Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.”  -- Wendell Berry, from What Are People For?: Essays

On Monday, December 21, 2015, six grandparents sat in six rocking chairs on the access road to the Geyer well in Adams and Middlesex townships. We had no intention of allowing any Rex traffic to pass; most of us were prepared to be arrested if it came to that.

This was, as far as I know, the very first instance of nonviolent direct action with a civil disobedience component carried out by fracktivists in Butler County. This was not a Marcellus Outreach Butler action, though many of the participants are affiliated with MOB.

Why did we do it?

As the action was wrapping up I engaged one of the other grandparents in conversation and she said something that is very powerful: "We don't do this because we think this one action will stop the well. We do it because we are obligated to say no."

While I'm pretty certain that many of the other grandparents, like me, hoped that our action would make Rex reconsider drilling near Mars Area schools, I am absolutely certain that none of us thought that this was even a remote possibility. But, as Berry suggests in the quote above, our "own hearts and spirits would be destroyed by acquiescence" if we didn't do it.

As research evidence piles up, it becomes clearer and clearer that fracking doesn't belong anywhere near people, other living things, water, air, or soil. In the months and weeks leading up to our action, a number of powerful studies were released that linked proximity to fracked wells and low birth weights (Pitt), problem pregnancies (Johns Hopkins), and cardiac visits to emergency rooms (Penn). Duke University released a study linking proximity to a fracked well and decreased property value. Low sperm counts have also been linked to proximity to fracking sites (U. of Missouri).

I applaud the powerful work done by the Mars Parent Group, who have bravely waged a tireless effort to organize and educate the residents of Adams and Middlesex. I am grateful to the residents of Middlesex Twp., the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, and Clean Air Council, who are fighting the Geyer well with the only state sanctioned tools at our disposal: the legal justice system. I am in awe of the people who have been hit with a SLAPP suit but are still speaking out against drilling near Mars Area schools, still exercising their rights guaranteed by our Constitution.
 
As an elected official, a former teacher of delinquent boys, a father, a grandfather, a person of faith and someone who appreciates and values the ideals of the founding principles of our country, I believe in playing by the rules. But still... rules are made by people, and people make mistakes.  When rules allow unspeakable harm or make it more likely to continue to happen, people must not acquiesce.
 
I think that civil disobedience is a tool that we are going to have to use skillfully to win this fight, but it's only one of the tools.  We need the entire toolbox and we need people to stretch from where they are to areas where they are less comfortable. Many have already done some remarkable stretching -- it was a big stretch by many to advocate for your community in front of your supervisors, commissioners and council people;  to knock on doors; to show up at rallies and hold signs.
 
Stretching is what MOB needs to encourage. We've been talking about it for quite some time. We've got some very educated "members" of MOB. They come to every meeting. They are engaged. They have their hearts in the right place but, maybe, some don't stretch. We need to get the folks who are educated to stretch -- e.g., to do file reviews, to monitor streams or air quality. We need folks who attend our rallies to stretch -- maybe to plan a rally. I love it when people say, "Can you think of something creative we could do about (for example) the trucks on Cliff St. in Butler?"  I'd love it even more if they'd stretch and say, "I'd like to organize something around Cliff St., could you help me pull that together?" Wouldn't it be wonderful if someone who attended our meetings said, "You know, that program on pipelines was really good. Can I contact my friend Tim DeChristopher about doing a presentation on..."   (Alternate: "You know, this presentation on pipelines was really good.  I know a guy who could do a presentation on... (fill in the blank); shall I contact him and see when he's available?")
 
 
The fracktivist toolbox in Butler County was opened just a bit wider on December 21st. Let's hope that it's just the beginning.

Lest we get depressed with the recent decision handed down by Judge Yeager on the Middlesex Twp. zoning case, let's look at another struggle: the Civil Rights struggle of the '50's and '60's.

