It’s easy to dismiss Oberlin College students for being idealistic lefties who fight the system while the rest of the free world watches football. But this time around, they look less like kooks and more like canaries in the hydraulic-fracturing mine.
On November 30, a contingent of Oberlin students became the first protesters of hydraulic fracturing in America to be arrested for their civil disobedience. The honor stems from their adventures at a work site in Youngstown, where seven activists tried to block the path of trucks carrying toxic wastewater away from a hydraulic-fracturing — known to friends as “fracking” — site. At the time, the news garnered little attention outside of environmentalist circles and this congenial rag.
But in December, Youngstown was rocked by its 10th and 11th earthquakes since March 17, including a 4.0 tremor on New Year’s Eve. The protesters insist the shocks are connected to the injection of toxic wastewater into area wells dug for that purpose.
And Columbus is feeling the jolt too: The Kasich administration — one of fracking’s biggest fans — shut down the well near the epicenter of the 10th quake, then announced a temporary halt to all injections around Youngstown.
According to the environmental news service EcoWatch, “Offices from the [Ohio Department of Nature Resources] believe the fracking wastewater pumped into the Youngstown-area well has been seeping into a previously unknown fault line in eastern Ohio, causing the seismic activity.”
It’s a big — if temporary — win for activists, who have been frustrated by Governor Kasich’s refusal to acknowledge that toxic water and other by-products of fracking can cause wee problems with Mother Nature.
More than anything, says Oberlin leader Ben Shapiro, the earthquakes proved useful in raising awareness of the problems surrounding fracking.
“You can feel an earthquake; you can’t feel your water being poisoned,” he says. “You can feel it when your house shakes on its foundation.”
This article appears in Jan 4-10, 2012.
Dohh! So we knew all along there were risks to this. But why does Ohio have to take all the risks? Turning the state into a dumping ground only gets us into a fracking problem. Did they think if they caused enough fracking problems, the residents would just move away? There has got to be better ways to create jobs than to destroy your fracking land, your fracking house, your fracking environment!
But if we don’t let them do it we will become labeled as a bad state to do business in and we won’t be able to get all of the big corporations to come to Ohio and give us jobs. What if companies like American Greetings and Diabold tell the governor to either get these liberals out of the picture or we will leave Ohio and move somewhere in which they appreciate business. If small and medium sized business, our biggest employers, were to be given any help at all we would create tons of jobs for the people of Ohio. But the banks won’t loan any money to start-ups or small businesses which are not owned by guys with money. But then our banks have plenty of money for these fracken guys. The banks talk a big game for wanting to help small businesses but they are not really helping the ones which are able to create good jobs, any jobs, for regular people. Even the bank from Columbus is all talk and little action where small business is concerned. They just say they are great for Ohio just like the governor of the same city. That bank has plenty of money to give to the Dispatch and the underwear business down there, but does not do much for small business up hear. They spend more money advertising how good they are for people and small business and how they like people for more than just their deposit, than they do loaning to good ideas. Most bankers have lost any thing resembling the will to create jobs. They have been right with the big corporations sending jobs out. Bunch of fucking hypocrites. Like the fucking PD and their governor supporting new breed of reporters who do what they are told and tell the reporters what to think especially where politics are concerned. The PD sold out in and before 2010 and has become more like the Dispatch than ever before. Our media in Ohio is as bad as it gets in the USA. The three big papers are all propaganda machines mostly for the big business right wing. I write these things on clevescene because 1) they don’t censor me and 2) because no body reads past the first sentence of what I write…yet it is published non-the-less.
It is just a shame that it is so hard for government, be it local, state, of federal to do what is right. Some things seem so plainly right or wrong but the powers that be are absolutely clueless, out of touch, or just plain ignorant.
“It’s easy to dismiss Oberlin College students for being idealistic lefties who fight the system while the rest of the free world watches football.”
It’s easy to dismiss Oberlin College students as some pretentious fucks.
“It’s easy to dismiss Oberlin College students for being idealistic lefties who fight the system while the rest of the free world watches football.”
It’s easy to dismess Oberlin College students for being pretentious fucks.
Is it liberal or extreme to be a 110 lb female college student to sit in front of a gate of an injection well while a truck driver asks if he can run you over. These kids were at that moment putting themselves on the line, quite literally. They were doing it because people were profiting from injecting water so poisonous that they had to transport it from Pennsylvania and inject it below a local water table. They believe, as I, that this is fundamentally sinful action. When our leaders sanction an action that is benefiting the few and endangering the very water that our children drink, then action is required of any American. Anyone who believes that we have an obligation to leave our children an America that you can drink the water and grow food on the land should celebrate these brave children.