New Yorkers United to Ban Fracking

New Yorkers United to Ban Fracking

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 20, 2011

Statewide Grass-Roots Leaders Meet,

Agree a Fracking Ban Is the Only Acceptable Outcome

Nearly 70 grass-roots activist leaders from around New York State met in Binghamton on Saturday, April 16, to confer on ways to institute a statewide ban on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and form a powerful alliance.

The polluting, industrializing, and energy-intensive method of extracting petro-methane, aka “natural” gas, has been causing water pollution and health problems in other states where it has taken place. This group, which includes entrepreneurs and business leaders, wants to stop it from harming New York—not to follow the usual regulatory route of mitigating harm after it happens.

The New Yorkers were joined by allies from Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, and Michigan, all states currently under siege from the gas exploitation industry.

Mike Bernhard is a member of Chenango-Delaware-Otsego Gas Drilling Opposition Group (CDOG), whose website has been tracking drilling issues for two-and-a-half years. “The more we’ve learned,” said Bernhard, “the more we know it’s impossible to extract shale gas from the Marcellus or any other formation around the country without catastrophic effects on our quality of life, property rights, property values, communities, individuals and traditional industries, as well as on the environment.”

Gloria Mattera, who traveled from Brooklyn for the all-day series of workshops and presentations, stressed the statewide unity of the group. “Although New York City politicians seem to think that the watershed that supplies 90 percent of city water is at least nominally protected,” she said, “it is not. We’re all in this together.”

Carl Arnold, of Delaware County, echoed Mattera’s thoughts. “We recognize that if the clean fresh waters of the Delaware, Susquehanna, Finger Lakes and other watersheds are contaminated by this dangerous and destructive industry, we all lose. We won’t let industry or anyone drive a wedge between ‘upstaters’ and ‘downstaters.’ We’re all New Yorkers, and we all want a healthy environment and safe water, clean air and a healthy food supply.”

The group was united in feeling that New York taxpayers should not be forced to bear the financial burden of cleaning up the toxic mess the gas industry leaves wherever it goes.

The day was filled with sessions on legal and issues related to fracking, and attendees networked over lunch catered by Binghamton eatery Cyber Café, supplemented with local foods brought by conveners.

The group recognizes there’s a hard fight ahead. “It’s not easy for a bunch of ordinary citizens to fight a megatrillion-dollar industry that obviously has a lot of local, state, and national politicians in its pocket,” said Maura Stephens of Tioga County, a cofounder of Coalition to Protect New York (CPNY), which also sent representatives from Chemung, Oneida, Schuyler and Yates Counties to the conference.

Fellow Tioga County resident Cecile Lawrence, a member of several organizations working for peace and a greener economy, added, “Other besieged areas of this country, as well as other parts of the world, are looking to New York State for leadership in ending the corporate invasion and toxic occupation of their communities. We aim to provide that leadership.”

LuAnne Kozma, who drove nine hours from Michigan to attend the conference, said, “More and more of us in Michigan recognize that a pro-regulatory approach simply allows fracking to continue and that only a ban will prohibit it.”

Kozma is with Don’t Frack Michigan, which seeks a statewide ban on fracking. She was glad to connect with many experienced New York activists who shared their ideas for educating the public and getting the ear of honorable legislators.

Attendees stressed that attaching the disclosure of fracking chemicals to only the public water supply, as the FRAC Act now languishing in the U.S. Congress would do, is not enough.

“That abandons tens of millions of rural people around the country who rely on well water,” pointed out Jack Ossont of Yates County, a member of the Committee to Preserve the Finger Lakes and CPNY. “Besides, the FRAC Act requires only that companies disclose what chemicals they’re using—it doesn’t protect our water from contamination by industry in the first place. That’s not acceptable.”

All conference participants agree that only a full ban on fracking for methane, a potent greenhouse gas, will protect the clean fresh water, air quality, food supply, community infrastructure, property values and quality of life now enjoyed by people in beautiful New York State.

