A Charade of Unity is not Unity; it's an Abuse of Trust and a Prescription for Enduring Harm: Response to Nathan Sooy and Clean Water Action

Nathan Sooy, Clean Water Action, and Josh Fox, Gasland
Governor Tom Wolf's inauguration, 1.20.15
Photo, Wendy Lynne Lee

In his response to a piece I posted recently where I dissect Food and Water Watch's (FWW) Senior organizer Sam Bernhardt's argument  that what the new Pennsylvania governor ought to do is impose a "halt" on new gas leases until the state can

adequately study whether fracking can be done safely--an argument that sounds reasonable on its face, but in fact belies a complete capitulation to Governor Wol'f insistence that we can "have our cake and eat it too--Nathan Sooy of Clean Water Action (CWA) posts the following (reproduced ver batim):

Wendy, one problem with your theory is that the anti-fracking movement is entirely dependent on the organizational, institutional and financial resources of the larger environmental organizations. In the history of social change and in the near certainty of cases, something (new social movement activity) nearly always arises from a pre-existing organizational base. In the American Civil Rights Movement, the SNCC sit in movement arose out of the social organizational context of the SCLC and CORE. And SCLC and CORE, in turn, arose from the context created by the NAACP, the Historically Black Colleges, and Gandhian traditions brought to America by the Fellowship of Reconciliation. So, I am not threatened personally by new movements arising out of and possibly in reaction to the organizational basis of the anti-fracking infrastructure in PA that was created by Marcellus Protest, Clean Water Action, the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, Sierra Club, and others who had a base of funding and staff and whose staff had the time, talent, and inclination to bring activities together. New things happen. But one thing I do know. Individual acts do not a social organization make. You need infrastructure to support, encourage, and develop ongoing organization. And you need funding. If I were you, I would be spending my time organizing that infrastructure to nurture the movement I wanted to create. Wendy Lynne Lee, you are a scholar. I suggest that you take a look at all of this through the context of Resource Mobilization Theory (McCarthy & Zald). New social movement steps do not come out of nothing. It comes out of something that was already nurtured and created. (https://www.facebook.com/groups/sierra.frackers/)

About the only thing Mr. Sooy gets right is the line about how I am a scholar--but this, of course, is intended as damning with faint praise. 

Let's examine Sooy's reasoning:

One of the basic principles of logic involves learning to distinguish necessary from sufficient from contributory causal conditions. Causal arguments that fail to appeal to the correct cause and effect relationship are fallacious--that is, they misidentify the correct causal relationship or they see such a relationship where there is none. 

Sooy commits this causal fallacy in his very first sentence when he claims that "the anti-fracking movement is entirely dependent on the organizational, institutional and financial resources of the larger environmental organizations." In effect, he's claiming that larger environmental organizations are a necessary causal condition for the existence of the anti-fracking movement.

This reasoning is fallacious for at least four reasons:

1. Sooy mistakes contributory (if even that) causal conditions for necessary ones: as the organizing of the disruptive events inside the inaugural venue made abundantly clear, such groups like Clean Water Action, Pennsylvanians Against Fracking, and Food and Water Watch not only had no bearing on the success of that disruption, it in fact was successful despite the utter lack of participation of the leaders of these organizations. Indeed, the notion that somehow the courageous folks who risked arrest did so only because they thought they'd have support from Sooy, et. al, is ludicrous. It's like claiming that in his magnificent "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Martin Luther King saw himself as dependent on the white clergy to support the Civil Rights Movement--when precisely the opposite is the case. King chastised his clerical fellows for their lack of committed involvement, their predictable capitulation, their insistence that racial equality had to wait. King moved forward despite the apathy, cowardice, and racist attitudes of his fellow clergy--not because of them. So too, the eight brave folks who were arrested at Governor Gas Wolf's inauguration acted despite the faint-hearted dependence of these faux-environmentals on a political system that rewards them so long as we don't put an end to the fracktastrophe. Note carefully, this is not to say that the risks undertaken by the Wolf protesters are the same as those of the incredibly brave civil rights activists at, say, Selma, Alabama. But it is to say that until we are prepared to take those risks, the gazillion dollar gas industry is going to keep right on fracking and pipelining us into oblivion. And it is to say that because climate change is the global civil rights issue of the 21st century that until we get clear about that fact, we're going to settle for the dry crumbs offered us by these fake greenies.

