*In case you did not see this on Facebook,* *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*
Ellwood City Ledger: Business in Lawrence County, PA
Published: Saturday, October 11, 2014 3:00 pm | *Updated: 6:25 pm, Sun Oct
12, 2014.*
AP Bookmark AP Byline By Eric Poole epoole(a)ellwoodcityledger.com* | *
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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. 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.
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. 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.” 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!”
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.” 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. *(In the meantime she spoke at
several gatherings as part of her commitment to Citizens' Climate Lobby and
the GMCA.)*
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. 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.
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.”
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.
[image: Inline image 1]
Maggie Henry, center, and David
