CONTENTS

Introduction

2 a) Setting the tone b) Secondary issues 3 The silence of the experts 4 What is empirical science 5 The unreliability of fracking geology 6 How to deal with resistance from academic geologists 7 Keeping an eye on the global context Summary of main argument

Introduction

One of the oldest tricks in the hustler's handbook is to get your punters in a panic so they forget to check the small print. Have any of you, for example, heard any mention of where shale fits in the ecology of the earth's surface or its role in the integrity of aquifer systems? I think not. Because what's happening IS we're being panicked here. We're being manipulated into falling into stock attitudes so the introduction of fracking can take place with a minimum of time, effort and outlay of treasure just a smooth transition which more or less manages itself because no-one is thinking much and instead we're falling into a well known typology of social action and pressure groups which can be easily sidestepped using time honoured people control methodologies. * * *

This is not to say our government possesses some new-fangled mind control system with hidden new technologies or some such sci-fi conspiracy theory. Far from it and quite the opposite what it's saying is that they're acting very much like a bunch of blundering toffs who're simply relying on the rest of us to act like the docile peasants we've so long learned so excellently to be. They, themselves, have clearly already been manipulated by the time honoured methods of petrochemical folk who, of course, are fairly doolally themselves on account of the fumes they're continuously inhaling and the numbingly anti-thought effects of their luridly well paid lifestyles. So why don't we all just roll over and kindly allow ourselves to fit so comfortably into their so fabulous plan for our new future and theirs, too, of course!? * * *

This pamphlet seeks to build on the courageous work of those who're currently active in saying no to such blandishments and are keeping the issue of resistance to fracking in the news. What it's saying is more people need to get involved to develop a much wider front. And it's suggesting a means of getting this wider front going. The government wants to fit fracking into a cameo mini-topic framework roughly in line with the neat political notion of an 'energy crisis' of the sort they're happily familiar with handling. That would be, yeah, neat for them but also completely wrong. Where it fits is in a much wider, much deeper zone, a colossal Russian doll of a thing a crisis of expertise tucked into a crisis of values and nestling many layers down in the global crisis of our whole culture. * * *

That's quite a tough call for a pamphlet to handle. I'm taking it on because, by an odd coincidence, I just happen to have been doing a series of investigations into these issues and I'm happy to share the relevant bits of my findings with you. However, I'm having to be much more strictly selective than I have been hitherto in order to compress this material into the pamphlet format so it's best

if I prepare you with a rough guide to the mind map on which I base it. After a brief section setting the tone* of what follows, I go through a number of secondary issues in order to clear the ground for my main one, the need for all of us, cautiously and firmly, to recognise our responsibility for science and technology in general and geology, in particular and to take them back from the specialists to whom, up to now, they have been consigned in the rough, unwritten social contract underpinning the division of labour system that has kept our world afloat for so long. First, I confront the issue of why these 'experts' have decided to remain aloof from the fracking controversy, maintaining a silence that seems to betoken total disinterest and disavowal of any responsibility for it. Then I look at the conceptual basis of the authority they believe justifies them in continuing to hide beneath the mantle of their questionable expertise. This leads on directly to the need to investigate the underlying theory base of empirical science and its confused relationship with philosophy and philosophers. This in turn brings me to the main topic of the pamphlet, the unreliability of academic geology as a basis for guaranteeing the safety of fracking technology or of the earth's ecological future if its use is allowed to continue. Here I strongly recommend that everyone hoping to oppose fracking effectively begins if they haven't done so already taking a closer interest in geological thinking and the theories it's currently based on. I emphasise the need to note the high proportion of speculative, even metaphysical, thinking these entail and use an analytical tool devised by the holistic and pragmatic philosopher of science, Willard Van Orman Quine, to show how it can be used to deflate unjustified pretensions to specialist science based authority. By doing so, people will be arming themselves with appropriate tools and evidence to cope with the inevitable resistance of academic geologists and the irrational apoplexy that is likely to be aroused by any suggestion that nonacademics should think themselves permitted to enter their holy of holies. Conflict of this kind will sometimes lead to protesters being confronted by all manner of underhand academic ploys designed to put layfolk back in their place. Faced with mind games of this kind the protester needs to be ever ready to re-establish his or her sense of poise and self-worth. I therefore include a useful form of thinking about such situations borrowed from the later and more mature work of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. A useful accompaniment to assimilating his thinking here is to work on how to transpose it all to your thinking about where it fits in the global context of all the myriad other peoples and species you'll be representing in what you're doing. I finish with a short summary of the technical and philosophical arguments designed to put the scheme into a context which can be assimilated by those who find such things a headache. By engaging with this material, you'll be entering a world of strange rites and mysteries but the confidence that you belong there as much as any of the rest of us should empower you to stand up for all of us. There's much in it worthy of deep respect but also a plethora of devices designed to generate smoke and mirrors. These are there to put the inquiring mind off the scent of the high proportion of subterfuge required to stop people realising that the experts are

only a little bit surer than you are about what they're doing there and are actually only trying to keep up with the 'Joneses' of the neighbouring fields of expertise who seem to be doing so much better than theirs. Yes, their world has its own scholastic division of labour within the wider social version with the result that it's a considerable challenge trying to glean what's currently going on in either. It's worth a try, however. This IS our world. Let's all respect it and enjoy our lives together in it. * (bold lettering indicates clues to the appropriate section titles of the main text)