2. Sooy's position leads to a reductio ad absurdam: if Sooy's correct that the anti-fracking movement is dependent on the bigger environmentals, then there is no movement and there has never been one. The Big Greens cannot brook the possibility of a movement--any movement--since, by definition, a movement lays claim to criticism of the system that has spawned it, refuses to be dependent on a system that generates conditions of harm, and it demands that the system change to prevent that harm or be overthrown. But CWA, et. al. not only fails to challenge that system, it actively benefits from it in the form of donors and political access. As I have argued elsewhere, these groups directly undermine the prospect of any anti-fracking movement from ever emerging by effectively colluding with law enforcement to "protest" only in designated "free speech zones," to not engage in acts of nonviolent civil disobedience, and to not be any real problem to the powers that be. In so doing, they get to portray themselves as the "rational" activists against the "radicals." But the truth is that it is only the radicals--those willing to question the very system that benefits the gas industry, the corrupt political system, and the Big Greens who benefit from both--who will ever get this movement off the ground. To therefore claim that that movement is dependent on these Big Greens is to claim that there is no movement. Of course, Sooy may be right about that--but I don't think that's what he wants.

3. Sooy's argument insures that the gas industry wins, and wins big: to the extent that these smaller wanna-be greenies like CWA and PAF model their organizational structure after the BIG greens like the Sierra Club, they cannot as a matter of policy support any movement. The Sierra Club's explicit policy is to not participate in any act of civil disobedience, and while movements are about many strategies to achieve a goal--like the end of fracking--to preemptively bar members from participating in a direct action insures that unless the goals are very very small (say, moving a pipeline route from my yard to yours) they will not be achieved. No doubt the Sierra Club leadership knows this--so we can only assume that their real objectives have nothing to do with ending fracking, and everything to do with perpetuating and growing the Sierra Club donor base. In that case, of course, SC might as well stand for "sugar candies" or "soggy conjectures"--cuz' that's about as much of a movement as they can support. Nonetheless CWA, PAF, FWW are SC-Clones to the extent that what they value most are their greenie images, their donor base, and their access to whomever is in power.

4. Sooy commits the specific causal fallacy Post hoc--"After this, therefore because of this." Sooy claims that there'd have been no Civil Rights movement without a number of organizations to provide its "base."While it is possible that that is the case, there is no way to determine that it is necessarily the case. Just because these organizations did provide support does not mean that others might not have arisen to the occasion had they not, or that no organization would have provided that base, but rather more loosely affiliated citizens with the same objectives. Indeed, Sooy doesn't get his history correct here since some of these organizations became organizations in virtue of and during the Civil Rights Movement--hence could not have been its base. To claim that no movement can emerge without an organizational base is just silly. Indeed, it is virtually always in resistance to organizational or systemic injustice that movements arise--and the fact is that an effective anti-fracking movement must come to regard organizations who model themselves after the Sierra Club as antithetical to their objectives since those organizations have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

Disrupting Governor Wolf's inauguration
Photo Wendy Lynne Lee

  

At bottom, however, it's just monumentally arrogant to claim that the anti-fracking movement is dependent on groups like CWA, PAF, and FWW. 

It's like Sooy thinks these groups bear some sort of parental relationship to the decision whether to engage in an act of protest, nonviolent civil disobedience--or any strategy to bring attention to the issues. 

But Nathan Sooy is not my dad--and he doesn't get to lecture me about what I should read about movements. Indeed, were CWA so expert, you'd think we'd have seen some modest results with respect to getting the gassers out of the Commonwealth. 

And I'll bet  that if you asked, say, Maggie Henry why she was willing to risk arrest during the Gas Wolf inauguration, her reasons wouldn't include appeal to whether Clean Water Action thought it was OKAY.

The notion that the Big Greens 
are the mommies and daddies 
of the anti-fracking movement is nuts.

And it's pompous nuts.

This sort of peremptory arrogance puts Sooy in the same league as, say, state police officers who, reporting to the Marcellus Shale Operators Crime Committee, think they can intimidate folks into behaving according to a system that rewards Sierra Club-Alikes for towing the line, staying in their "free speech zones" drafting their repetitive petitions, having their one-off marches--

while it punishes real citizens for demanding to live in the democracy we were promised with the clean water and air to which we have a right. 

