We've been trying to get the word out. We've had very visible protest actions at drilling sites and outside the offices of drilling companies. We've been cussed at, flipped off, called names. We've been effectively ignored by our city council (Greeley). The county commissioners have screamed at our lecturers (geologists and physicists) to shut them up at public events. Our newspaper (The Greeley Tribune) has become little more than the public relations newsletter for the oil and gas industry. We have been repeatedly lied to about the contents of the fracking fluids. We have been accused of ignorance about the realities of fracking, told that things like benzene are 'naturally occurring' and therefore cannot be harmful. When we presented information about Pavillion, Wyoming, and the deadly effects of fracking on that destroyed community, our mayor told us the information was 'irrelevant.' The mayor's wife, by the way, is the current president of the University of Northern Colorado, and she has recently sold the rights to drill horizontally under the campus (no, the student body wasn't consulted about whether or not they wanted that kind of exposure).
We're moving toward 20,000 wells in the county, and the commissioners are completely in thrall to the oil/gas industry. Our "representative", Cory Gardner (R), is swimming is such deep oil money that it's actually gotten significant attention in DC.
The money coming into the community is short-term, as are the jobs. The water they are taking from the agricultural community is leaving farmers with growing piles of dusty earth. Our aquifer is at historically low levels. And we're accused of being alarmists. Damned right we are, with good reason. Scientists who have tried and tried and tried to get through the layers of lobbyists, with little success, are now viewing us as 'worst case scenario' in the making.
If you don't live here, you will still be impacted. The water that is poisoned does not stop flowing at the state line, it eventually finds its way into other water supplies. This isn't Vegas, and what happens here does not stay here. This is a national problem, part of a growing global poisoning. It's not about energy, it's about money and lots of it, enough money to make it easy for them to dismiss the destruction of the environment, enough to make it possible to not care about the lives of millions. What happens here will clobber those living half a continent away and then some.
Please help us get the word out! Please.
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