Not in Our Backyards

I have a story in this month’s Outside magazine about the first county in the country to ban fracking. It’s an unlikely new epicenter for the fracking fight–the county is poor and rural, with just 5,000 people and no stoplights. The Community Legal Defense Fund, an environmental advocacy group from Pennsylvania, helped Mora County draft a community rights ordinance that grants the county the right to prevent corporations from drilling for oil and gas. A subsidiary of Shell and a petroleum producers associaiton have both sued the county, arguing the ordinance violates their corporate personhood and is therefore unconstitutional. The case may take years to resolve in the courts, but in the meantime the rest of the country is looking on to see if a community’s rights will trump a corporation’s. You can read the story here.

Illustration by: Shout