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Fighting Fracking in the UK
Lancashire/Great Britain
Twenty-five women, some retired, and three men met at a covert rendezvous point at 5 a.m. on August 7, 2014. Sporting camouflage, they rushed onto the field. “When you legally occupy a field, you have to run a piece of marker tape around the site, so we did this first,” grandmother Ros Wills tells me.
For his article on occupy.com Steve Rushton met with the activists who fight fracking in Lancashire, North West England. The activists organized secret meetings for the Operation Acorn (“because big things grow from little acorns”) to plan the days of action. Even the nationwide anti-fracking and environmental movement in the UK Reclaim the Power followed the group’s invitation “to hold its annual camp on the site”.
Reflecting with pride on the organization of their site occupation, Atkinson says, “Fighting fracking has brought this community together – being proactive, both the campaign and camp are opportunities for the first time to stop fracking.”
Why is fracking dangerous and controversial?
The risks posed by hydraulic fracturing – which involves blasting thousands of gallons of water mixed with chemicals underground to break up shale gas deposits – are what motivated them to act, adds Wills. “Since we found out plans to frack Blackpool, we discovered it pollutes the water with chemicals, pollutes the air, and causes earthquakes,” she says.
Read the whole article by Steve Rushton on occupy.com: here
Read more about recent (August 2014) fracking protests in the UK: here
Also check out this star-fueled campaign “MY BODY MY WATER” against fracking New York water from 2012: here
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