Robert Jereski of New York City put it bluntly: “Shale gas is a dead end. The transition to a green economy must begin now. That makes sense for jobs and for a sustainable economy.”

On May 2, New Yorkers United to Ban Fracking will join thousands of other New Yorkers in Albany to demand a statewide ban on this industrial nightmare. Find more information at http://www.un-naturalgas.org.

With spring 2011 comes......

Photo of the opening plenary at Left Forum in NYC in March.

Increasing number of events on fracking. Events downstate and upstate. Concerns about injection wells for ramming toxic fracking waste deep into the ground, in OH and AK. Do earthquakes result? Mining sand for fracking, causing lung scarring in WI and elsewhere. The horror of the earthquake/tsunami/multiple nuclear plants breaking down in Japan continues. Radiation released into the atmosphere floating across the ocean eastward to the North American continent. Increased radiation levels found in rainwater and surface water in areas of the U.S. but the EPA assures us it's not of concern. Reading that the EPA has raised the level of "safety."
With spring comes plants pushing up out of the ground and the planting of crops. The combined threats of fracking, Fukushima radiation, existing fracking south of the border releasing toxins into the air, trucking frack waste to landfills this side of the border and spreading radioactive frack waste salt on roads in winter now to blow around. How to remain hopeful as Mr. Hope Obama touts the need for un-natural gas to save us all.

Egypt: Tariq Ramadan & Slavoj Zizek

It all comes down to fungus

I just finished watching a video interview of an Italian oncologist, Dr. Tullio Simoncini, where he presents his evidence that fungus causes cancer, that cancer cells are acidic, and that he's had good results with direct application of a baking soda solution onto the cancer cells via a catheter into the breast tumor or the prostate tumor, or a bronchial tumor for example. Look in Google video for this: "Fungus Causing Cancer - - A Novel Approach to Most Common Cause of Death."
I had difficulty figuring out how he would do this with a brain tumor. Still, this approach is intriguing. I think he said that a catheter could be inserted into the brain to directly apply the sodium bicarbonate to the tumor cells in the brain.
Marc Sircus, OMD, Director of the International Medical Veritas Association, has been writing for a long time that sodium bicarbonate is the poor man's cancer treatment.
http://imva.info/
I'm not saying this to take away from the Italian oncologist. Either Dr. Simoncini knew about what Marc Sircus has been writing or did not know, and developed his idea independently, which is a kind of scientific verification. It does not matter.
So the Italian oncologist concludes that it's rampant pollution that's causing the fungus. Now, think about white nose syndrome that's killing off bats in a big way in the U.S., especially in the northeast. Look at the www.bats.org page for the section on white nose syndrome.

Think also about so-called Colony Collapse Disorder in bees, for which there's various theories as to cause but one recent study points to fungus as causative. Look at www.sciencedaily.com for an article about this theory put forward in October of 2010.

Put this all together.

Widespread pollution from toxins in the air, water, food, soil, - toxins which can be chemicals or electro-magnetic radiation


or vaccine contents and all the benzene, toluene, formaldehyde, etc. in the air and water from oil and gas drilling via fracking




and the compressor stations leaking methane into the air, the toxins in clothing - all this pollution, the cumulative impact of which is attacking all life -humans, bees, bats and who know what else that has or will develop fungus. As Dr. Simoncini pointed out, hundreds of thousands of people in Japan have toenail fungus. Have you checked your toes lately? This is not an issue of morality or cleanliness. It's an issue of our bodies being overwhelmed with trying to fend off an ever increasing amount of environmental stresses and toxins that corporations are blasting at all life.
One route, at least for humans, is for us to do our best to eliminate sources of yeast and fungus in our diets, like mushrooms, wheat, dairy, dried fruit. Yes, there go the sauteed portabella on focaccia with melted mozzarella accompanied with date squares for dessert.

This is the kind of epidemic event at which homeopathy can excel over conventional Western medicine (ConMed), along with food discipline.
And soak your feet in baking soda at night as frequently as possible, e.g. while you check email or post on your blog.

But the most important route is to get out there and fight back!

