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truth + creativity
Bill would limit whistleblower activities on PA farms by Natasha Khan for Public Source Chickens crammed into wire cages next to the rotting carcasses of other chickens. The floor of a barn coated with flies. Hens with their [...]
More Than a Matter of Opinion: Ed Rendell’s Plea for Fracking Fails to Disclose Industry Ties by Justin Elliott for ProPublica Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell took to the New York Daily News op-ed pageWednesday with a message to local officials: [...]
Hunting For Pennsylvania’s Orphaned And Abandoned Wells By Dimiter Kenarov for The Huffington Post Laurie Barr is a hunter. Each year, around November, when the trees in Pennsylvania lose their foliage and the shrubs are nothing but bare [...]
Export push reframes debate over fracking By Alexandra Duszak for The Center for Public Integrity When Pennsylvanians agreed to a massive increase in natural gas drilling in the state, they were told that the economic benefit would outweigh any potential [...]
On January 9, 2013, in otherwise quiet Highland Township in Elk County, Pennsylvania, officials signed a community rights bill into law stopping the deposit of fracking waste within the township. Seneca Resources, the drilling and fracking arm of National Fuel Gas of Williamsville, N.Y., had planned to inject its “production fluids” (oil and gas drilling and fracking waste) into an injection well about 2,200 feet from Crystal Springs — a main source of water for James City — according to the Kane Republican. Injection wells have a history, both long and recent, of failing to contain waste and increasing the risk of exposure to drinking water supplies. So, residents of Highland Township asked their municipal officials to say “No.” A Community & Environmental Rights Movement Highland Township is the latest on a list of over 140 other communities that have said ‘no’ to factory farms, waste incinerators, corporate water withdrawals, and now fracking by passing rights-based ordinances. Marsha Buhl, president of the Highland Township Recreation Association, collected signatures from more than 230 township residents in order to ban the injection well.
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.
Our Land by Laurel Dammann for Public Herald The following is a look at terms from Public Herald’s feature length documentary Triple Divide that focusses on hydraulic fracturing in Pennsylvania. Hydraulic Fracturing, or “fracking,” is the process of extracting [...]
A Look at Drill Waste Pits and Groundwater by Melissa Troutman, Laurel Dammann, and Joshua Pribanic “It was 2007, and my water well was fine. I mean, I didn’t have any problem with it. I was cooking, drinking, [...]
Parts of Pa. law favored by frackers overturned by Alice Su Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth Court overturned parts of the state’s controversial Act 13 on Thursday, returning zoning authority over natural gas drilling to the municipalities and townships that had contested the [...]
Podcast: The Poison Beneath Us ProPublica’s podcasts on iTunes Whiff of Phenol Spells Trouble by Abrahm Lustgarten for ProPublica The stench of phenol was overpowering, wafting from mud taken from a layer of rock thousands of feet beneath southern Ohio. It [...]