What's Under Your Feet, The Fracking Geology Pamphlet

Setting the tone If like most of the human race you don't live in an earthquake zone, the ground under your feet is likely to be almost a catchphrase for what you can be most sure of in life, the most predictable thing you're ever likely to come across. Geology in such areas is likely to seem the epitome of mundane activities and, knocking about at bits of rock with a small hammer and so forth, the geologist to seem an unlikely person to wander far from what's really down to earth. In this pamphlet we'll be confronting the utter fictionality of this picture. We'll be looking at the need for us to exchange it for one in which geology is about as speculatively metaphysical as the mind itself, rent with uncertainty, and geologists as having little in the way of the type of solid facts you would expect from a person whose word you're being asked to rely on by someone promising you the earth if you'll just sign here and give away the rights to the land you're living on. That's what we all did in the last election. We elected politicians who've sold us down the river on the basis of a few predictions by geologists and left ourselves with the prospect of now having to live with a scale of uncertainty few of us can currently imagine, of having to abandon most of the assumptions on which we've based our lives up to this point and having only ourselves to blame. * * *

The anti-fracking protests at Balcombe, ironically a thriving mining site in ancient Celtic times, are having at least one predictable result. A media inspired polarisation has already begun to emerge between the young, hippies and nimbys currently the main protesters against fracking and the

rest of the populace who would rather grin and bear it just to keep the good times rolling. The aim of this pamphlet is not merely to give full credit to the protesters for getting the ball rolling and to further empower them. It also aims to make it less likely they'll get lumbered with the inevitable consequences of such a polarisation becoming the default mode of how we confront the fracking controversy. To achieve these aims we're going to have dig deeper to expose the dangerous assumption being concealed here, the assumption that we don't need to look more closely at worrying evidence of the unreliability of the geological science fracking is based on to find reasons why we all need to become involved. Our aim will be to open up the whole issue to reveal the cultural crisis that underpins it. The danger otherwise is that in the increasingly highly charged atmosphere of ritual social conflict it will be all too easy for the momentum currently being generated to become diverted and lost in an escalation of its current energy around the banners of more peripheral issues. There's a number of such issues raising serious questions about the sense and moral probity of pressure to grant fracking licences on this island and on this continent. They deserve to be counted and scrutinised in order to see why they must eventually be considered to be of secondary importance here. Secondary issues Foremost among these is the unseemly haste of the way fracking engineers have got a foot in our door in the first place. Who was consulted? What expert opinion was canvassed? Was someone's uncle involved? Are charges of nepotism appropriate and should a parliamentary inquiry be set up to investigate how they've got this far? Then there's the element of panic in pro-frackers' language. All of a sudden, we're on our last reserve tank of oil when its finished we're up the proverbial creek and nothing but drastic measures can save us. Ecologically minded activists have been trying unsuccessfully for decades to convince the rest of us of our need to find alternatives to oil and to put more effort into reducing the impact of our technological relationship with nature. Licensing fracking in Britain and Europe is an admission they were right all along combined with a strategy which can only make matters worse. Underneath the panic lurks a highly questionable attempt to get us locked into technologies that will stave off any sea change in global politics that looks likely to limit our culture in ways that would put it on a level with that of today's third world nations. To our politicians schooled as they are in the visions and embellishments of global modernity this is a prospect to be averted at all costs. Their aim appears to be to keep global hierarchy high with us placed comfortably close to the top. This might be acceptable if it were part of a short term policy of caution ensuring we don't fall too far relative to the rest as the global economy gradually subsides in a stable long term process of flattening

