<div dir="ltr"><i>In case you did not see this on Facebook,</i> <i>I am sending out this terrific/terrible story of the kind of chaos that is reigning in the East where there never have been earthquakes before in our time. LZ</i><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr"><div><div class="h5"><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr"><div><i><br></i></div><div>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(83,83,83)">Ellwood City
Ledger: Business in Lawrence County, PA</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(83,83,83)"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(83,83,83)">Published:
Saturday, October 11, 2014 3:00 pm | <i>Updated: 6:25 pm, Sun Oct 12, 2014.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(83,83,83)">AP Bookmark AP Byline By Eric Poole </span><a href="mailto:epoole@ellwoodcityledger.com" target="_blank"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(83,83,83);text-decoration:none">epoole@ellwoodcityledger.com</span></a><b><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(83,83,83)"> | </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><b><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(83,83,83)"> </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-family:Arial">NORTH BEAVER TWP. -- This is the last harvest
for Maggie Henry at the farm that has been in her family for more than a
century. “This farm has been in the family for five generations,” she said
Friday night through sobs. “And there won’t be a sixth.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-family:Arial">Henry herself has been at the farm for
decades. She stayed during the 1980s and 1990s when other farms across the
United States failed because they couldn’t balance the books. She stayed in
2008 when her husband, who works as a truck driver, had to follow the job to
State College when recession closed his local terminal.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-family:Arial">But now Henry is leaving, because she doesn’t
much care for some of her new neighbors. North Beaver Township is one of
Lawrence County’s most active municipalities for Marcellus shale natural gas
drilling, including a well pad near her house.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-family:Arial">Last year, the township supervisors approved
plans for a natural-gas-fired electric power plant, to be built a few miles
from Henry’s farm near Mohawk Junior-Senior High School. It all turned Henry
into an anti-fracking activist.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-family:Arial">On Wednesday, Philadelphia City Paper
reported that state police and a private security firm working for drilling
companies are sharing information -- including, in at least one case, a
photograph of Maggie Henry, Lawrence County farmer, at a protest in
Philadelphia.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-family:Arial">Henry said it's all driven her out of her
home as well, a home she doesn’t want to leave, a home where she once dreamed
of helping care for her grandchildren as her own kids took over operating the
farm. “I thought that they’d play in the pastures like my kids did,” she said.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-family:Arial"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-family:Arial">But Maggie Henry still had one order of
business before leaving Lawrence County for good. On Friday afternoon, when the
Great March for Climate Action crossed the state line into Pennsylvania, she
was there to greet them. “These people have walked across the country,” she
said. “How could I not open my home to them?”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-family:Arial">In preparation for her departure, Henry
downsized her crops this year. She didn’t participate in any of the area’s
farmers markets and grew mostly heirloom tomatoes that she plans to take with
her to central Pennsylvania. Those tomatoes thrived, and they formed much of
the meal Henry helped prepare for about 50 marchers between the ages of 3 and
77, who pitched tents in her yard overnight before the march to Butler on
Saturday.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-family:Arial">Their schedule calls for them to be in
Pittsburgh on Tuesday and at the march’s completion Nov. 1 in Washington, D.C.,
almost eight months to the day after it began March 1 in Los Angeles. “First,
we’ll celebrate the fact that we made it,” said Jimmy Betts, one of the March
organizers, about the group’s plans when they reach the nation’s capital.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-family:Arial"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-family:Arial">Then they will hold teach-ins and protests at
the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which is in charge of overseeing
energy policy, including transportation of fossil fuels on the rails.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-family:Arial">Betts said, as a leader, the March has left
him feeling perpetually “unprepared.” He said organizers could have done more
to get ready, specifically in terms of outreach, by holding events to engage
and inform people in the towns he has traveled through, which could have helped
the march get more media attention.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-family:Arial">But he has been consistently impressed by the
marchers’ ability to adjust to the challenges, he said. “It’s not just about
walking across the country. This has become a resilient community, a diverse
community.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-family:Arial"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-family:Arial">On Friday morning, the confluence of the
march’s cause and Maggie Henry’s cause helped the group engage in the kind of
effort that Betts had envisioned for the event in the first place. Some of the
marchers took part in a silent protest at the Youngstown/Warren Regional
Chamber of Commerce.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-family:Arial">Michael Cartwright, a marcher from Grosse
Pointe Woods, Mich., said the chamber staff’s response ranged from apathy to
