns and embrace gas drilling almost as if drilling is an entrenched part of our heritage, a kind of bookend to our western, cowboy heritage, a rewriting of history. 
 
I don't really blame them. What else can the Chamber of Commerce do? Gas drilling is here to stay. Thanks to Mayor Moncrief, ex-Mayor Barr and a handful of others gas drilling IS entrenched now. The heritage is just beginning and so are the problems.

I tried to address this collective faux-amnesia phenomena and the hybrid greed factor that has accompanied it in a essay I wrote for the current issue of the Fort Worth Weekly. The names I named of various cultural, educational and civic organizations are just the tip of the iceberg of influential groups that are participating in this grand delusion we call urban gas drilling. 

This ain't the Cowtown I was born in. Without vigilance, your town could be next.

DY




See photos here from the Chesapeake Energy exhibit that was on view at the Fort Worth Library (formerly known as, the Fort Worth PUBLIC Library. No kidding):



Read the library press release explaining the re-branding here:

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