While members of the US Congress take unprecedented sums of money from the oil and gas industry and cast votes to loosen regulations on fracking, at the local level we are winning fight after fight, says Victoria Kaplan, writing on MoveOn.org.
Right in the heart of Texas oil and gas country, the Dallas City Council just voted 9-6 to essentially ban fracking—the practice of injecting toxic chemicals and massive amounts of water deep underground to reach oil and natural gas deposits—within that city of more than a million people, Kaplan says.
A day later, Erie County, New York—home to Buffalo—banned fracking on county lands with a 9-2 vote of the county legislature. More than 500 local MoveOn members took part in that campaign. And last month, voters in four Colorado towns approved permanent or temporary bans on hydraulic fracturing—despite being outspent 32 to 1 by Big Oil and Big Gas.
Now a Fracking Fighter project has been launched to help those working in their local communities in the United States to fight against fracking for oil and natural gas.
Check out the stories of some of the hundreds of Fracking Fighters HERE.
Here are just two examples of hundreds stepping forward to campaign:
Robert Fofrich is a college student at West Los Angeles College, and the goal of his campaign is “to end hydraulic fracturing in the Inglewood Oil Field next to my campus—the largest urban oil field in the country.” In his neighborhood, people are getting sick. In 2008, Robert joined the Longest Walk 2, walking 3,000 miles across the country to call attention to environmental destruction and Native American rights. The experience affirmed for Robert that “no matter how colossal a task, with diligence it can be accomplished.”
Fracking Fighter Elyse Hirsch
Elyse Hirsch is a young mother in Stow, Ohio, where the gas industry has bullied its way into dumping radioactive fracking waste from other states. She writes, “We currently have 242 active injection wells in the state of Ohio with over 500 million gallons of radioactive waste injected in 2012 alone. I am organizing with Stark, Summit, and Portage counties in Northeast Ohio to ban injection wells in Ohio and ultimately slow fracking regionally.”