passive-aggressive hostility -- one person loudly slammed an office door during
their protest. “We did a moment of silence,” Cartwright said. “They just kind
of ignored us.” Shortly after that, security arrived and escorted the marchers
out of the offices.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-family:Arial"><br></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-family:Arial">Business leaders in Marcellus shale lands -- which run from
western New York, through western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio into West
Virginia and Kentucky -- have seen development of natural gas as a boon. </span><span style="font-family:Arial">In Lawrence and Beaver counties, politicians
and businessmen have called it an opportunity not seen in the region since the
collapse of Big Steel, with the prospect of the electric plant in North Beaver
Township and a factory in Beaver County to refine natural gas into vehicle fuel
a return to regional economic prosperity.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-family:Arial"><br></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-family:Arial">As a farmer herself, Henry understands how
seductive six-figure payments for drilling leases can be to farmers who have
scrabbled for generations of being land-rich and cash poor. But she believes
the cost for that money -- in the form of water and air pollution, water waste
injection-related earthquakes and release of greenhouse gases -- is too great. </span><span style="font-family:Arial">So do the marchers. John Jorgenson, a science
teacher from Tucson, Ariz., has been on the March from its beginning. “I teach
at-risk teens,” he said. “But all of our teens are at risk from this horrendous
deal coming down.” </span><span style="font-family:Arial">Jorgenson and fellow marcher Anita Payne, who
lives in Ontario near Canada’s capital of Ottawa, said the March has
encountered people who are dependent on the burning of fossil fuels for their
livelihood or their lifestyle. “A truck driver yelled, ‘Climate change is a
lie,’” Payne said. “If I’d been fast enough, I’d have yelled, ‘And the Earth is
flat, too!”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-family:Arial"><br></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-family:Arial">In the Midwest, Jorgenson said the marchers
have gotten “coal-rolled” -- a technically illegal alteration that allows
diesel vehicles to belch almost pure soot from smokestacks as a protest against
environmental regulations. But he said the marchers also have encountered
people like a Nebraska farmer, a self-described political conservative who
nonetheless depends on a dependable consistent climate for his livelihood. “The
stereotypes don’t fit anymore,” Jorgenson said. “He knew something was wrong.” </span><span style="font-family:Arial">Warming -- the weather kind, not the climate kind -- kept
Payne off the march through most of the summer. Being from northeast Canada,
she temporarily dropped out over the summer and rejoined it outside Chicago. “I
wanted to do the first 500 miles and the last 500 miles,” she said. </span><i style="font-family:Arial">(In the meantime she spoke at several gatherings as part of her commitment to Citizens' Climate Lobby and the GMCA.)</i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><i style="font-family:Arial"><br></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-family:Arial">Sarah Spain, an Iowa native, admitted she
can’t force her fellow marchers to wear fluorescent vests, but she strongly
recommends that they do. The marchers can’t walk on the interstate highways --
which prohibit non-motorized vehicles -- so they have walked more than 2,000
miles on state and local roads, such as Columbiana Road, which runs past
Henry’s house. Although the marchers said no day is typical, they usually go 15
to 20 miles a day, sleeping in campgrounds and parks, or with sympathetic
residents like Henry. </span><span style="font-family:Arial">Safety is a primary objective, and to this
point of the march, there has been only one incident, said Jorgenson. A driver
asleep at the wheel went off the road earlier this month outside Toledo, Ohio,
and struck a hand-cart and one of the marchers. The cart was destroyed, and the
accident’s impact pitched the marcher onto a nearby lawn. But she was bruised
and not in any way broken. “She was up the next day with a bullhorn,” Jorgenson
said.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-family:Arial"><br></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-family:Arial">Heading into the march’s homestretch, he said
that an experience that could have been draining has turned out to be just the
opposite because of encounters like the one near Albuquerque, N.M., where a
fellow marcher turned to him and asked why he signed on for the march. As if on
cue, a passer-by provided the answer. “A shopkeeper came out and said, ‘It’s
about time someone did this.’” Jorgenson said. “I said, ‘That’s why I’m here.”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-family:Arial"><br></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-family:Arial">And it was for the marchers that Maggie Henry
opened her home Friday night during an emotional time in her life -- she plans
soon to have her modular home dismantled and transported to her new home. With
a weekend husband who works halfway across the state five days a week, she
enjoyed the crowd -- including a family of fire eaters from Butler County who
came in to provide entertainment -- that brought life to her farm. “For me this
is a good day, having these people around,” she said.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-family:Arial"><br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-family:Arial"><br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-family:Arial"><br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-family:Arial"><img src="cid:ii_14929b9aa099b1d5" alt="Inline image 1" width="469" height="298"><br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-family:Arial">Maggie Henry, center, and David</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-family:Arial"><br></span></p>
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