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When college students gear up for a road trip, that usually means a trunkful of beer and a backseat full of misappropriated sorority girls.

But over at Oberlin College, where the student body is known as much for its activism as its handsome selection of black turtlenecks, five kids took a less frivolous trip that still ended in the classic way: with everybody getting their asses arrested.

The Oberlin Five paid a visit to Youngstown last week to protest the hydraulic fracturing that’s become quite the outrage there of late. The area is particularly contentious in light of the seven earthquakes experts claim have taken place there this year, which critics say take the fun out of groundwater contamination common at fracking sites.

The students blocked the path of giant trucks carrying wastewater to the fracking site of D&L Energy. They were charged with disorderly conduct, but freed in time for soy lattes back home the next day.
“There are four wells in Ohio and many more permits in progress,” says Ben Shapiro, an Oberlin grad who spearheaded the field trip. “There are permits under way for hydrofracking as near as Broadview Heights. If you poison water anywhere, we’re all downstream here in Cleveland.”

This article appears in Dec 7-13, 2011.

Vince Grzegorek has been with Scene since 2007 and editor-in-chief since 2012. He previously worked at Discount Drug Mart and Texas Roadhouse.

8 replies on “Oberlin Students Arrested After Protesting Fracking”

  2. But the governor says it does no harm to anything and can make everyone in Ohio rich…and him and his jobs dudes should know what’s best for Ohio. He’s from Fracking PA you know?

  3. Well you know, Oberlin has a bunch of liberals who worry about silly stuff like our fresh water source. Who needs good drinking water when you have oil. Just buy bottled water and quit getting in the governors way of progress.

  4. Commenting on clevescene gives me the same peaceful and alone feeling I have while walking alone through the Metro Park…in the winter when no one else is there. My tracks in the snow are often the only other human tracks, but deer are walking and running free..and no shot-gun blasts from the hunters from the east and the south of here to disturb my peace..Although I do like deer-meat smokies the way the Amish make them.

  5. I sometimes have to pinch myself to be convinced that I am not dreaming. Even when I feel the nerve endings reacting to the pinch, I still do not trust it. Dreams are all things made of illusion, which are all things made of world.

  6. Believe it or not, I was once upon a time a respected businessman and thinker. When I started thinking more than doing business my friendships and partners began to dissipate. I became less focused on money and more focused on thinking and that was the end of my relationships with the right wing thinking of greed and money and power for political and control-freaked ends. There was an Italian philosopher who made me sick as he said that the means are justified by the ends and that the ends were always made of perceived gain…win–loose negotiations became popular in every business college in America..The big itellectual sell-out could not be stopped. The eighties drove it home with disco and glitter worship and we still are caught in the trails.

  7. But today the sun shines on the Cleveland horizon and life jumps with excitement and enthusiasm. All caught in the creation of the here and now–the only truth. Past is gone and future is specualtion. Live today, tonight, deliberately and without reservation..but be good to others and kind and gentle while you walk through time.

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