Pro-Fracking Greens Called Out in Sandra Steingraber's New Manifesto [View all]

[xchrom]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/06/08-6


Portrait of Sandra Steingraber as part of artist Robert Shetterly's American's Who Tell the Truth project.

A new salvo has been fired in the national battle against fracking.

Within hours of the Illinois General Assembly's vote on its controversial bill on hydraulic fracking last Friday night, the AP's headline rippled across nationwide newspapers: "Illinois lawmakers approve nation's toughest fracking regulations."

Not so fast, says Dr. Sandra Steingraber, the renowned scientist whom Rolling Stone has called the " toxic avenger." She returned to her native Illinois last week to join a growing citizens uprising against gas drilling and sand mining operations she defines as "an accident-prone, inherently dangerous industrial process with risks that include catastrophic and irremediable damage to our health and environment."

With New York readying to rescind or keep in place that state's temporary moratorium, and high stakes battles taking place across the nation about whether to regulate fracking or place moratoriums on it, Steingraber and a network of citizen groups have viewed Illinois as the staging ground for a fracking rush that will have an extraordinary ripple effect.