After a seven-year battle, Grant Township fought off a permit for an injection well. “Fights like ours should mushroom all around Pennsylvania,” says town supervisor
This article by Justin Noble appeared in Rolling Stone magazine on April 1st, 2020.
An unlikely crew of environmentalists who took on the powerful Pennsylvania fracking industry in a David vs. Goliath battle to keep an injection well out of their community have notched an important victory in their fight.
Using a novel strategy — seeking legal rights for nature itself — the rural western Pennsylvania community of Grant Township has been battling for seven years to stop the permit for the injection well, which would have brought a 24/7 parade of trucks carrying brine, a toxic byproduct of oil-and-gas drilling that would be shot down the well and into a rock layer deep beneath the farms and woods in the area.
Earlier this month, in a stunning reversal, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), which in 2017 sued Grant Township for interfering with the agency’s authority to administer state oil-and-gas policy, revoked the permit for the injection well.
“This decision is soooooo delicious,” says Stacy Long, a graphic designer and township supervisor who together with her mother, Judy Wanchisn, a retired elementary-school teacher, helped lead the charge to stop the well. “I am hopeful that the haters and naysayers will take note, and that communities will be inspired with what’s just happened and run with it. Fights like ours should mushroom all around Pennsylvania.”
(To read the rest of this article at Rolling Stone Magazine’s website please click HERE.)