No Frack Ohio

Contact: LuAnne Kozma, Ban Michigan Fracking

Email: info@banmichiganfracking.org

Novi, Mich.—A new anti-fracking grassroots activist group, “Ban Michigan Fracking,” organized this week to lead the movement for a statewide ban on fracking for shale or “natural” gas. And fresh from their success in preventing the Delaware River Basin Commission from altering its rules to allow fracking in the headwaters of that mighty river, a host of east-coast and Midwest anti-fracking organizations today welcomed “Ban Michigan Fracking” into the fold.

Ban Michigan Fracking formed to educate, advocate and organize to ban fracking and raise awareness of the dangers of gas drilling to the state’s economy, to the environment and to the health and safety of its people. Ban Michigan Fracking sees as its immediate task the critiquing of current legislation on fracking and water withdrawals that would actually facilitate fracking in the state.

Ban Michigan Fracking spokesperson LuAnne Kozma said, “We have learned from the experience of our sister-organizations in the east that only the total banning of this dangerous process can excite and mobilize people. The halfway measures that pretend to deal with fracking are really designed to fracture our movement and get us bogged down in regulatory detail. We know enough now to demand a ban and we stand with the majority of the informed public in telling our legislators to represent us and not corporate polluters threatening our communities and our way of life.”

Grassroots organizations on the east coast and in the Midwest agreed with that assessment. Maura Stephens, a co-founder of Coalition to Protect New York, extended a welcome to Ban Michigan Fracking: “Interstate solidarity and co-operation is the next, necessary level in our struggle against the corporations that would turn our country into a polluted resource colony.” In Pennsylvania, John Detwiler, of the group Marcellus Protest, pointed out “We’re not ‘naïve’ or ‘emotional’, as pro-drilling propaganda paints us: we see what this industry has already done to other Americans. Pennsylvania shows why our grassroots movement to ban hydrofracturing is gaining national momentum – we cannot rely on so-called regulation by our state government.”