The proof here is in the pudding. None of the organizations Sooy sites have gotten us one iota closer to a ban on fracking in Pennsylvania. My god, they haven't even really slowed the disaster down. While they ask you for your money, the industry just keeps on keepin' on--ravaging of the state's water and air.

Lastly, Sooy says that "Individual acts do not a social organization make." 

He's right--but that redounds only to his failure and the failure of the organizations he defends. 

Had CWA, et al, organized even just 100 of their loads of sign-onmembers to join the eight arrested, the inaugural events would have seen very different news coverage. And--just to trouble shoot for one rather lame response--this isn't because civil disobedience is the only tool we have in the ban fracking tool box.

It's because without civil disobedience 

as an option we are enfeebled 

from the very outset.

Without that potent prospect,

we broadcast the message that 

we do not have the 

courage of our convictions. 

We concede that our cause 

is not sufficiently significant, 

and that we care only so far as 

we are not inconvenienced.

Nathan Sooy's failed argument reminds me of an image that epitomizes that entire day: 

As I was leaving--hightailing it home to process photographs--I walked past the building where Maggie Henry and her fellows were being charged and processed. As I looked to cross the street, I saw Nathan and Karen Feridun (PAF) strolling together away from the protest--and away from that

Maggie Henry,
Governor Wolf's inauguration
Photo Wendy Lynne Lee

building. I have no idea where they were headed chatting and laughing--but what I do know is that there was no risk. They were walking free outside on the streets of Harrisburg. Maggie Henry was being booked on her part in the disruption of Wolf's inaugural speech, after which she got to go home and face the harm done to her directly by the gas industry. 


Sooy would have us believe that it's in unity with some organization to which Henry somehow owes loyalty--although it has done nothing to protect her. I don't pretend to know Henry's specific motives--but she owes nothing to an organization whose policy bars them from standing with her to protect her farm.

Not a goddamn thing. 

A charade of unity is not unity; 

it is an abuse of trust 

and a prescription 

for enduring harm.

The Big Greens count on folks like Maggie Henry to be the "radicals" so that their paid staff can continue to play the system as the "rational activists."

Nathan Sooy in the
Free Speech Zone
Governor Wolf's
 inauguration
Photo Wendy Lynne Lee 

But they are not activists, and they have no movement. 

And if you doubt this, simply look back to what Sam Bernhardt of FWW "demands":

A moratorium to study 

what we already know 

is damaging to health, 

environment, and community 

in order to determine 

whether we ought to halt 

what we already know 

must be banned.

If that's the best organizational support we can get, we're better off looking to each other and leaving the greenie beneficiaries of the status quo behind.

Indeed, anyone who works out here in the actual trenches of the effort to stop the gas companies from destroying our communities knows that while movements are partly about money--first and foremost their about experience, guts, and commitment. 

Movements are borne 

out of pathos, 

not petitions. 

They're peopled by 

intrepid insurgents,

not polite protesters.

A movement is more of siege than of soiree.

Unless you're a Big Green like the Sierra Club, or a wee little aspiring greenie like Clean Water Action.  

So, like Bernhardt's argument before him, Sooy's fallacious reasoning only shows us that we can do far better than settle for the thin gray gruel of "moratoriums" and "halts" and pleading with governor gas wolves.

The clear direction of reason points one way only: 

a ban that excises the gas industry from the state in defense of the right to clean air and water and in recognition of our moral duty to act to stem the effects of climate change for our future kin.

Anything short of that demand, and our having our cake and eating it too is throwing out the baby with the bath water.

A baby that's the planet.

Imagine: 100 "Ban Fracking Now!" Protesters Inside the Inauguration of Governor Gas Wolf

Photo Wendy Lynne Lee

*Update: it has been brought to my attention that Maya van Rossum of the Delaware River Keepers does mention the word "ban" in her press conference presentation at the inauguration of Governor Wolf. I am happy to make that correction; thank you to David Wood. Here then are my questions for the august Delaware River Keepers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?x-yt-ts=1422327029&x-yt-cl=84838260&v=7xo7rcT5ElQ

1. Why--as DRK does not need Pennsylvanians Against Fracking, Food and Water Watch, and Clean Water Action--to advance their legal strategies for reaching a ban on fracking--are they on the PAF board of directors? This can only muddy the DRK message, and it cannot advance their mission. 

