FRACKED: FRACKING & MARCELLUS THUNDERCLOUDS

"Orion‘s search for a more truthful relationship

between humans and the natural world

occasionally calls for the expression of outrage.

The more we learn about a gas-drilling practice

called hydraulic fracturing—or “fracking”—the more we see it

as a zenith of violence and disconnect,

impulses that seem to be gathering on the horizon...

like thunder clouds."

Orion

"Here, on top of the Marcellus Shale, along the border between Pennsylvania and New York—where we are surrounded by land leased to the gas industry; where we live in fear that our water will be ruined, our mortgages called in, our teenage children killed in fiery wrecks with 18-wheelers hauling toxic fracking waste on our rural, icy back roads; where we cash out our vacation days to board predawn buses to rallies and public hearings; where we fundraise, donate, testify, phone bank, lobby, submit public comments, sign up for trainings in nonviolent civil disobedience; where our children ask if we will be arrested, if we will have to move, if we will die, and what will happen to the bats, the honeybees, the black bears, the grapevines, the apple orchards, the cows’ milk; where we have learned all about casing failures, blow-outs, gas flares, clear-cuts, legal exemptions, the benzene content of production fluid, the radioactive content of drill cuttings; where people suddenly start sobbing in church and no one needs to ask why—here in the crosshairs..."

Sandra Steingraber

"No right way is easy. . . .

We must risk our lives to save them."

John Muir, Sierra Club’s founder

The Steingraber Family

"Dear Sierra Club,

I’m through with you."

---

"The Sierra Club had taken money, gobs of it, from an industry that we in the grassroots have been in the fight of our lives to oppose. The largest, most venerable environmental organization in the United States secretly aligned with the very company that seeks to occupy our land, turn it inside out, blow it apart, fill it with poison. All for the goal of extracting a powerful heat-trapping gas, methane, that plays a significant role in climate change.

"Climate change: identified by The Lancet as the number-one global health problem of the 21st century. Children, according to the World Health Organization, are among its primary victims."

---

"The path to salvation lies in reparations—not in accepting praise for overcoming the urge to commit the same crime twice. So shutter your doors. Cash out your assets. Don a backpack and hike through the gaslands of America. Along the way, bear witness. Apologize. Offer compensation to the people who have no drinkable water and can’t sell their homes. Whose farm ponds bubble with methane. Whose kids have nosebleeds and mysterious rashes. Write big checks to the people who are putting their bodies on the line in the fight to ban fracking, and to the grassroots groups that are organizing them."

"Finally, go to Washington and say

what the Sierra Club should have said in 2007...

Fracking is not a bridge to the future.

It is a plank on which we walk

blindfolded at the point of a sword.

There is no right way to do it.

And the pirates are not our friends."

The Orion Blog

Breaking Up with the Sierra Club

March 23, 2012, by Sandra Steingraber

FULL LETTER - HERE