leading to worldwide restructuring around increasing localisation. It clearly isn't this however since such a strategy would obviously have to include long term publicly recognised contingency planning designed to deal with any instability likely to emerge. In the current absence of such leadership and planning it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that what our politicians are committed to is a brutal global elimination contest with the winner nations taking all. As a nation, in other words, we seem to be set on reverting to the privateering pirate role which launched us to global power in the first Elizabethan age. This bodes ill both for the human race as a whole and the ultimate winners since it can only lead to terminal mayhem and the despoliation of nature as a whole. The most worrying issue of all, however, has to be the silence of the experts. The keyword for any cogent explanation here is 'complacency'. Starting from the top, there is and never has been a civil service department whose remit is to comb through the details of proposed policies or projects to list up all the biases, prejudices and most likely beneficiaries of a given promotion or propaganda campaign. We clearly expect our political representatives to have advisers on hand who have an attested career of excellence in this department of thought or to be good at it themselves. We are in other words all guilty of complacency in this respect . We only have ourselves to blame for the fact that we can't turn to our political experts and expect them to pass on some well argued geological case for fracking they can claim they've 'exhaustively scrutinised' before deciding to let the proposers do the current dummy run. Political experts are notoriously too hard to pin down for that to be a worthwhile option. It seems we have no alternative but to turn to the scientific experts. The silence of the experts We have academic departments full of these, geologists, scientists of all stripes and indeed philosophers intensively trained to comb through propositions of all kinds to expose the varied forms of concealed bias and subjective twisting they likely conceal. These all have available to them vast amounts of exhaustively detailed information easily accessed via specially privileged channels of the internet not available to the public. We only have a scattering of videos you could hardly count on the fingers of one hand but they're enough to make it clear not only that all is not well in the world of the fracking already undertaken in the USA and elsewhere but also that there is strong evidence of forms of highly dubious, technically advanced and devious forms of malpractice being used to resist any attempt to bring those responsible to book. Yet what do we hear on the subject from our highly trained and highly paid academic experts? Effectively, not a peep has to be the only answer here. What indeed we do have is a good case for considering that what we're confronting here is the foundation layer of an orthodoxy of several centuries standing with academia playing a key if somewhat taciturn role as its chief custodian. In fact, if you're looking for the real source of the authority on which licenses to frack are currently being issued you would be well advised to concentrate more

closely on a curious but little known academic arrangement which could even be described as intriguingly complex if it weren't for the negative aspects closer inspection reveals. These concern the probity of the long standing fix which has preserved what closely resembles a ghastly fazing game regularly and ritually enacted by two academic communities, scientists and philosophers, with enquiring layfolk as its main victims. The way it works is like this. The aim of the game is that both parties remain comfortable beneficiaries of the status quo. The main rule is that neither should question the other's authority. Philosophers must defer to scientists as the only experts capable of assisting the public in their search for the truth of any given matter of fact. Scientists must deny the philosophical nature of what they do and defer to philosophers when it comes to dealing with layfolks' questions about the integrity and reliability of the methods they use to make their scientific claims about what can be trusted as fact. Sticking to these rules has given them both the almost impregnable sociocultural base which has kept them quietly where they are for at least three centuries. The most significant factor behind the longevity of the orthodoxy has to be its power as a system of beliefs capable of soothing our remorse with respect to the crimes our forebears had to commit against other societies and nature as a whole to get us to our current high status the doctrines of modern humanism. This differs from the classical and renaissance forms of humanism mainly in the bleakness of its vision of the universe as a fundamentally lifeless vortex of particles going randomly nowhere in particular while draining away into some otherwise incomprehensibly placeless sump. Add to this the doctrine of natural selection as a factor somehow capable of organising this paradoxical gradient into developing the transient forms and systems of our world and you have an allegedly powerful basis for justifying the human ability to 'conquer' and disfigure the face of nature as evidence for the belief that we're the only beings in it that qualify as having meaning or moral value. Crowning it with a neurophysiology that hard-wires the individualism essential to all types of humanism in our uniquely large brain to body ratio seems to give the ideology a hard and solidly incontrovertible physical justification. The master stroke of the whole account, however, has to be its chutzpah in presenting its persistent failure to explain the role of the brain in the generation of consciousness as proof of the brain's complexity and justification for belief in the superior and elite nature of our own. The intensely convoluted structure of denial at the heart of today's humanism has enabled it to weather a number of recent setbacks. It's currently engaged in attempts to control the effects of the revelations of the Human Genome Project. The discovery that we have far fewer genes than expected has resulted in drastic modifications to its commitment to genetic determinism. A similar outcome is slowly emerging from the Human Connectome Project which was intended to demonstrate clearly that the brain is hideously complex and will only be understood when we have a map of all the connections between nerves. Instead, evidence is emerging that the brain is a lot simpler than previously thought. A clamp-down on disagreement now appears to be in force to repress in-fighting in the project until a suitably neutral common line can be agreed on.