2. Will DRK--now that it's clear the pipeline industry will use the legal decision against them with respect to compounding potential impacts across a pipeline corridor to law-suit proof their applications to FERC--alter its strategy consistent with its mission?

***********************************************************
Among the best moments of Tom Wolf's inauguration was being able to get up in the middle of his first speech as Pennsylvania governor and shoot a dozen pictures of history when a friend and ally--who has worked tirelessly for his fellows to end the catastrophe that is fracking--stood up for us all to demand it be banned. For that act of courage, he was arrested while Governor Gas Wolf looked smugly on.

Photo Wendy Lynne Lee

This act of nonviolent civil disobedience is made all the more striking by comparison to the fact that the main organizers of the protest going on outside the inaugural venue cannot even bring themselves to whisper the word "ban," let alone call for one--although they affect a pretense to being serious about doing something about fracking--using words like "halt" or "moratorium" just well enough that many well-intended folks are bamboozled.

Don't get me wrong.

There were a couple of hundred of committed, well-meaning people just outside in the designated "free speech zone" assigned to protest. They were loud. They were awesome. And even though news station WBRE completely ignored them, you could not fail to hear folks chanting "Ban Fracking Now!" in the background of the governor's address.

Photo Wendy Lynne Lee

These are good folks who spent their own time and money thinking that they're doing something right.

It's the organizers of that "action" who must be called out--for the sake of the folks above. 

I have thought long and hard about this, and I think the only conclusions that can be drawn about:

1. why the word "ban" has been effectively "banned" 

2. why these so-called leaders weren't inside risking arrest with the rest of us

are that while the leaders of Pennsylvanians Against Fracking (PAF), Food and Water Watch (FWW), Clean Water Action (CWA)--and even the august Delaware River Keepers (DRK) are happy to see other people do the hard work and absorb the hard consequences entailed by acts of civil disobedience, they have

 1. Neither the stomach for what they know must be undertaken as nonviolent civil disobedience to end the conversion of the state into an industrialized gas factory, 

2. Nor the guts to see that the harms perpetrated by this industry are part and parcel of a system that advantages them. 

3. Nor the foresight to see that legal victories--like those of the DRK concerning cumulative impacts ignored by the Federal Regulatory Energy Commission (FERC)--are pyrrhic. Their ultimate effect is instruction to the gas companies about how to draft an airtight application next time.

4. Nor the conviction that fracking really could be ended.

If they held any or all of 1-4, they'd have been inside the inaugural venue getting ready to call out the words "BAN FRACKING NOW!" instead of speechifying, jostling for mic time, or schmoozing it up with Josh Fox. 

Photo Wendy Lynne Lee

Imagine what could have been accomplished had 100 people been inside that venue demanding a ban at the top of their lungs. Imagine that news story. 

Why don't we make national news headlines? Because not enough of us do anything to make national news headlines.

This is not to say that everyone should have been inside. There are good reasons for avoiding that risk--for some folks. I get that.

But then there are lame-ass excuses. 

And for pretty much anyone who wants to be in front of a microphone decrying the evils of fracking, avoiding that risk is nothing but excuse.

Photo Wendy Lynne Lee

Truth is, these would-be leaders simply cannot bring themselves to forfeit the benefits of playing a game that derives its own legitimacy from party politics, the legal system, the economic system. 

Moreover, they're positively advantaged by the "fractivist game" getting to appear like the "rational folks"  compared to the "radicals." This advances their status, allows them to take credit for the pretense of a movement as if sign-ons were members, as if "halt" meant "ban," and as if anything short of a siege of every site relevant to the ongoing destruction of this industry will really make a difference to a governor whose spending agenda depends on gas revenues.

Photo Wendy Lynne Lee

I am sick to death of this charade. 

This is wrong, and it must be called out as wrong. 

It's misleading when folks living in the shale fields don't have this kind of time.

It exhausts vital energy we manifestly cannot afford to waste. 

It's dishonest--especially to those folks who made the trip to Harrisburg to stand in the cold, hold signs, and make a din just behind the inaugural speeches.  

Photo Wendy Lynne Lee

It's wrong because while we among the "radicals" are doing the real work of what could be a movement but isn't, these "fractivist leaders" effectively reinforce a system that advantages the gas-government-law enforcement-private security firm network that criminalizes the "radicals." 

