Fracking – Page 14 – Earth First!

Affirmative: Fracking Awareness North Somerset is go, go, GO! 30th April

Fracking Awareness North Somerset (F.A.N.S) is a new organisation seeking to mobilize community based resistance against fracking. We aim to build a network of groups all over North Somerset to collectively struggle against the insidious threat posed by fracking to our local communities and landscape.

F.A.N.S. will encompass and offer support for all anti-fracking/environmental groups in North Somerset, providing them with up to date information, encouragement and solidarity in fighting this cause.

Our Facebook page is now up and running and we are currently in the midst of designing our new North Somerset focused leaflets. We are also creating a new website so that we are easily contactable and can provide information and help for other groups around North Somerset.

Once our leaflet and website are finished, we are planning F.A.N.S Fortnight – two weeks of talks, presentations, meetings, workshops and film showings around the towns and villages of North Somerset. F.A.N.S Fortnight aims to educate the residents of these areas on the often complex issue of fracking. We seek to show them how they may be affected by fracking in the coming years, but also that there is light at the end of the tunnel.

So it’s all go from North Somerset! Please feel free to get in touch if you are interested in supporting us or have a new group that would like to join F.A.N.S. We would also very much like to hear from anyone interested in helping out with festivals or ideas for promotion.

Fracking will bring industrial North Sea gas extraction to our very doorsteps. Together, we can stop it.

Community resistance will be one of the most effective tools deployed against the fracking corporations. Despite what may appear at first glance to be a very bleak situation, hope can be found by standing together in focused solidarity.

Therefore, we will be encouraging and providing support for anyone who would like to start their own local group. Our aim is to help as many people as possible take their first tentative steps in this struggle. United communities are key to ending (with a firm and resolute full stop) fracking's threat to North Somerset.

A lot of promotion is needed to ensure that residents know who we are and when we will be in their area. Therefore, members of F.A.N.S are planning to visit a large number of local South West summer festivals this year to manage stalls, run workshops and hold talks. We will also be promoting F.A.N.S Fortnight and the events/meetings that are going to be held during that time.

Last on our current agenda is 'Love and Rage' – a monthly spoken word poetry and acoustic music night held in Bristol. Love and Rage will be a regular fund-raiser to help contribute towards the monetary demands of our campaign. It will also be a platform from which to inform people of the dangers posed by Fracking and, at the same time, hopefully mobilise them into action.

Earth First! Summer Gathering: 7th-11th August 2013

This year's the Summer Gathering will be in the Hastings area near the Bexhill-Hastings Link Road campaign. It will run from the evening of Wednesday 7th August and finish on Sunday 11th August.

The Earth First! Summer Gathering takes place each year to provide a space in which the radical ecology movement can share skills and plan for future campaigns and actions. Anyone who is interested in ecological direct action will have a valuable part to play and is welcome to come to this family friendly gathering. If you've not been to an Earth First! Gathering before and are thinking about it, please do come, we are a very friendly, welcoming bunch and would love to have you get involved

Programme: Workshops, skill sharing and planning action, plus low-impact living without leaders. Meet people, learn skills.

Transport/location: exact location will be announced 2 weeks before gathering on website.

Cost: £20-£30 from each person to cover all costs except food. (If you really can't afford this, please come anyway and give what you can).

Food: Delicious vegan food will be available, and meal tickets will be on sale at the gathering.

What to bring: Everyone will be camping so bring a tent, sleeping bag etc.

If you have any particular accommodation, access or dietary needs please tell us asap but at least two weeks in advance so we can plan suitable facilities. There will be a small amount of living vehicular space if booked in advance, on a first come first served basis.

Contact: summergathering-at-earthfirst.org.uk

http://efgathering.weebly.com

Blockade at Fracking Waste Storage Facility

This morning 19th Feb, protesters blockaded a Fracking Waste Storage Facility in New Matamoras, OH. Truck traffic to the facility was disrupted for 2.5 hours. As of this posting, a monopod is still in place on the site.

In an unprecedented show of unity against the extraction industry members of Appalachia Resist!, Tar Sands Blockade, Radical Action for Mountain Peoples’ Survival (RAMPS), a coalition of indigenous leaders including representatives from No Line 9 and the Unis’tot’en Camp, Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance, and Earth First! chapters from across the country have gathered in Southern Ohio to participate in and support this action. This is the latest in an ongoing and escalating campaign of resistance to the dangerous and exploitative resource extraction industry that is threatening the existence and survival of the earth and all of it’s inhabitants world-wide.

Fracking Saboteur Sentenced to 6 Months. 13 Feb

As far as we can tell, there’s been no clear reason expressed about why he did it.