What drives them on in these efforts is a fear of holistic empiricism bordering on the paranoid because it's beginning to threaten the authority of science in much the same way that religion used to. The thinking brain is a key and iconic symbol of their authority and any suggestion that its nerves might have a much simpler but equally vital role in the vertebrate body architecture is total anathema. The idea that complexity might only have relevance as a holistic feature of the whole body with consciousness being generated in a distributed way in all the sense organs that appear to be its source threatens the current humanist mystique with an apparently pole-axing blow. The last thing humanists want, as we shall shortly see, is for it to become common knowledge that geology harbours a similar threat in the plausibility of a holistic geological empiricism. What is empirical science? Empiricism in general entails the claim that our physiological senses, sight, hearing and so on, are the final arbiters of the reliability of beliefs about the world which lies beyond what we perceive. One underlying assumption here is clearly that perception is capable of providing a separate investigative thinking process with a body of raw and unbiased 'evidence' or data known as a result as a 'data set' on which to base its judgements. Another is that the larger your data set the more complete and reliable your explanatory judgements will be. A further assumption appears to be that the world is somehow finite so you will at some stage arrive at a point when you've gathered 'all' the evidence there is to be gathered and be in a position to come to an incontestable final judgement. Scientific empiricism aims to speed up the process of investigation by experimental uses of technological devices and processes in ways which generate new perceptions which allegedly extend the previous array of perceptions to create a new data set. These new uses are designed to test predictions made on the basis of a prior 'data set' which has subsequently turned out to be insufficient to justify incontestable belief in previous explanations. The predictions are made by adding to or otherwise changing the previous explanation and both the novelty of the technology involved and the details of the new data set must be such that they can be replicated by others. Scientific empiricism plainly makes all the same assumptions as the prescientific version and habitually adds the final assumption that its ability to speed the process up means it won't be long before it comes up with a final, complete and irrefutable explanation. Philosophers who accept this account are usually unbothered by the observation that such a vision is ultimately unjustifiable when considered in the context of science's inability so far to produce a psychology that demonstrates conclusively how it will ever be possible to conceive of sensory perception as being separate from the as yet sketchily understood type of thinking required to generate beliefs about what we perceive let alone deliver a plausible physiology to go with it. Simon Blackburn is a good example of this type of philosopher well known for his self-confidence as a populariser of both science and philosophy. A big part of this is the work he does to instil confidence in the copper bottomed quality

and reliability of the deliverances of science and its relationship with technology when compared to the claims of those attempting to make judgements of a moral nature. He recently wrote the following in an article in the Times Literary Supplement,
In empirical matters the authority of the person who has gone and looked, of that of scientists who have a vast history of successful prediction and theory behind them, is relatively easy to detect and then to respect. The authority of a self-proclaimed moral expert is relatively elusive. Scepticism about scientific authority is rare and usually insincere; scepticism about moral expertise is almost orthodox. Entities from iPads to rockets to medicines seem to refute relativisms and scepticisms in the scientific domain, but what plays the same role in the ethical world? (my use of italics)

Laying aside for the moment Blackburn's attempt to promote the cargo cult spin-off technologies of experiments as proof of empirical science's claims to authority with regard to reliability of beliefs concerning what lies beyond what we perceive, what we ought most of all to take issue with in these remarks is his underlying message that it is futile to question the authority of empirical science. Accepting this challenge effectively brings us to the main issue of this pamphlet. The unreliability of fracking geology What I'm proposing is that fracking geology provides us with a highly appropriate case showing why scientists now need to confront the natural limitations of science's authority to justify technologies which risk the despoliation of the ecology so vital to our survival. And since most scientists and philosophers are like Blackburn unbothered by general arguments about the persistent absence of an adequate psychology to back up scientific empiricism's use of the experimental method we're going to have to use a tougher approach which argues from specific flaws in what the experimental method generates. We need, in other words, to be patient with ourselves as we find the personal resources required to concentrate on the ways the scientific failure to get to grips with the nature of our minds and its limits affects the specifics of geology in particular. We are that is going to have to begin thinking about ways of arguing about the specifics of geology. And to back up our arguments here as we do so we're going to borrow some of those developed by two major philosophers of the modern age, Willard Van Orman Quine and Ludwig Wittgenstein, both of whom occupy positions in the current pantheon of notable thinkers of the past very close to the wing reserved for mavericks on account of the way so much of their output threatened to rock the arrangement's boat. On Blackburn's view, for example, you'ld be justified in doubting whether either of them existed which is typical of the way their thinking has been sidelined. Anyone who's done some philosophy of science will confirm not only that they existed but more seriously that they undermined science's claims to authority by showing that maths and logic are little more than children's games and that there is no identifiable difference between theories and stories hardly surprising then that the community of orthodox humanistic philosophers prefer not to be caught publicly referring to them.

