Watched: Jacquelyn Kingsley saw “Triple Divide”

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Triple Divide is a tremendously moving film. To hear landowners and farmers speak of having their land rights and human rights violated was powerful and upsetting. I appreciate their willingness to honestly describe what they're going through. Their testimonies, along with the demonstration at the beginning of the film of how fracking representatives approach landowners, give audiences an idea of our collective vulnerability to the manipulations and deceptions of an uncaring and immoral industry. However, at the end of the film, one man's clarion call reminds us that we can always develop our collective strength. I love the bold and inspiring declaration of the landowner who says he will not succumb without a fight. That's what we all have to do to the extent that we are able: intelligently and peacefully resist. I think it's great that the film emphasizes the importance of high quality and exceptional streams and bodies of water that are being threatened by fracking operations and a lack of state protection. Perhaps the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) should be prosecuted for failing to punish industry/ company violations of the commonwealth laws in its state and endangering these vital water sources, aquifers, and thus the public health. Hopefully, residents will place more pressure on the DEP to execute its responsibilities in a more transparent and timely fashion. Triana Energy should refer to themselves not as "21st Century Explorers" but as 21st Century Colonizers. In fact, all of the natural gas companies depicted in the film could be labeled as 21st Century Colonizers as their profit-driven and short-term interests drive their destructive exploitation of already established communities.

Watched: Elisabeth Hoffman saw “Triple Divide”

Joshua Pribanic and Melissa Troutman talk about their film “Triple Divide” at a Butler Area Public Library screening. photo: Michael Bagdes-Canning

I drove through Pennsylvania on the turnpike early Saturday. Past the billboards for “Affordable coal energy: Increasingly green and always red, white and blue” and “Wind dies, sun sets. You need reliable, affordable, clean coal electricity.” Past the giant wind turbines on the mountain ridge near Somerset. I picked up my brother in Pittsburgh, a frack-free zone, and headed for the western Pennsylvania premier of the film “Triple Divide” at the Butler Area Public Library. This part of the state is not frack-free. “Triple Divide” the documentary is impressive and disturbing storytelling about the free-for-all that is fracking in Pennsylvania. Triple divide the natural phenomenon sends the waters in fracked Potter County, Pa., into three North American watersheds. At this juncture, the Allegheny River heads west to the Ohio River and eventually to the Gulf of Mexico, the Genesee River finds its way north to Lake Ontario, and the west branch of the Susquehanna River winds southeast through Maryland and into the Chesapeake Bay. As filmmaker Melissa Troutman says in the movie’s narration, “For the triple divide, everything is downstream.” These rivers form the ecological foundation for life in the region, not to mention providing drinking water for millions in and beyond the region.

EcoWatch Interviews Public Herald About Fracking & Triple Divide

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With high-profile activists like Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon taking a stand against fracking, the controversial drilling practice has been pulled from the periphery and placed in the public's main line-of-sight at a scale sparking movement from Hollywood. Promised Land, a film starring Matt Damon as a salesman for a natural gas company, hits theaters tonight, lending cinematic drama to the issue of fracking. While the large-scale exposure is valuable, Melissa Troutman, co-creator of another film on fracking, is careful to iterate an important fact, "Promised Land is a story, but this [Triple Divide] is a true story." Triple Divide, a documentary by Joshua Pribanic and Melissa Troutman of Public Herald, carefully investigates the effects of fracking in the Marcellus Shale Region of Pennsylvania from the ground up, focusing its lens on the true accounts of neighbors who have lost their water well to contamination from drilling, and farmers, like the ones in Promised Land, who have lost their land to pollution from a nearby well pad. In their first live interview about the film, journalists Joshua and Melissa discussed Triple Divide and the impact of fracking with Stefanie Spear, Founder and Editor of EcoWatch, a news service designed to promote and build a community of grassroots environmental activism. You can watch the full interview above or at EcoWatch.

Journalists Detained, Labeled Ecoterrorists by Natural Gas Workers

Melissa Troutman approaching a guard shack in Tioga State Forest. photo: Joshua B. Pribanic

By Joshua Pribanic & Melissa Troutman Public Herald journalists photographing natural gas operations in Pennsylvania were falsely detained in the middle of the night by two water truck drivers on an unmarked road in Tioga State Forest and [...]

Top Photos, Natural Gas, DEP: The 2012 Letter to Readers

The Public Herald's top photo for 2011, John Strong Bag in "These Economies." An iconic tribute to the occupation of Wall Street and economic uncertainty. © Joshua B. Pribanic

Dear PublicHerald.org readers: As we look ahead at this important year, we’d first like to thank all of our readers. The unfettered nature by which you share, invest in, and contribute to +Truth and +Creativity energizes our original [...]

Poetry: A Hunter’s Bird

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I You live on these mountains, these Alleghenies, among the laurel— imbued with its same tenacious, rugged beauty and toughness— and the bedrock: sandstone and quartzite, –sheltered by long forgotten flags of maple and oak inextricable with the [...]

Editorial: Reform the Ohio EPA

The Ohio EPA's reliability to regulate based on industry funded science has resulted in a state-funded public relation department safeguarding companies on the public dollar. Now, even peer-reviewed science hailed from state universities is being discarded for company research, simply because companies had more dollars to dispose (citing Danielle Ivory's work for The Huffington Post Investigative Fund »

Michigan State University Publishes New Study on the Feasibility of Local Food Systems

Transforming vacant urban lots into farms and community gardens could provide Detroit residents with a majority of their fruits and vegetables. As city officials ponder proposals for urban farms, a Michigan State University study...