The following are Jeanne Blackwell's comments after the CA Fracking Tour panel spoke and educated a room full of 200 citizens from San Luis Obispo, on April 16th held in the appropriate venue, the SLO Grange Hall. I asked Jeanne if I could turn her summary into an article and post it for more to see and read about it…


We learned what fracking is, what it does to our precious resources, what HAS happened and IS happening in many communities just like ours across the country.

We have to make a choice and we have to make it now. Why now?  Because we are sitting on the largest oil reserve in the US states and the biggest, most powerful, corporation in the world, Halliburton of Deep Water Horizon fame, AKA EXCELERON, PXP, names change, it’s all Halliburton, is here ready to take it off our hands.  They don’t take no for an answer, they don’t have to tell the truth, and they don’t play fair.

By Karen Charman on Jan 29, 2013

The history of liberty is a history of resistance—

Woodrow Wilson

While New Yorkers anxiously await Governor Andrew Cuomo’s decision on whether to lift the state’s de facto moratorium on high-volume slick-water horizontal hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” Woodstock, the iconic counter-culture capital of the world, has become the first municipality to call for legislation to make fracking a Class C felony.

Woodstock’s action is just one small town’s response to a rapidly escalating global war over fracking. To both sides in this war—environmentalists and citizens who oppose fracking on the one side and the gas industry and its supporters on the other—the upcoming ruling to allow or ban fracking in New York is being viewed as (you should pardon the expression) a watershed event.

Decisions made in Albany and in towns like Woodstock will likely determine whether fracking goes full steam ahead everywhere, or whether its momentum can be slowed or even stopped. New York, after all, has a rich history of environmental activism and democratic movements, and anti-fracking activism has spread like wildfire over the last couple of years. New York is also home to abundant supplies of clean freshwater, an essential resource that is in crisis globally and that could be endangered by the practice.

Fracking? Please Explain

On January 15, the Woodstock Town Board unanimously passed a resolution to petition New York State to introduce New York Public Law #1—which would impose stiff penalties for fracking and related activities. Before taking this step, the Woodstock Town Board took two others: banning fracking within its borders and outlawing the use of frackwaste fluid, some of which is known as “brine” (because of its heavy salt content), on its roads. This material is used as a de-icing agent in the winter and for dust control on dirt roads in the summer. Despite the fact that brine from oil and gas wells (whether fracked or not) is laden with heavy metals, toxic chemicals, and radioactivity, since 2008 the Department of Environmental Conservation has granted approval for it to be spread on roads in the western part of the state.

By: Sterling Allan