We won't however be relying on this material in what follows. Instead, the advice we ought to pass on to fracking protesters and potential protesters in general starts with details of a late work by Quine containing guidelines on how to spot unreliability and lack of authority what he calls 'indeterminacy' in a science. These involve looking for a narrative condition Quine called empirical equivalence. We need to show how geology is a highly appropriate science on which to apply this approach. What it comes down to is relatively simple when you've grasped the notion of a science's 'data set'. A science can be said to have empirical equivalence when the people who maintain it harbour at least two rival or mutually contradictory theories or collections of theories explaining what gave rise to the things in its data set. Having this narrative condition shows, in other words, that the science hasn't been able to make its mind up and can't be unquestioningly trusted with regard to any prediction or judgement it makes about the things that aren't in the list, causes and so on the things we can't actually perceive but believe make sense of it all. In Quine's view the holistic nature of our psychology is such that no science certainly not geology can ever escape this condition. Now, the science of geology has all the appearances of possessing a sound and long standing provenance. It's one of the main pillars of learning responsible for the emergence of the modern mindset and of our current conception of the age of the earth and the universe as being much greater than previously thought. It was also deeply involved in the emergence of Darwin's theory of evolution, so important to humanists. It clearly deals with a host of things that we can't see inside the earth and continues to generate an as yet unresolved range of explanations for them showing that we need much more careful scrutiny and thought before we decide we understand enough to start smashing things up down there. And it has apparently dithered in self-contradictory ways in the past over how to explain all this and could well repeatedly dither in a perpetual cycling through all its rival theories in vain attempts to find solid grounds for fixing on one in particular. So why is all this important to questions about fracking? Well the worrying thing is that the rival geological stories entail different often contradictory way of evaluating the risks involved in the new technology. Let's just go through the main alternatives here to see what this means. Let's start with the current orthodoxy. Obviously the reason any fracking has taken place at all, anywhere, is because the current orthodoxy attaches a low degree of risk to what fracking entails. It pictures the outermost layer of the planet, the so-called 'lithosphere', as a mainly solid, brittle, inorganic, lifeless and largely unstructured spherical layer aptly deserving its use of the Greek word 'lithos' for 'stone', its only dynamic features being its ability to break up into tectonic plates (a mixture of greek and latin meaning 'building slabs') moving around on a more fluid layer beneath it called the 'asthenosphere' meaning 'area of weakness'. In this picture, the living skin we occupy is like a superficial and self-supporting mould unlikely to be greatly affected by cracks or damage to the layer of surface it conceals. In orthodox geology, the planet earth has remained more or less the same size

since a vast collection of cosmic debris was fused together by heat generated in the inorganic power of the mutual gravity of the bits grinding together under the spin of the vastly greater gravitational forces generated in their orbit of the sun. Geology is thus a firmly cloistered compartment of learning with little to contribute to the cosmic physics which defines our universe as self-contained and explained by the inorganic atomistic particles of its quantum level and their relationship with those of the sun and the other planets and their satellites. Terrestrial life is thus a forlornly accidental layer and however much we may personalise it by giving it some mythical name like that of the ancient goddess Gaia has little to add to the humanistic conception of the universe as a whole as fundamentally inorganic, inanimate or just 'dead'. Fracturing the structures of tiny pockets of this irrelevant outermost layer is unlikely, in these terms, to add as much as a jot to the ultimate fate of the cosmos as a whole. This geological template has alternated its variants from its earliest formulations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the late nineteenth century however a strikingly new model started to emerge. Map makers and users had begun noticing a curious consequence of the growing accuracy maps were developing. Putting the whole corpus on a globe gave rise to an intriguing possibility, that the earth might once have been much smaller, roughly the size the globe would become if you subtracted the area of the oceans from its surface. Once you've noticed it, you see it even when looking at a flat map of the whole world. In other words, if you join together the oceanic coastlines of the current continental surfaces of the world you end up with another reasonably global but much smaller orb of the earth. So, what globes and maps of the earth are giving us are graphically extended empirical evidence for believing that the earth may once have been at least two-thirds smaller than it now is. It seems in other words to have expanded by this amount. This geological theory is clearly going to be somewhat different to our current steady state one. This difference has, indeed, been considerably enlarged since those early days to the extent that it's now fairly reasonable to describe the two empirical theories as being rival or mutually contradictory explanations of the same data set. This becomes much clearer when you look at the version of the expanding earth theory developed by the Australian geologist S. Warren Carey in the 1950s. Carey decided that the theory needed to propose that the expansion wasn't just a matter of volume but also involved increase in mass. This had the advantage of giving the theory added confirmation when viewed from the angle of the extinction of megafauna like large insects and dinosaurs. Increase in the world's mass would have lead to an increase in gravity and tighter limits on viable anatomical size. Global expansion rather than asteroids was, in other words, what did for the dinosaurs. Carey saw clearly that this extra mass had to come from somewhere but where was extremely difficult to explain if you insisted on a physics that rested on principles of thermodynamic conservation as humanistic physics does to make sense of its bleak vision. From Carey's point of view involving mass in the geological expansion is consistent with proposals of similar explanations for the expansion of other planets and their moons and, indeed, the expansion of the universe itself. He has clearly been vindicated in this but such a view would have been a problem for anyone believing in the solitary, steady-state, self-