In 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery (AL) bus. She was charged with disorderly conduct and violating a local ordinance. A 381-day boycott of the buses, a near bankrupting of the transit company, and a federal court decision saying such practices as segregated bus seats were unconstitutional didn't end the practice; it just made it illegal.

Although the 1954 Brown v Board of Education of Topeka decreed that segregated schools were unconstitutional, many schools remained segregated.  In 1957, 9 black teens had to be escorted by Army and National Guard troops to classes at Little Rock's Central High School -- the first black students to attend school there.  The troops were there to "maintain order and peace."

In 1960, four black students sat at a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina and asked to be served. They were not. They were forced to leave when the store closed. A group of black students in Nashville, replicating the Greensboro event, were beaten by white teens and then arrested for disorderly conduct.

In 1961, black and white passengers were savagely beaten and imprisoned for riding together on buses from Washington, D.C. to cities in the Deep South in the Freedom Rides, designed to test the Supreme Court's ruling in Boynton v. Virginia (1960), which declared segregation in interstate bus and rail stations unconstitutional.

In 1962, after repeated failures to gain admittance to the University of Mississippi, James Merideth was admitted when a federal court ruled that the school could not bar a student based on race. It took 500 troops to allow him to enroll and he was continually harassed.

In 1963 Dr. King delivered his "I Have A Dream" speech in front of over 200,000 people in Washington, DC, but also in that year Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers was assassinated in Mississippi and four young girls were killed in a church bombing perpetrated by Ku Klux Klan members in Birmingham, Alabama.

The Civil Rights Act was passed and signed into law in 1964. It ended, at least in legal theory, the unequal application of voter registration requirements and racial segregation in schools, at the workplace and by facilities that served the general public.  Yet when it came to registering African-American voters, discrimination continued.

In 1965, following several peaceful voting rights demonstrations (including one in which Civil Rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson was murdered by a police officer in Marion, AL), a series of marches from Selma to Montgomery AL were initiated. The first attempt was brutally halted by state troopers and county possemen who attacked the unarmed marchers with billy clubs and tear gas. The news footage of "Bloody Sunday" galvanized the country and President Johnson announced that he was sending a voting rights bill to Congress, which later that year became the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

So what does all this long-suffering and brutality have to do with the Middlesex Twp. zoning case?  It offers us a powerful lesson: we will not lose unless we quit fighting.  This is true of the legal process and beyond.  In 2013 the PA Supreme Court ruled that Act 13 zoning is unconstitutional, stating that shale-gas drilling is an industrial use which is incompatible with residential zoning uses.  Yet township solicitors continue to ignore these admonitions, and now a county judge has done so as well.  And so this case will be appealed to the Commonwealth Court and ultimately the state Supreme Court.  We lose only if we quit fighting.

But it is equally true beyond the legal process.  Beyond the obvious abomination of a heavy industrial use placed in a formerly quiet residential neighborhood, there is the growing evidence that shale-gas drilling is an abomination to the planet -- to the air we breathe, the water we drink, to our children, pets and wildlife and to our climatological system that is growing more out of control by the month.  This abomination must be stopped.  

Despite laws being passed that were designed to help protect the rights of minorities, the Civil Rights movement had to keep implementing protests and demonstrations to bring the true spirit of those laws to fruition.  Our state and country may or may not pass laws to address the abomination of shale-gas drilling; it may be up to us to continue to draw attention to these hazards and keep them in the forefront of the public consciousness, just as Martin Luther King and other Civil Rights activists did with black rights issues in the '50's and '60's.  We can't give up until shale-gas drilling is banned everywhere on the planet in favor of clean and renewable energy.

Make no mistake: the shale-gas protest movement is very much a civil-rights movement: our right to clean air, pure water and a healthy environment for decades to come.  These rights were established by Pennsylvania's Environmental Rights Amendment -- Article I, Section 27 of the PA Constitution --  in 1970, and re-affirmed in the Robinson Township case of 2013.  Like the civil rights laws of the '50's and '60's, they are being ignored.  Like those brave activists and organizers, we must continue the fight.  We will not lose, unless we quit fighting.

