A Return Tour Through a Land of Abandoned Homes and Broken Promises

By Alison Rose Levy

Beaver County Blue via Alternet

This article was published in partnership with GlobalPossibilities.org [3].

April 22, 2013 – Gasland Part II, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on Sunday, takes us deep into the heartland of America, a land overtaken by gas extraction via fracking. The iconic and recurring depictions of water-on-fire seen in the first Gasland, in the new film serve as postcards from a travelogue through a land of broken promises, abandoned homes, and extinguished rights.

The first Gasland, (which was released in 2010 and nominated for a 2011 Academy Award) became this country’s wake-up call about fracking, the first prod for millions to look beyond the industry-engineered PR facade. Banjo music played throughout the soundtrack revealed director Josh Fox’s chosen musical instrument. But Fox became a kind of Pied Piper for a growing grass roots movement that questioned the need for fracking. Challenging the inroads claimed by the multinational gas and oil industry, fractivism is a popular and youth-driven pushback that these powerful industries are neither accustomed nor equipped to deal with.

Gasland and Gasland Part II (and films like them) unmask the human debt incurred by an array of corporate Goliaths. It turns the lens on those joining the ranks of the Davids—ordinary citizens that awaken from the American dream to discover their way of life has been redefined by impersonal corporate entities, intent on constructing new superhighways towards profits‑—right over the lives of tens of thousands of people.

Gasland Part II continues Fox’s exploration by offering textured, in-depth profiles of half a dozen or so families in geographically diverse locations, from Australia, to Wyoming to Pennsylvania. Fox’s camera takes us into the homes of straight-talking folks who worked hard to secure their corner of the heartland.

Continue reading Josh Fox’s ‘Gasland’ Sequel Opens →

Fracking protesters gather Sunday before a giant papier-mache pig along Mount Jackson Road in South Beaver, Lawrence County. The protesters chose the pig because of a drilling site019s proximity to a nearby organic farm, where pigs are raised, and what they termed a 01Cpiggish gas industry. (Julia Rendleman/Post-Gazette)

By Janice Crompton 

January 28, 2013 – Maggie Henry won’t feed her livestock soybeans because she is worried that the beans have been genetically modified. Instead, the organic farmer from South Beaver, Lawrence County, grows her own wheat and other grains to feed her pigs, chickens, cows and other livestock.

But that isn’t Mrs. Henry’s chief concern these days.

Just 4,100 feet from Mrs. Henry’s green pastures lies a gas well operated by Shell Appalachia.

And Mrs. Henry isn’t the only local resident concerned about the well, where a group of about two dozen activists staged a protest Sunday afternoon.

With shirts that read "Protect Farms for our Future," four of the protesters latched themselves to a 7-foot by 12-foot papier-mache pig, meant to represent the "piggish gas industry," Mrs. Henry said, as well as the livestock at her farm.

Continue reading Activists Oppose Shale Drilling in Lawrence County →

Quick Money Or Long-Term Health Concerns?

By Lynn Peeples

Huffington Post

POINT MARION, Pa. — Dave Cogar counts down the days until he’s fracked.

Through a haze of cigarette smoke at the Brass Rail bar here, he laments about living on welfare. He still finds jobs where he can — working construction or fixing computers around this small town south of Pittsburgh — but he says he’s fallen short of creating the life he wants for himself and his teenage son.

So he’s come to the conclusion that natural gas hidden in the Marcellus Shale, thousands of feet beneath his rural Pennsylvania land, may offer him a second chance.

About a year ago, he signed a lease with Chevron, one of a handful of energy companies vying for rights to tap the abundant underground gas in this area. Now Cogar awaits an anticipated windfall of up to $300,000 a year for the next decade or so, according to his own estimates using figures a lease salesman ballparked for him, as well as the written conditions of his lease. The money won’t flow in until Chevron starts injecting pressurized fluids into the ground to fracture shale rock and forage for gas, the controversial process known as "fracking," but Cogar believes it will happen soon. Chevron declined to discuss the details of their agreement with Cogar.

"It should be safe, and the money looks good. Now it’s just the waiting. Like Tom Petty says, that’s the hardest part," said the bald-headed and goatee-chinned Cogar between sips of beer. He began belting lines from the song — and other Petty classics — a few moments later, attracting the attention of fellow bar patrons.

The natural gas rush is on in Pennsylvania, as well as in a growing number of other shale gas-rich states such as Texas, Wyoming and Colorado. New York and Illinois are primed to join in. For residents living near the drilling, the easy money to be had by ceding their land to drillers often competes with their concerns about drilling’s impact on their health and well-being.

Continue reading Fracking In Pennsylvania Sets Up Dilemma For Locals: →

Livestock Falling Ill in Fracking Regions, Raising Concerns About Food

By Elizabeth Royte
Beaver County Blue via Food and Environment Reporting Network

In the midst of the domestic energy boom, livestock on farms near oil-and-gas drilling operations nationwide have been quietly falling sick and dying.

While scientists have yet to isolate cause and effect, many suspect chemicals used in drilling and hydrofracking (or “fracking”) operations are poisoning animals through the air, water, or soil.

Earlier this year, Michelle Bamberger, an Ithaca, New York, veterinarian, and Robert Oswald, a professor of molecular medicine at Cornell’s College of Veterinary Medicine, published the first and only peer-reviewed report to suggest a link between fracking and illness in food animals.

The authors compiled 24 case studies of farmers in six shale-gas states whose livestock experienced neurological, reproductive, and acute gastrointestinal problems after being exposed—either accidentally or incidentally—to fracking chemicals in the water or air. The article, published in New Solutions: A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy, describes how scores of animals died over the course of several years.

Continue reading Western PA Cows in Trouble, Too →