contained universe as it was then conceived. Geology quickly beat a retreat from Carey's bold vision but cosmological physics has dared to move on in ways that would have delighted him. The notion of our universe being merely one of many in a much larger multiverse, for example, suggests newer approaches to thermodynamics which are not merely totally different to those now current but actually different enough to suggest that it's no longer a sign of insanity to think in terms of the whole multiverse as being 'holistically' organic. Using this framework at both cosmic and quantum levels, physicists would have much more room to develop theories about inter-universal exchanges of energy which do away with the notion of mass at the constituent level and express it as a holistic function of the structure of the multiverse as a whole as it organically digests and assimilates similar multiverses external to it. In these terms the increase in mass can have no determinate empirical explanation inside our universe because the events or processes underlying it are external to it. As a result the reductionism of orthodox explanations has nothing to go on. From the viewpoint of a holistic geology based on empirical thinking of this kind, the lithosphere, its shales, sands and aquifers, can be considered as a composite organic structure acting as a one-way membrane maintaining a homeostatic balance in the energy our planet is receiving from its multiverse. It receives quantum-scale energy inputs via the crystal interface detected by Japanese physicists at the point defined in relation to our universe as earth's centre and breathes its output of liquid and gaseous deteriorated energy through the membrane into the sump we call space. The 'centre' of our planet, in other words, is the input gateway from the multiverse and the efficient functioning of its organic action depends on the delicate permeability of the lithospheric membrane in its role as output organ recycling stuff to be finally ejected elsewhere and by other means. Clearly, a geology of this kind would attribute a much greater risk factor than orthodox geology to any attempt by us to exploit the flexibility, viscosity and dynamic substances of the lithosphere for purposes which make sense in terms of our interpersonal individualised luxury culture but are 'incomprehensible' in terms of most other viewpoints. The sensitivity of the balance between system input and output could be so extremely difficult to calculate as to render the scale of the risks attached as ultimately of cosmic proportions. The effect on the fate of the multiverse itself could, in other words, be substantial. At the very least, it would be reasonable to claim that the geology supporting speculations of this kind was massively connected to the physics of the multiverse in an inescapably holistic interdependence. We now have a basis on which to return to the issue of how to apply Quine's formulation of scientific unreliability to geology. It's clear, for example, that Carey's version of geology contradicts the current orthodox humanistic version in several important ways, for example, in terms of the size of the earth over the immense tracts of time since our universe began, the relation of terrestrial geology to cosmic physics and, more relevantly for us, the risks associated with plans to frack the shale deposits in the lithosphere. In Quine's definition of

'empirical equivalence', these differences can never be finally resolved because the holistic structure of the beliefs associated with them are sufficiently complex to allow those holding them to make appropriate modifications elsewhere in the structure of the belief system they jointly form to permit them in particular to survive any attempt to find evidence with the potential to falsify them they're core items of their systems. Geology, in these deep terms, is rent with controversy and can never be used to justify civic projects which threaten the basic rights of anyone whose life depends on the ecology of the land targeted by the projects. Geology can't reliably predict the extent of the landmass that will be affected by fracking so no legal basis can ever be established for any projects involving this technology. How to deal with resistance from academic geologists Protesters against fracking need, however, to be very aware that today's community of geologists are extremely unlikely to accept this challenge lying down. They will undoubtedly put up stiff resistance to any attempt to cite it as a reason for calling off the current fracking tests. Their first strategy will very likely be to go public with their usual reaction when confronted by expanding earth geology in more general contexts which is to pour scorn on it and attempt to depict it as an outmoded way of thinking which doesn't even merit being identified as geology. In one respect, they 're simply being true to the pioneering spirit of their calling. They're responding to a deep awareness inside themselves of what is at stake in general terms. Many of the first modern geologists were gentleman amateurs passionately attached to the humanism of the Enlightenment. The modern variety is similarly dedicated to the belief that the notion of a steadystate earth is essential to the crucial idea of precision which lies at the heart of today's scientifically based notion of unflinchingly neutral authority. This currently rests on the notion of standards of measurement based on the steady, regular movement of our world putting orthodox geology under a spotlight. For today's geologists, therefore, anything that threatens these standards conjures up horrific nightmares of the civil and genteel rationality of our individualistic world being swept away and replaced by extremes of riotous group emotion. It automatically figures as a fundamental threat to the 'gentleman' side of their calling. That's why they descend to mockery and scorn. It's hard then to avoid the conclusion that they're their own worst nightmare here, motivated by an emotion of deep tribal atavism, so deep they can't even distinguish its features as such, failing as a result to see the incoherence they themselves are descending into. The high ambiguity and confusion of what all this confronts us with indicates that, at this point, we need to call up our second philosophical lifeline, Ludwig Wittgenstein. In particular, what we need from him is his 'private languages' argument which, like Quine's empirical equivalence, is the product of a later more mature period of a life spent confronting clichs of thought.