-- Michael Bagdes-Canning

"We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all — by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians — be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us.
How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing." 
Wendell Berry, from Compromise, Hell!  

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The arc of the moral universe may bend toward justice but, left to its own devices, that arc would, indeed, be long.

Sometimes, the arc needs a little help. Human history is packed with people helping the arc along by confronting injustice.

Many of us profess to be Christians. Jesus is one of those historic figures who helped bend the arc of justice. One example: In his first appearance at the temple in Nazareth, Jesus quotes the Prophet Isaiah.
 
"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because God has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. God has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord."  (Luke 4: 16-19)

How would quoting the Prophet Isaiah help bend the arc of justice? Nazareth and all of Judaea was an occupied land. The power of the day, Rome, and those complicit were benefitting from the enslavement of the poor, the captives, the oppressed. Jesus, speaking out, was calling out the oppressors. He said what others dared not say. He so enraged those that heard him that they tried to kill him, driving him to the edge of a hill where they hoped he would plunge to his death.  (Luke 4: 20-30)
 
American history, too, has those who bend the moral arc toward justice.

The Boston Tea Party was a reaction to the coercive powers of the British East India Company. It was, in essence, the ExxonMobil of its day. In order to see that its profits were robust (because a Dutch company's smuggled tea was undercutting the East India Company), Parliament enacted a series of "intolerable" laws. The colonists reacted to those laws with an act of civil disobedience (and destruction of property) by tossing tea overboard. Today we celebrate those brave "activists."

Rosa Park, too, bent the arc toward justice. The story goes that she was a simple seamstress too tired to move when she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery AL bus in 1955. Parks was no simple seamstress and she may have been tired but, more likely, she was sick and tired of being treated shabbily because of the color of her skin. Parks broke the law supporting segregation but, in so doing, addressed a greater injustice.

We here in Butler County are faced with an injustice. Our communities are being industrialized, our air, water and soil are being befouled, our health is being compromised and our government is not acting to protect us.

We (MOB and concerned others) have responded to this by availing ourselves of all of the legal avenues available to us. We have: filed permit appeals; worked toward appropriate zoning; done DEP file reviews; appealed to our local, state, and federal government officials; engaged in marches and rallies; invited in experts and victims to speak of the harms of unconventional drilling and fracking; sued and sought other legal relief, and many, many other tools.
 
We have, however, shied away from asking our members to consider the sorts of tools that accelerate the bend of the arc toward justice.

My personal call to nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience was first activated when I watched on a live stream as my favorite author, Wendell Berry, went to visit the Governor of Kentucky (his home state), and refused to leave his office until the Governor acted to protect Kentucky from the ravages of mountaintop removal coal mining. Berry spent the weekend "camped" in the Governor's office, garnering lots of press and making a powerful point.

In the quote at the beginning of this article, Berry -- an octogenarian, farmer, philosopher, poet, novelist and essayist -- tells us that we must be "radical" if we are to rid ourselves of those who would oppress us.  And how does he define "radical"?  As "being thorough."  "Being thorough" means using all the tools at our disposal to affect change.  It means emulating the likes of Jesus and the Boston Tea Party activists and Rosa Parks and Dr. King and Wendell Berry.  Their actions may make us feel uncomfortable, but history shows us that this is how real change happens and justice is won.  We all know that the system is broken but most of us continue to play the game even though it's rigged. It's going to take some brave people to stand up and say that they are no longer going to play by the rules that are meant to keep us losing. When enough people stand up, the rules will change.

Undoubtedly we will have to stretch well beyond our comfort zones to accelerate the bending of the arc of the moral universe toward justice in Butler County.  But it is not beyond our capability to do so.

-- Michael Bagdes-Canning
​
(The opinions expressed in this blog do not reflect any official positions held by MOB or any of its members.)