How do they do that? Through the careful crafting of actions that insulate themselves at press conferences and protests, through the use of all the impotent avenues of petitions, comment periods, and speeches at hearings--and through draping themselves in well-meaning folks who are suckered into believing that the system will work.

Photo Wendy Lynne Lee

The new governor then gets to maintain the illusion that he's dealing with real grassroots environmental organizations, and is thereby legitimated in not only ignoring the "radicals," but consigning us to "justifiable" arrests for disruption.

By orchestrated contrast, in other words, PAF and company make sure the authorities know they're not us.

And the gas industry laughs at how fractured the movement is, and carries on. 

All of this was driven home for me by a Op-Ed written for Governor Wolf's inauguration by FWW's Senior Political Organizer, Sam Bernhardt deceptively titled " Governor Wolf, ban fracking."

Bernhardt decisively ends any speculation about whether FWW stands for a ban in the very first sentence:

If Gov-elect Tom Wolf is serious about giving our state a fresh start, he needs to make a moratorium on fracking a top priority for his new administration.

A moratorium is not a ban. It's not another name for a ban. It's not like a ban. It's not on its way to a ban.

First, a moratorium exists for the sake of studying the effects of something--and then deciding whether to continue it. New York had a moratorium. They surveyed all the extant health studies. They determined that these were sufficient to make their moratorium permanent. Unless Pennsylvanians are a different species of animal from New Yorkers, the health studies that applied to them apply to us. A moratorium is thus redundant. 

Second, the only reason, therefore, to cling to moratorium language is because somehow the word "ban" is just too hot.

If Bernhardt meant "ban," he'd have said "ban." 

"Moratorium" is a weasel word the intention of which is to soften the message for a recalcitrant governor and thereby retain political access.

Photo Wendy Lynne Lee

Notably, none of the speakers I heard at the press conference prior to the inauguration--Karen Feridun (PAF), Maya van Rossum (DRK), and Sam Bernhardt (FWW)--used the word "ban." It was as if they all had exchanged reassurances before the event that they were going to use the word "halt" or "moratorium"--and they stuck to their script.

Bernhardt actually weasels even more a few lines later when he claims that "Wolf is stepping into a landscape where he would be hard-pressed to justify not placing a moratorium on new fracking" (my emphasis). So--FWW's position is apparently not to do anything about the fracking already going on--its infrastructure--the pipelines, the compressors, etc. All the moratorium aims at are new permits--leaving the industry in tact--and in your yard. Combine this with--as Bernhardt mentions in passing--Wolf's 5% extraction tax, and what you get is an industry more determined than ever to make those wells produce--at the cost of your health.

Fourth, Bernhardt insists that "[o]ne of the biggest challenges  [Wolf] faces is maintaining the support of an emboldened Progressive movement in Pennsylvania," and that "nothing short of a moratorium will keep that base together for four years." We have no reason to believe that. After all, even those strongly opposed to fracking voted for Governor Gas Wolf--and even after they knew he'd taken money from the gas industry. Many issues may keep or break the Progressive movement, but the fact is that folks voted for Wolf because he wasn't the other "Tom," and being a "progressive had little to do with it. 

The crazy thing is that Bernhardt acknowledges precisely this point earlier in the Op-Ed: "being the guy whose last name was not Corbett turned out to be a big help [to Wolf's election]." So--which is it Mr. Bernhardt? That Progressives actually care about getting a moratorium--or that Wolf can look forward to being re-elected so long as he's not more disastrous than Corbett? Given the modest protest turnout at this inaugural event, we have no reason to think fracking really matters to "progressives."

Fifth, turning to propaganda, Bernhardt claims that "the statewide anti-fracking movement is growing," and that "last year, dozens of Pennsylvania environmental, health, faith, and community groups came together to form Pennsylvanians Against Fracking."

So, where were they Mr. Bernhardt?

Signing a "Wanna be a member?" sign-on page is not "coming together" any more than "moratorium" means "ban." If "coming together" means nothing more than more protests with all the same people, more petitions, more OP-Eds like Mr. Bernhardt's, then what we can expect is that we'll see more fracking--as soon as the price of gas goes back up. 

