Grant Township, Pennsylvania, population 741, has became the front line of a radical new environmental movement – and they’re not backing down. Rolling Stone magazine’s first-ever major story about the Community Rights movement, with a focus on the courageous residents of Grant Township, Pennsylvania, who are continuing to make national history as they defend their right to protect themselves and their local lands from corporate toxins and radioactive wastes produced by the fracking industry, and their equally necessary right to local community self-government and enforceable rights for nature.
On October 24th, 2012, several agents from Pennsylvania General Energy, an oil-and-gas exploration company, met privately with local officials from the rural western Pennsylvania community of Grant Township. Fracking was booming in Pennsylvania, and PGE had been trucking tens of thousands of gallons of fracking wastewater to faraway injection wells in Ohio. Developing an injection well somewhere in Pennsylvania could save the company around $2 million a year, and Grant Township, a swath of woods and hayfields slightly larger than Manhattan and populated by a mere 741 people, seemed like an especially good spot.