Res ipsa loquitur

Res ipsa loquitur - the thing speaks for itself - AKA "Duh!"

The wrenching of fully grown trees out of the ground as if there were no more than a handful of unwanted dandelions and just as precious for watershed protection, cleansing the air,
The helicoptered dropping of charges followed by muffled blasts underground to the devastation of all life that communicates via vibration
The whirling dust storms devilishly birthed by the movement of massive diesel powered trucks and machinery;
Men desperate for money power out precious loam, flattening,
Spewing exhaust triggering asthma, stroke, breathing our last breath,
Men, and it seems it's always men, drive heavy gigantic barrel-shaped vehicles fast along narrow winding rural roads.

Increasingly scarce water that men suck from creeks, streams, lakes, rivers;
Tractor trailers groaning under the strain of layered bags of toxic chemicals strapped down with hooked reins
that can fly loose, puncturing a bag of poison spilling its contents for miles and miles and miles along roads,
On which your mother, my sister, our children, dogs, chickens walk.

Underground, hidden and hurting, whirling steel digs deep into millennial layered shale.
Stop, he does not stop but continues,
ramming thick slimy fluid poison into the fossilized remains of prehistoric animals and vegetation;
Heavy metals mixed with burning radiation, a DNA mashup;
To the mosh pit of hell, open to the now sickly air,
For frogs, wild turkey, geese, cows, sheep, to sip, crawl or dive into sickness or death
Do us part,
U.S. flag of occupation flying high from the utmost point of the rig.

Child bent over with intestinal pain, burning skin, the shakes,
No records kept, no screening of workers, forced treaties of silence in exchange for doubtful buffaloed BPA'd? water steaming in the sunlight,
Man from man, woman from woman, family from family torn apart,
Do us part.

As the forces of occupation do their part
We're just doing what we're told,
We meed to keep the engine of commerce going
As the enslaved from Africa, the indigenous people de-slaved to facilitate the creation of the layers of domination,
Same argument, we need the slaves for the sake of commerce, for the sake of the nation,
We need the exhalation of fossils for the sake of commerce, for the sake of the nation, U.S. flag flying high atop.

And we have "science" on our side,
"Science" says "no documented evidence" of contaminated water,
The politicians say who know nothing about science,
A science corrupted, bought and sold,
A contortion like the intestinal grippe after having sipped Dimock water, a science of a 100% impossibility, a false quackery feeding the desperate and greedy.

Res ipsa loquitur.

Like Hitler's science-based plan to exterminate the Jews.
Like the English invading plan to exterminate the indigenous people of the Americas.
Sullivan and Clinton. Clinton and Sullivan riding high the crest of the pounding waters of the Susquehanna sweeping clear the scientifically proven "inferior" peoples living quietly along the banks with their storehouses of corn, squash, dried meat.
Dead, gone, along with their knowledges of the movement of the waters on their part of Turtle Island.

Not the science of which biologists, chemists, geologists true to their calling will speak who never say anything to a certainty except be careful, you cannot lose by slowing down or even banning.
Except money.
With the forces of Nature no certainty can ever exist. Then mix in human imperfection.

When you have un-silenced evidence, you must say stop.
Do not continue to do what generations later, as Sandra Steingraber said, realize is the unthinkable.
Slavery,
the killing of the Jews,
the genocide of indigenous peoples,
the not treating black men for Syphillis,
the fraud-filled injection of Syphillis into
the bodies of brown people, Tuskegee, Guatemala,
the U.S. eugenicists' choice of Jamaica for their research as the ground zero for the creation of "monsters" by "race mixing", on and on.
Then, science. Now, Unthinkable.
This is the poisoned tree of "science" from which comes the word-fruit that those who want to make money from drilling speak, even if they do it out of desperation, which does not excuse them.

Every single human being has the responsibility to get the information necessary to protect us all, even if those with temporary power do everything to keep the information hidden.
Let us not be the new Germans to our own selves.
The thing speaks for itself.

Cecile Lawrence (c) October 2010