[Editor’s Note: On the day after President Obama controversially proposed converting a large slice of Alaska (12 million acres) into federal land, this environmentally related essay arrived.]
Imagine starting out on a hike or driving through your favorite National Forest, and this is your view: Swaths of trees that have been clear-cut, hoards of trucks flying along back roads and fracking rigs scattered across the landscape.
Because our public lands are currently open to fracking, this dirty, disgusting and dangerous image could become more common for visitors to our national forests and wilderness areas. Sign the petition if you think our national forests and public lands should be protected from fracking.
As a Colorado native, I am lucky to have the awe-inspiring Rocky Mountains and many areas of public land right in my backyard. Just the other weekend I went snowshoeing through Arapahoe National Forest, with fresh, powdery snow falling on the pine trees around me.
A Fracking-Free World
I cannot imagine going out and seeing fresh snow on a clearing made by a huge fracking well pad, instead of fresh snow on treetops. Our national forests and public lands are too precious to frack.
But fracking already is happening in national forests and public lands across the country — from Pennsylvania's Allegheny National Forest to the border of Glacier National Park, from illegal fracking in the Florida Everglades to George Washington National Forest in Virginia (which was recently approved for fracking).¹
Thanks to the incredible opposition to fracking that has grown across the country, U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI-2) and co-sponsor Jan Schakowsky (D-IL-9) introduced a bill during the last Congress to ban fracking on all public lands. This bill is the strongest piece of federal legislation against fracking to be introduced to date.
While Food & Water Watch members have made it clear that fracking should be banned on our public lands (along with allies, we submitted more than 650,000 comments from people like you against the Obama administration's proposed rules for fracking on public lands), the oil and gas industry is pushing back. They will do everything they can to kill this bill so they can keep fracking our public lands.
That's why we need to make sure that when this bill is re-introduced this session, it has an impressive list of co-sponsors and supporters. Ask your Congressperson to co-sponsor this bill to protect our public lands from fracking.
I want to be able to enjoy our parks and forests for years to come, and I want to make sure there will be protected wilderness for future generations to experience. Join me in standing up to protect our public lands from fracking today.
Ms. Seeley George, online organizer for Food & Water Watch, may be contacted at act@fwwatch.org