Lastly, Bernhardt claims--rightly--that the "real game changer" was Cuomo's decision to ban fracking in New York. Bernhardt asks: "Are New Yorker's health and safety more valuable than our own?"

If you didn't effectively think so, Mr. Bernhardt, you'd have been inside Wolf's inaugural festivities calling out at the top of your lungs for a ban.

Fact is, Governor Gas Wolf has about a zero chance of getting anything even connected to fracking passed through a solid Republican State House. So while we're dithering about asking for "moratoriums," the state will continue to be raped, our kid's futures despoiled by Republicans who drink LNG for breakfast.

We have, in other words, 

nothing to lose by going 

whole-hog, 

damn the torpedoes, 

all out, 

hell bent for leather 

for a ban.

So why aren't we? Is the menu at the governor's luncheon for environmentalists really that good?

For photographs of some of the inaugural events, please go here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/wendylynnelee/sets/72157650332258906/

For more of Food and Water Watch, go here: http://thewrenchphilosleft.blogspot.com/2014/09/selling-out-movement-to-guarantee-seat.html.

Having our Cake and Eating it Too: Ex-PennFuture President, Jan Jarrett Throws a Tantrum

Jan Jarrett--thirteen-years-and-ousted president of the green-washing faux environmental group PennFuture-- got one thing right when she insisted that 

Pennsylvania’s mainstream environmental organizations are looking forward to working with the Wolf Administration to strengthen gas drilling oversight and improve regulations, work for cleaner air and water and begin to address Pennsylvania’s climate change challenges. (Jan Jarrett's Ad Hoc Blog: Fractivist foolishness)

If she's referring to her friends over at the Sierra Club, she couldn't be more on the dollar. As I have shown, the Sierra Club is so covetous of their image with the "have my frack cake and eat it too" governor that they not only refuse to raise a protest sign at Wolf's inauguration asking him nicely not to continue poisoning Pennsylvanians, they don't even want their members wearing Sierra Club hats and T-Shirts at the event--lest it offend the governor's delicate sensibilities and compromise their photo-ops with their new guy.
  

That "strengthening gas drilling oversight" and addressing climate change form a demonstrably contradictory set of claims is apparently lost on these Big Greenies; they just

don't seem to get it that the only effective way to address climate change is for the gas to stay in the ground. Everything else is a denial-soaked half measure that achieves nothing more than kicking the ticking climate bomb down the road where it will explode on our grandchildren.

It's fortuitous that keeping that same gas in the ground is also the best way to protect the health of Pennsylvania citizens, respect community' rights to self-determination, and act  like we care enough to behave responsibly toward the future.

But no matter.

For Big Greens like PennFuture and the Sierra Club Pennsylvanians clearly just don't rate as highly as do New Yorkers who can sleep at least a little bit better at night knowing that they won't wake up to frack pad flaring.

Jarrett of course, does get all this, and that's what likely fueled her nasty-gram to folks planning to protest the Gas Wolf Governor's inauguration:

Groups that cling to the futile hope that Pennsylvania will ban drilling for natural gas are planning to throw a tantrum during Governor-elect Wolf’s inauguration. According to an organizing website, these groups are urging people to disrupt the ceremonies to the point of being arrested.

 There are a couple of observations to make about this:

First, Jarrett obviously doesn't have a clue about the "groups" she's talking about. She doesn't identify the "organizing website" (any more than she identifies "mainstream environmental organizations"), and if--as is most likely--she means Pennsylvanians Against Fracking, or PA Food and Water Watch, or Clean Water Action, she's got nothing to worry about. These folks have no more stomach for the civil disobedience Jarrett refers to as "tantrum throwing" than do the Sierra Club members who stand foursquare behind a policy forbidding it--insuring a future of irrelevance for its mostly white, mostly affluent members. 

Indeed, for however much Jarrett's having some angst over whether the inauguration will be the suave affair she hopes, as many of the folks she accuses of "tantrum throwing" voted for Wolf as did PennFuture people, and their 'I "heart" Wolf" "photo-op action is a far cry from "the point of being arrested." 

Photo Michael Badges-Canning

Indeed, if holding up signs and smiling for a camera is enough to get arrested, all future hope for a democracy is dead dead dead.

But--second--this brings us to a crucial question:

What sort of wholesale abdication of respect for the first amendment does it take to label an exercise of the right to free expression--especially for the sake of calling attention to systemic injustice--"tantrum throwing"? 