As far as we can tell, there’s been no clear reason expressed about why he did it. But does there really need to be? Anyone who risks their freedom to attack a fracking site in the Marcellus Shale, and in one evening succeeds at delaying operations for three months, is a hero to all who drink water and hate energy corporations.

Tanner Long, 21, from the Trout Run area of Lycoming County, PA, allegedly admitted to an ambitious act of vandalism on August 30, 2012, and was sentenced in late-January to six months of prison (in a “county pre-release center”) and five years probation.

The story was not heavily reported outside the local area, but you can check out a short news clip here, which includes heart warming images of overturned bulldozers at a trashed fracking site on public land. You can also send him a letter here for the time being:

Tanner J. Long #3625
Lycoming County Prison
277 West Third Street
Williamsport, PA 17701

What we know of the story: In September 2012, a $10,000 reward was offered by Brubacher Energy Services for any information leading to the arrest and conviction of whoever vandalized construction equipment in Loyalsock State Forest.

According to Myron Brubacher, an owner of the Lancaster County company.”They basically cut the trees to block access to the road where our equipment was located.”

The vandals, who had somehow acquired keys, used pieces of equipment to damage other pieces of equipment. In total, the company reported $120,000 in damages.

“They rolled several pieces, one of our machines was rolled over on its side. They did a lot of damage,” Brubacher said. “It took three months to repair the damage.”

He added that the company has increased security since the vandalism.

Lycoming County Judge Nancy L. Butts told Long to “grow up.” While we at the EF! Newswire could see the potential for flagrant Bart Simpson-inspired immaturity when facing off with someone named Judge Butts, her honor was apparently referring to Long’s heroic vandalism being immature (as opposed any personal insult to Butts that one may have easily been tempted to utter, as we were.)

While three others reportedly watched on the night of Aug. 30, Long started heavy equipment belonging to Brubacher Energy, of Bowmansville, at a well site off Route 14 north of Trout Run.

Earth First! Winter Moot 2012 – 24-26th February 2012. Updated: location & what to expect

A weekend of discussion and networking for those taking direct action against ecological destruction.

Please note date & location change (due to date clash & venue problems):

24-26th February 2012, near Glasgow

Nearest train station: Lanark.

See earthfirstgathering.org.uk for further information about location, programme and contact details

Update:

Where – this years Earth First Winter Moot will take place in Glespin Village Hall, South Lanarkshire. Glespin is a small village about 14 miles south of Lanark, and 35 miles south of Glasgow. South Lanarkshire also has many beautiful areas with rivers, hills, forests and peat bogs. Full directions

What to expect – this years Earth First! Winter Moot takes place in South Lanarkshire, Scotland. In a months time environmentalists from across the UK and beyond will converge to discuss and debate. Below is an update from the organising collective who are working on the program.

The Moot 2012 collective has felt that at previous EF! Gatherings groups have primarily attended to recruit for their respective campaigns. Yet those who attend EF! Gatherings are predominantly already active, making them good places for networking, but not necessarily for outright recruitment. We recognise the effort gathering organisers put into planning agendas but often the more discursive aspects of the gatherings focus on larger, abstract questions and debates have often been framed by self-appointed experts. We feel that these discussions ineffectively attempt to find answers or reach consensus where this is inappropriate.

For example at the first EF! Gathering 20 years ago the question was asked: ‘What is EF!?’ 20 years later in 2011 at the last Moot the same question was still being asked . . .

The answer is EF! is what we make it, and this year we are going to make it a space in which we can approach our campaigns both critically and analytically by asking more specific and practical questions. Our activism should be constantly evolving not stuck in a rut asking the same questions again and again.

The agenda will be designed to ask questions around four key issues: the tactics we use; the strategies that we employ in our campaigns; community solidarity; and sustainable activism. There will be no attempt to reach conclusions or consensus especially about what EF! is. Instead we want to have discussions that lead to new ideas that could evolve ongoing campaigns or give creative inspiration to ones that are just getting started.

A free space will be provided in which campaigns will be able to hold meetings and have further discussions if they wish, and there will also be some space given for campaign updates with an emphasis on honest analysis rather than promotion.

For updates and more info check the website or email us.

efwintermoot@noflag.org.uk

New EF! Action Update

In an end of the summer compact EF!AU, find news about kicking shell in the teeth in Rossport again and then some more, solidarity with the community at Dale Farm, and anti-GM resistance – Spuds you Don’t Like demo in England, sabotage in Germany, France and Scotland.

On top of the usual contacts and dates, read about solidarity with jailed Swiss nanotech activists, resistance against steel plants, mobile phone masts, mining and energy projects here & across the world – stay angry and don’t carry on as usual!

The quarterly EF!AU, August 2011