People’s Gas and Oil Summit in Pittsburgh

For those of you who haven’t watched Gasland, I would strong­ly rec­om­mend check­ing it out. Besides the cool shots and excel­lent ban­jo accom­pa­ni­ments, the sto­ry at the heart of the film is extreme­ly com­pelling and well told. There are hon­est and admirable pro­tag­o­nists in the movie, as well as shad­owy cor­po­ra­tions. The movie was cre­at­ed by Josh Fox, self-described child of hip­py par­ents who built a house in the woods of North East­ern Penn­syl­va­nia where he now lives. Josh first encoun­tered frack­ing through a let­ter in the mail offer­ing him around $100,000 total for the right to drill on his land. Fox, unsure about this finan­cial pro­pos­al, sets out to find more infor­ma­tion. He starts out with a town near him where drilling is already under­way and ends up embark­ing on trips to Wyoming, Texas and oth­er high­ly drilled areas in the country.

When Fox made the movie, he had to trav­el all across the coun­try to find the type of infor­ma­tion he was look­ing for, from per­son­al expe­ri­ences to empir­i­cal data, it was all scat­tered. Luck­i­ly for those of us inter­est­ed in the move­ment, Earthworks.org decid­ed to hold the Nation­al Peo­ple’s Oil and Gas Sum­mit in Pitts­burgh this year, con­sol­i­dat­ing many of the peo­ple and resources which Fox tracked down in the mak­ing of his film. We also had the plea­sure of meet­ing oth­er allies, researchers, and activists not men­tioned in the film, and the film­mak­er him­self (while Fox could­n’t be phys­i­cal­ly there because he was on shoot in Aus­tralia, he did take time to skype with us, from a park).

The sum­mit was right in the heart of the Mar­cel­lus Shale Nat­ur­al gas drilling boom region this year, though it is nor­mal­ly held in the west. This served as a stark reminder to all in atten­dance that the nat­ur­al gas bat­tle has spread across the coun­try. There were many great speak­ers and pan­els, and the range of top­ics cov­ered was pret­ty wide­spread. Here is a list from Earth­works themselves:

• The BIG PICTURE – where are they drilling, why and who’s next?
• Nat­ur­al gas, CLIMATE JUSTICE and PUBLIC HEALTH: life cycle impacts of gas
• Hydraulic FRACTURING: Full Dis­clo­sure, NO Exemptions
• To lease or not to LEASE; landown­er and min­er­al own­er rights
• CLIMATE CHANGE: Beyond coal, oil and gas: what is our ENERGY FUTURE?
• MEDIA: reform­ing the indus­try one blog, sto­ry, movie and wiki at a time
• Leg­is­late, Lit­i­gate, AGITATE: lessons on orga­niz­ing and civ­il disobedience

The con­fer­ence was packed with infor­ma­tion. From excel­lent eco­nom­ic analy­sis on the mar­ket for nat­ur­al gas, to strate­gies, to the per­son­al sto­ries shared by some of the brave speak­ers. We even had an oil indus­try insid­er — grant­ed, he was qui­et­ly mocked and booed by polite sum­mit goers, due to his luke­warm stance on gas drilling. I was real­ly blown away by how much I was learn­ing. Although some­times that new knowl­edge came at the cost of feel­ing down or over­whelmed, being sur­round­ed by so many activists and peo­ple who care was fantastic.

If you are inter­est­ed in more infor­ma­tion about Mar­cel­lus Shale, Hydrofrac­tur­ing, or Nat­ur­al Gas, here are some links that might pique your fancy.

• On our site you can check out an entire sec­tion devot­ed to Nat­ur­al Gas at. http://www.energyjusticenetwork.org/naturalgas
• You can also check out our map­ping fea­ture on our site: http://www.energyjusticenetwork.org/map, which not only pro­vides you loca­tions of cur­rent oper­at­ing Nat­ur­al Gas drilling sites, but also pro­posed and expand­ing sites and a pletho­ra of oth­er information
• At the con­fer­ence there was actu­al­ly a pan­el (Web-based Tools for Infor­ma­tion Shar­ing and Doc­u­men­ta­tion) devot­ed to some oth­er real­ly great ways that peo­ple were using the inter­net and tech­nol­o­gy to expose frack­ing sites, land­men, etc. 
  • http://www.fractracker.org/ which also deals with map­ping frack­ing sites
  • http://civic.mit.edu/projects/c4fcm/extract-landman-report-card an MIT relat­ed project that cre­ates a com­mu­ni­ty for fracked peo­ple, and has come up with a report card for land­men. This is real­ly impor­tant because it allows locals to share their expe­ri­ence deal­ing with the land­men. It also gath­ers all these expe­ri­ences into real­ly prac­ti­cal data. So that rather than hav­ing anec­do­tal evi­dence in the fight, we can actu­al­ly trans­late it into empir­i­cal data, which can be used to change minds and inspire activism.
• Even thought you may not have been there, you can still get some real­ly great infor­ma­tion from peo­ple like Wilma Sub­ra, per­son­al­ly, on your com­put­er, just by check­ing out the speak­er’s pow­er point pre­sen­ta­tions online at: http://earthworksaction.org/2010SummitAgenda.cfm#PANEL4
• Video was tak­en dur­ing the Sum­mit, in which all the speak­ers were filmed. The sum­mit orga­niz­ers still haven’t decid­ed if they are going to put up the video on youtube or if they are going to release it in DVD form. Either way, for more updates about that I would check back here:http://www.earthworksaction.org/POGsummit2010.cfm
• Last­ly you can hear cov­er­age of the Sum­mit thanks to Rust­belt radio, which cov­ered two sto­ries: 

  Audio post­ed by Pitts­burgh Indy­media: Rust­belt Radio Col­lec­ti to Pitts­burgh Indy­media (54.5 mebibytes)

   

And of course for all of your oth­er Ener­gy Jus­tice Needs come back to us here at Ener­gy Jus­tice Network.

–This has been Lju­bi­ca Sarafov, cam­pus and com­mu­ni­ty orga­niz­er for PA, sign­ing off!