‘You don’t have an oil and gas problem; you have a democracy problem’
This article by Anthony Hahn appeared in the Daily Camera, March 5th, 2018.
Calls for an outright fracking ban took center stage at a community forum with representatives of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund on Monday night — a meeting heralded by one of Lafayette’s ardent anti-fracking activists as “day one in the real resistance.”
The majority of the meeting, which activists in attendance called “almost five years in the making,” was dedicated to CELDF representative Thomas Linzey fielding questions from a handful of citizens on how a ban on oil and gas development in Lafayette could play out.
The organization is proposing to fund and mount a defense on such a ban via the city’s Climate Bill of Rights; before a last-minute amendment last March, the bill sanctioned protection for direct action protest and civil disobedience in the face of oil and gas protest.
“You’re a creature of the state; they can abolish you tomorrow,” Linzey told more than 160 residents in attendance in the Lafayette Public Library basement on Monday. “They don’t see you living in the municipality. Who does exist? Corporations.
“The law is not on your side. That means you have to make it.” MORE…