Shale-Shocked: How Fracking Got “Occupied”

Far below this rip­pling wealth there’s a vast, rocky nether­world called the Marcellus Shale. Stretching through south­ern New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, the shale con­tains bub­bles of methane, the remains of life that died 400 mil­lion years ago. Gas cor­po­ra­tions have lusted for the methane in the Marcellus since at least 1967 when one of them plot­ted with the Atomic Energy Agency to explode a nuclear bomb to unleash it. That idea died, but it’s been reborn in the form of a tech­nol­ogy invented by Halliburton Corporation: high-volume hor­i­zon­tal hydraulic frac­tur­ing — “frack­ing” for short.

Fracking uses prodi­gious amounts of water laced with sand and a star­tling menu of poi­so­nous chem­i­cals to blast the methane out of the shale. At hyper­baric bomb-like pres­sures, this tech­nol­ogy pro­pels five to seven mil­lion gal­lons of sand-and-chemical-laced water a mile or so down a well bore into the shale.

Up comes the methane — along with about a mil­lion gal­lons of waste­water con­tain­ing the orig­i­nal frack­ing chem­i­cals and other sub­stances that were also in the shale, among them radioac­tive ele­ments and car­cino­gens. There are 400,000 such wells in the United States. Surrounded by rum­bling machin­ery, ser­viced by tens of thou­sands of diesel trucks, this night­mare tech­nol­ogy for energy release has turned rural areas in 34 U.S. states into toxic indus­trial zones.

Shale gas isn’t the con­ven­tional kind that lit your grandmother’s stove. It’s one of those “extreme energy” forms so dif­fi­cult to pro­duce that merely access­ing them poses unprece­dented dan­gers to the planet. In every frack­ing state but New York, where a mora­to­rium against the process has been in effect since 2010, the gas indus­try has con­t­a­m­i­nated ground water, sick­ened peo­ple, poi­soned live­stock, and killed wildlife.

At a time when the International Energy Agency reports that we have five more years of fossil-fuel use at cur­rent lev­els before the planet goes into irre­versible cli­mate change, frack­ing has a green­house gas foot­print larger than that of coal. And with the great­est water cri­sis in human his­tory under­way, frack­ing injects mind-numbing quan­ti­ties of purposely-poisoned fresh water into the Earth. As for the tril­lions (repeat: tril­lions) of gal­lons of waste­water gen­er­ated by the indus­try, get­ting rid of it is its own story. Fracking has also been linked to earth­quakes: eleven in Ohio alone (nor­mally not an earth­quake zone) over the past year.

But for once, this story isn’t about tragedy. It’s about a resis­tance move­ment that has arisen to chal­lenge some of the most pow­er­ful cor­po­ra­tions in his­tory. Here you will find no hand­somely funded national envi­ron­men­tal orga­ni­za­tions: some of them in fact have had a cozy rela­tion­ship with the gas indus­try, embrac­ing the industry’s line that nat­ural gas is a “bridge” to future alter­na­tive ener­gies. (In fact, shale gas sup­presses the devel­op­ment of renew­able energies.)

New York’s “Little Revolution”

While most anti-fracking activists have been respond­ing to harms already done, New York State’s resis­tance has been wag­ing a bat­tle to keep harm at bay. Jack Ossont, a for­mer heli­copter pilot, has been active all his life in the state’s envi­ron­men­tal and social bat­tles. He calls frack­ing “the tsunami issue of New York. It washes across the entire landscape.”

Sandra Steingraber, a biol­o­gist and scholar-in-residence at Ithaca College, terms the move­ment “the biggest since abo­li­tion and women’s rights in New York.” This past November, when the Heinz Foundation awarded Steingraber $100,000 for her envi­ron­men­tal activism, she gave it to the anti-fracking community.

Arriving in the state last October, I dis­cov­ered a sprawl of loosely con­nected, grass­roots groups whose names announce their coun­ties and their long-term vision: Sustainable Otsego, Committee to Preserve the Finger Lakes, Chenango Community Action for Renewable Energy, Gas-Free Seneca, Catskill Citizens for Safe Energy, Catskill Mountainkeeper. Of these few (there are many more), only the last has a paid staff. All the oth­ers are run by volunteers.

“There are so many peo­ple work­ing qui­etly behind the scenes. They’re not in the news, they’re not doing it to get their names in the paper. It’s just the right thing to do,” says Kelly Branigan, co-founder of the group Middlefield Neighbors.  Her orga­ni­za­tion helped spear­head one of the movement’s cen­tral cam­paigns: using local zon­ing ordi­nances to ban frack­ing. “In Middlefield, we’re noth­ing spe­cial. We’re just reg­u­lar peo­ple who got together and learned, and reached in our pock­ets to go to work on this. It’s inspir­ing, it’s awe­some, and it’s America — its own lit­tle revolution.”

Consider this, then, an envi­ron­men­tal Occupy Wall Street. It knows no divi­sions of social class or polit­i­cal affil­i­a­tion. Everyone, after all, needs clean water. Farmers and pro­fes­sors, jour­nal­ists and teach­ers, engi­neers, doc­tors, biol­o­gists, accoun­tants, librar­i­ans, innkeep­ers, brew­ery own­ers. Actors and Catskill res­i­dents Mark Ruffalo and Debra Winger have joined the move­ment. Josh Fox, also of the Catskills, has brought the frack­ing indus­try and its vic­tims to inter­na­tional audi­ences through his award-winning doc­u­men­tary film Gasland. “Fracking is a pretty scary prospect,” says Wes Gillingham, plan­ning direc­tor for Catskill Mountainkeeper. “It’s cre­ated a com­mu­nity of peo­ple that wouldn’t have existed before.”

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