Jill Wiener has dedicated a large part of the past five years of her life to keeping the use of hydraulic fracturing for natural gas extraction out of New York State. The Sullivan County, NY, resident believes that if fracking has yet to happen in a state, it should never be allowed to happen. And where fracking is happening, it should be stopped.
Catskill Citizens for Safe Energy members/volunteers with boxes in Sullivan County, NY, in January. Catskill Citizens’ members generated (in 30 days) more than 24,000 of the 200,000 public comments submitted to New York State regarding its proposed fracking regulations. Jill Wiener is front and center (sixth from the left). Photo Credit: Dana Duke
Many of Wiener’s fellow grassroots activists in New York share this belief. They’re opposed to the regulatory path followed in other states, including in Illinois where some big environmental groups worked with the natural gas industry to get fracking legislation passed and signed into law. So far, the New York activists’ strategy for keeping shale gas drilling out of the state has worked: fracking in New York still appears to be a long way off, if it happens at all.
The strength of the resistance manifested itself again June 17 when more than 3,000 people of all ages and backgrounds from across New York gathered in Albany to urge Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the legislature to end the threat of fracking and promote a clean energy agenda. Robert Boyle, a long-time environmental activist and founder of Riverkeeper, remarked last year that he has never seen an environmental movement “spread with such wildfire” as the anti-fracking movement.
“It took me 13 or 14 years to get the first Riverkeeper going. Fracking isn’t like that. It’s like lighting a train of powder,” he told journalist Ellen Cantarow.
Please follow the link to the rest of the article from ecowatch: http://ecowatch.com/2013/influence-grassroots-anti-fracking-movement-like-wildfire/