In 2009, Food & Water Watch was researching threats to ground- water when we started hearing from members and donors in New York who were worried about the risk of water contamination from fracking, and from folks in Pennsylvania who were seeing fracking gain ground. They asked if we were looking into the is- sue and if we were going to do anything about it. A year later, we released our report “Not So Fast, Natural Gas.” “What the report found was that this wasn’t regulated; that there were all these issues and that it was a threat to our groundwater,” says Emily Wurth, Food & Water Watch Organizing Director. Food & Water Watch Joins a Grassroots Movement Growing in New York
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Photo by Mike Markham
At the time, Food & Water Watch printed 1,000 hard copies of our reports to share with organiz- ers, members, and allies. “Not So Fast, Natural Gas” flew off the shelves; we had to reprint it several times. Meanwhile, our team members in New York be- gan attending meetings with community groups across the state who were fighting fracking. “There are so many beautiful parts of the state — from the Catskills to the Hudson Valley to
In the fall of 2010, filmmaker Josh Fox released Gasland , a doc- umentary on the growth of fracking and its impacts on families and towns across the country — including several in Pennsylva- nia, right across the border from New York. Gasland showed how frackers were tearing into communities with horrific consequenc- es: once-crystal clear water running brown, strange illnesses in people and pets, nauseating smells, and decimated farmland and forests. Meanwhile, the body of research on fracking was small but grow- ing, and it suggested that the industry was contaminating water and endangering those closest to its operations.
the Finger Lakes — that were at risk of being fracked,” Emily says. “And the gas industry landmen were going around trying to get people to lease their land. So, in towns across New York, people started organizing because that was a real threat.”
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People Power vs. Fracking 8
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