Tag Archives: fracking

Is Cheap Natural Gas Worth Poisoning Children?

Is cheap natural gas worth poisoning children?  It’s a question we all need to answer truthfully.  Especially when it comes from the mouths of children themselves.

I met Devon Haas at the Stop the Frack Attack rally in Washington, DC.  She is a beautiful eight-year-old-girl who was out in the blazing heat with her sign, fully present to do her part to stop the insanity of fracking.  She lives in Pennsylvania, where fracking is taking over at lightening speed.   Accidents and spills abound, contaminating water and air.  The gas industry will not own the contamination they are causing, but they do own the governor and the Department of Environmental Protection.

Devon makes clear the obligation we have as a society to stop the destruction of the planet and get serious about renewable energy.  How can we do otherwise? How can we not do our part to make sure the water she drinks and the air she breathes are safe?  We are the caretakers of their future, and the future is now.

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Devon is currently involved in Kids of the Gulf, a documentary film in progress that features two kids – Devon and Devin – who are determined to have a positive impact in the Gulf coast region in the aftermath of the BP oil spill by telling the stories of the children affected by the spill.  She is also the founder of Kids Army Worldwide
, which connects tens of thousands of kids around the world together for environmental and social justice issues that matter most to kids today.

The Sky is Pink: The Truth about Fracking

Josh Fox’s “The Sky Is Pink” is a brilliant, concise and startling short documentary on the truth about fracking and the fate New York awaits.  It is worth 18 minutes of your time. Fracking is NOT safe.  It’s as simple as that.  See for yourself.

Stop the Frack Attack!

Hydraulic fracturing a.k.a. fracking is the current form of natural gas extraction that is sweeping the nation and the globe.  It’s beyond toxic, poisoning people, ecosystems, our precious water supply and the air we breathe. Yet the gas industry has all the money it takes to drill away, passing on drilling’s heaviest costs to landowners, local communities and future generations. There are even legal gag orders on doctors in Pennsylvania and Ohio that prevent them from revealing to patients the specific chemicals showing up in their bodies as a result of fracking.  Enough is enough!

The Stop the Frack Attack rally and march in DC is happening on Saturday, July 28th, 2012.  It will be bursting with good people who want a safe and promising future for all.  Let your voices be heard over the sound of the mighty dollar that has bought our elected officials.  All rally details can be found at stopthefrackattack.org.

Here’s Barbie’s latest anti-frack rap, “Hit the Road, Frack.”  She’s had it, too…

Poisoned Water, Poisoned Air and Other Scary Monsters

My daughter Claire says she has a lot of monsters that live under her bed. They include vampires, zombies, giant furry things, etc. They are her friends, and only she is allowed to visit them. One day, after talking about her monster friends, Claire asked what really scares me. I think she was hoping I’d come up with something that has glowing red eyes, long crusty fingernails, green fangs and a hair-raising howl. Pondering her question, I stared out into space, letting all the monsters that haunt me race through my head.

Cancer, cancer, cancer, I thought; that everywhere-you-turn monster that’s consuming humans at a frightening pace. Cancer scares me. What scares me even more is the constant poisoning of our water, air, soil and food. Modern industrial life has brought with it a plethora of toxic chemicals that have saturated our society.

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Air

I’m not quite sure when it first began, but somewhere around the time when my daughter Claire was in pre-K we began a ritual of saying good morning to the sky as we drove to school. There’s this overpass we come to that presents a wonderful, wide-open view of the sky. From this viewpoint we can see big white billowy clouds, dark rolling storm clouds, or pure blue. It always speaks to me, this feeling of expanse before the busy day begins. And it seems to speak to Claire, too.

Four years later, though not every morning, we still greet the sky out loud in unison when we arrive at the overpass. This morning’s sky was sunny and blue with no clouds. Yet there seemed to be a brownish haze near the horizon that I found unsettling. Was I imagining that it was brown? Was my environmental-contamination-oriented mind making this up? It seemed too present to be a figment of my imagination. Of course, I kept this observation to myself, allowing Claire to solely indulge in the wonder she so deserves.

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I Can’t Stop Thinking About Fracking

I can’t believe how insane fracking is.  Call me naïve, but I am stunned that oil and gas companies are willing to poison our waters – and therefore ecosystems, wildlife and people – for the sake of profit, “that mean, mean green, that mighty dollar.”

Having written a post on fracking, I was gearing up to write an essay on the sweatshops in Bangladesh, but I’m finding it hard to move on to another subject because fracking is spreading at lightening speed across the Marcellus Shale.  Unless we can stop it, its toxic wastewater will permeate the waters of the Northeast and Mid Atlantic sooner than we think.  I find that thought horrifying.

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What the Frack?

Up until a few months ago, I had never heard of fracking. If you had asked me what it is, I would have guessed it’s a substitute for a word that one should not use in the presence of children. As it turns out, that is not what it is, but it still has everything to do with something that should never be used in the presence of children.

Hydraulic fracturing, a.k.a. fracking, is an extraction process for natural gas that is currently being conducted in 27 states in the country. Josh Fox, director of the award-winning documentary Gasland, is convinced that fracking is one of the country’s biggest environmental and public health challenges in history. After learning about it myself, I could not agree more.   Continue reading