What Wittgenstein's private language argument gives us here is good reason to believe it's the current community of academic geologists who're promoting an outmoded way of doing geology. Evidence for this claim can be found, paradoxically, in the irony of a simple observation that the scorn of geologists with respect to the expanding earth story shows they're also being untrue to the pioneering spirit of their calling in at least one other respect, that of denial of an important side of their communal roots the amateur side. The original amateur impulse to pick up the neat geological hammer was a groundbreaking social development and the people who carried it through were clearly more open minded than the academic community of geologists today. They knew they were exploring a new field of enquiry and needed a new way of talking about it that would attract a wider range of social types. We need Wittgenstein here because we need to start thinking in a similar way, effectively to start thinking of ourselves as geologists with as much right to discuss the pros and cons, merits and demerits of different geological theories, narratives or stories whichever way you want to characterise the medium in which geological information is conveyed. We need his words and thoughts about words and their meanings because they will help us to take the first step towards a story of language which is capable of breaking down the traditional view of what justifies someone in claiming the right to talk on equal terms with self-professed experts of a given field of expertise if only to ask for evidence that what the expert is saying makes sense. We need to do this because it's plainly the traditional view on which geologists currently rely as justifying their picture of the unique authority of their words as the irrefutable and only reliable expertise available to us here. Today's geologists are talking and behaving, that is, as if it were linguistically possible for them to have explanations of geological matters which they understand and non-experts not only don't but can't hence the scorn and mockery. This makes sense to them because they're still thinking in terms of of a pyramidally hierarchical society in which elites with high flown abstract knowledge use it for the benefit of the masses who are where they are because they are constitutionally incapable of the wisdom only the elite can understand. Wittgenstein's private language argument indicates this isn't possible and that they're in denial about the way language works in the development and explanation of technical expertise. If geology involves private language then it is the mockery. The key feature of his private language argument for us here is the holistic recognition that it's NOT because words have some kind of internal meaning allowing reference to actual external entities that makes them meaningful. It's because they're developed by the social institutions of the whole language community as part of the overall integrated culture which sustains their institutional use. These uses are their meanings and only persist because of the support of the whole culture. It's only thanks to the fact that the members of the institutions are already well versed in the public language that their special uses make any sense and the special uses themselves only persist because they represent a functionally integrated interest of the language group as a whole.

Thus in the case of geology it's only because everybody in our language community has some kind of interest in some form of geology that academic or specialist geology makes any sense at all. We all want to know more about our world because we all have at the very least some kind of inchoate feeling that we don't as creatures quite fit in here in the same way that all the other creatures of the world appear to. We all want to know more about what kind of creatures we really are and what kind of world this is that gave rise to our difference. Expert geologists need to maintain contact with these aspirations if the particular novel specialist details they're developing in what they're doing is to keep on track in terms of how they communicate with each other. Without this contact they are risking the consequences Wittgenstein attached to any attempt to create a private language, mainly the inevitable descent into self-indulgence regarding what its about and what its uses are, a recipe, in other words, for personal alienation and eventual loss of any sense of responsibility for how they're being treated by others. Geologists do themselves no favours in this respect. Their current tendency to rebuff attempts by non-academics to engage them on equal terms about geological matters is a sure-fire method of increasing their contribution to the social chaos they so clearly want to avoid. They plainly need to give themselves a thorough check over about their ability to grasp to whom their allegiances as experts are ultimately due. Keeping an eye on the global context A useful form of advice worth offering in this context involves reminding geologists or anyone putting themselves in the position of standing up for current geologists' attitudes that they're not alone in this respect. What they're going through is culture wide. It isn't just about economics and the need for new forms of energy. It's a crisis of authority about value in general but chiefly about what value is and how we get it. This is something that's been periodically bursting through the surface of our human cultures ever since the beginnings of recorded time and probably way back before that, right back to the time our difference first emerged. It's something, in other words, we all need to re-evaluate and re-negotiate together on a regular basis. This is necessary because clearly the continuity of many of the most basic structures of our culture involves very large numbers of people doing things together and the only thing that stops the whole shebang from falling apart is our ability to conceive of ourselves as being driven by a shared system of values. It's easy in such an arrangement to forget occasionally that we haven't always lived together in such large numbers and so need to keep an eye on how well we're managing the increasing problems of balancing perceptions of interpersonal space and status that goes along with the growth in numbers. We need to know more about what we really have in common. Everyone needs a path to their own source of value and its clear that not everyone is sure they have one in the current state of things. They can't help communicating this and eventually we're all affected. This, of course, is why we need more people with very general skills like the skill of being able to sense where at any given juncture our values are actually coming from and also where possible alternatives may be located. On top of that, we need to make sure there are adequate channels to permit the benefit

of these skills to work its way through the system as a whole. Unfortunately, these channels aren't being kept clear enough to keep up with the increasing number of ways the system is capable of deteriorating. More work still needs doing to remove the social debris of the violent disasters that have blocked these channels over the last four centuries or so if we're ever to be able to really appreciate the considerable advances in human self-appraisal that have also been made over the same period. The last century has capped the lot in finding new ways of fusing agony with ecstasy. Things at the moment are increasingly falling apart in three other areas of academic re-evaluation activity and work on sorting them out can't be separated from the problems of cosmology and geology. We can list them up as follows: the social dimension of mind, language and meaning ditto for body image, health and the physiology of how they relate to the other areas how they all relate to ecology and our place in nature

