Shaking foundations

On my bike ride home from the train station, I see a church sign: "Shaking Foundations? God is Big Enough to Hold Onto." I assume that the person who put this sign up was thinking about economic or personal foundations, was trying to speak to the heightened anxiety that has its grip on our society.

But I can't help but think of another shaking foundation. Last week in Philadelphia, members of 65 organizations gathered in a rally (described by some as "raucous") to oppose rules that would allow fracking--a method of extracting natural gas--to go forward in Pennsylvania.

Fracking is literally the breaking up of the earth's bedrock to release deeply buried pockets of methane. Concerns about the practice are widespread and include contaminated ground water and wells as well as the irreversibility of destroying the very foundation of the earth.