ACTION ITEMS concerning FRACKING!

Written on: June 4, 2013

Here are two action alerts, one from PennEnvirnoment and one from Earth Justice, both consistent with Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart support of the Earth Charter principles. Please consider taking the requested actions and passing them on to others who may be interested in the issue.

1.     Let’s Keep Fracking Out of Our Forests and Parks (PennEnvironment)

The Obama administration just proposed weak rules that will open up many of our national parks and forests to fracking, including parts of the Delaware Water Gap.

Instead of following his own Advisory commissions advice to keep unique and sensitive areas off limits to oil and gas drilling, these rules will allow the frack-fueled oil and gas rush to mar countless landscapes across the nation. Let’s tell President Obama to keep our forests and parks frack-free.

For months, we’ve been urging the Obama administration to protect our parks and forests from fracking. Instead, they proposed very weak rules that would leave our forests and parks vulnerable to the damage of dirty drilling.

Across the country, fracking has been an environmental disaster — contaminating drinking water sources and turning rural landscapes into industrial zones. Yet the oil and gas industry wants to bring its dirty drilling to places like:

• Delaware River Basin, which is home to three national park areas, and provides drinking water to 15 million people.
• George Washington National Forest, threatening the streams that feed the James and Potomac Rivers, which provide drinking water for roughly four million people;
• Glacier National Park, putting its wildlife, air quality, and scenic views at risk; and
• Otero Mesa in New Mexico, putting perhaps the largest untapped freshwater aquifer in this parched southwestern state at risk. And that’s just a few of the places at risk.

Take action and help us keep our parks and forests free from fracking.

2.     Strengthen Fracking Rules (Earth Justice)

President Obama promised that the drilling boom would not come at the expense of public health. A proposed rule for drilling on public lands fails to meet that promise. Eleven times the oil and gas industry met with the Department of the Interior, pressuring officials with the Bureau of Land Management to weaken proposed fracking regulations for federal public lands. Unfortunately those meetings resulted in a set of fracking rules that would allow companies to hide fracking chemical information behind trade secret claims, and they won’t have to test individual wells’ cement casings—a critical barrier between fracking chemicals and underground aquifers. Our federal public lands provide drinking water for millions of Americans. This weak policy will put these drinking water sources at risk.

TAKE ACTION! Strengthen Fracking Rules On Our Public Lands

This entry was posted in With a Heart for Justice and tagged: Delaware River Basin, Delaware Water Gap, Department of the Interior, Earth Justice, Forests and Parks, Fracking, George Washington National Forest, Glacier National Parl, Obama Administration, Otero Mesa, Pennsylvania, President Obama, Strengthen Fracking Rules