There's clearly a wide range of variety in attitudes to these topics but this in itself gives us a point of entry from which to begin the task of integrating them. The four of them are such as can be discussed in all manner of material surroundings and at any level of status. We can allow our criteria with regard to material surroundings and levels of status to relax somewhat without risk of diminishing our abilities to continue in the task. In other words, we need to recognise that improvements to our material surroundings and status either as individuals or as nations come some way below the priority of sorting out and integrating the above four areas of thinking about ourselves and our world. From the viewpoint of thoughts like these it's clear that our need to re-evaluate the role of science and technology in our lives is paramount. One of the most obvious features of this role we need to tackle is precisely the claims that are made about the ability of science and technology to improve our lives being one of the main reasons we need new sources of energy to keep the scientific project going. If, for example, it turns out that science and technology are no longer effective at achieving these objectives then its clear that we need to reevaluate our need for science and technology rather than needing to find new forms of energy for them. Hopefully, the situation is that they have simply overshot the limit of our needs and we can slowly and cautiously draw them appropriately backwards in a continuous process of finding the current optimal point of comfort in this regard. There's so much confusion about how science relates to technology. Simon Blackburn's view mentioned earlier is a good example. According to this the technological spin-offs of scientific experiments can be cited as evidence of the correctness and reliability of the theories which guided the design of the experimental apparatus that generated them. This, however, depends on a misleading way of looking at what experiments do in relation to the incompleteness of a given theory it involves, for example, forgetting that all theories are incomplete until they're self-evidently true because they contain no detail that can't been accounted for by empirical means. Not only that, but,

because you can never be sure how complete a theory is, you can also never know how close to being correct or absolutely reliable it is. Spin-offs thus make not a jot of difference to the value of the theory though they may make unaccountable differences to the value of our lives. The science of geology gets up to some pretty weird tricks. Some of the tests it carries out are clearly based on the assumption of the superior reliability of the orthodox humanist conception of the universe because they would have been inconceivable in terms of an organic multiverse or the immanence of a continually creating divine power. Letting off massive explosions on the earth's surface to gauge their vibrational effects, for example, clearly involves not having to worry about causing the multiverse pain or divine dismay. Fracking is a similar case where the doubts are real enough to deserve evaluation in ethical terms and the added need for respect to become paramount. Summary of main argument The purpose of the argument is to determine whether we can trust geologists' stories about what we can do to the deeper layers of what lies under our feet without damaging the ecology it supports. I use Quine's philosophy of science to justify my claim that we can't rely on them in this issue. Quine argues that we can't rely on a science which is clearly controversial because what it has discovered its body of evidence is capable of supporting at least two rival, mutually contradictory interpretations. I'm arguing, in other words, that the evidence gathered by geologists is purely circumstantial. One of the rivals, the current orthodox story, interprets the evidence as indicating that the ecology of which our lives are an integral part won't be significantly affected. The other, the expanding earth story, entails the consequence that our ecology would be substantially affected. From a Quinean perspective, these two stories each have a sufficiently complex global structure to allow their followers to modify the less important details around their core beliefs to permit them to survive evidence which appears to falsify details in the outer shells. There's never enough evidence to get at the more speculative core so a story modifiable in this way can't be falsified as a whole. This, in other words, is a controversy that can never be resolved by purely narrative means. There are, of course, other ways of resolving controversies, such as by some kind of fiat or ruling by an external authority. This hasn't so far been necessary in geology's case because geologists have been able to rely on the restrictive practices maintained by the community of academic scientists in the by now traditional arrangement they have with the community of academic philosophers to suppress the rival strongly empirical expanding earth story. Protesters mustn't allow themselves to be browbeaten by the members of these communities who try to deflect the power of this analysis by suggesting they don't have the mental capacity to understand the theories involved. This strategy can be turned back on itself by pointing out that science still hasn't provided a physiologically based psychology to back up attacks of this kind and

until it does we can rely on Wittgenstein's advice that expert knowledge that can't be expressed and understood in the common language is effectively meaningless. The upshot is that the situation precipitated by the threat of imminent and unstoppable fracking activity in the UK and Europe cries out to be considered in the context of an ethical dimension. A context of this kind won't emerge in the timely fashion required to stall current political attempts to panic us unless a greater diversity of folk pick up the signals of an immense imminent blunder we can never step back from. Please photocopy this free pamphlet and pass it on to as many as you can.