Answer: When it threatens to upset the apparently fragile relationship between a governor already compromised by dirty campaign donations and frack-gas-extaction-friendly environmental transition team appointments, and Big Greenies worried they'll be identified as "radicals."

According to Jarrett's logic, it's not only futile to demand a ban on natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania, if you do you're just throwing a tantrum--and if you do that during the governor's inauguration... well, shame shame. 

That is precisely the safe and gutless reasoning that has gotten us:

Deforestation

Desertification

Endless Pollution

Species Extinction

and

Climate Change.

Let's consider an analogy:

Schman Schmarrett: 

Groups that cling to the futile hope that Schmensylvania will ban the compulsory relocation of indigenous peoples on arid reservation sites are planning to throw a tantrum during Governor-elect Schmolf’s inauguration. According to an organizing website, these groups are urging people to disrupt the ceremonies to the point of being arrested.

No one would deny that the forced relocation of any people is wrong. We'd all applaud the groups who worked to bring attention to this egregious injustice, and if that involved the nonviolent noisy disruption of a governor who claimed something completely idiotic like that we could have our cake--force people onto reservations--and eat it too--make life better for everyone, we'd all be on board.

So what makes fracking different?

Not much, I'd say.

Indeed, the absurd argument that we can have our cake--protect state forests and parks by reinstating a trampled moratorium, and eat it too--frack everything else-- is precisely what Governor Wolf's Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) appointment--John Quigley--and Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) appointment--PennFuture's Cindy Dunn are for. 

But this reasoning is just as idiotic as is the argument for forceably relocating indigenous peoples:

1. Many of the state parks, games lands, and forest are already fracked to smithereens. While "restoring" a trampled moratorium might staunch some tiny bit of that blood-letting, what it preserves amounts to nothing but fenced in dioramas unless we stop the destruction of the rest of the state.

2. The idea that we can frack to smitherines the rest of the state and preserve the state parks, etc. at the same time defies reason. It defies everything we have ever known about the myriad and complex interdependencies of ecologies, and it pretends in an almost psychotic fashion that what happens outside the forests does not happen inside the forests. That is nuts--and we will pay for this nonsense.

3. If you have any doubt whatever about how much of the state forests are already lost, please see: https://www.flickr.com/…/wendylynne…/sets/72157645174931918/

4. A compelling case can be made for the claim that the effort to preserve what amount to woodlots and picnic parks over the protections of the property rights of ordinary citizens, over the rights of communities to self-determination, and over the rights of the people of the Susquehanna River Basin, is racist and classist. The same people who stand to benefit--who have long had far more access and power than many of the rest of us--SC club members included--work with a corrupt state and a corrupt industry to "preserve" their hiking trails--but they are more than happy to trade your yard for the preservation of their "special places" because you may be poorer, darker skinned, less affluent. And that makes them as much your adversary as is the state and the industry--even more so. 

So, if what Jarrett's calling a "tantrum" is resistance to activities whose manifest illogic both cannot survive any rational or moral scrunity and clearly causes real and enduring harm to those most vulnerable, then for all practical purposes, Jarrett is Schmarrett, Wolf is Schmolf--Quigley is Schmigley, and Dunn is Schnunn.

I'd argue, in fact, that until we see the very real avenues of comparison between the harms caused by fracking--and it's corrupted political infrastructure--and other forms of gross injustice--racism, antisemitism, classism, and the exploitation of indigenous peoples, we are never going to become an effective force for bringing an end to these harms, not to mention reclaiming the environmental justice owed to them.

To the reader who rightly points out that we have an ugly history in the United States of forcing people onto abandoned land--and then using a lame euphemism to describe it--"reservation" (as if it were a "special place" reserved just for them)--I say, absolutely. Perhaps it seems inappropriate to draw such comparisons. 

I understand.

But the point is not necessarily to compare amounts of harm.

The point is to indict the system that produces it--over and over--and call out its self-appointed talking heads--Jarrett--who'd try to shame us into silence when we demand an end to the harm.

The irony is that Jarrett really just gives voice to what many already believe--that actually exercising your civil rights is somehow unseemly, impolite, inappropriate.

Of course it is.

That's why we drafted a Bill of Rights to protect it.