The following was submitted as “comment” to the New York Times Dot Earth feature, Andrew Revkin’s article, “The Inevitable Slow Path To New York Shale Gas,”
(http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/31/the-inevitable-slow-path-to-fracking-in-new-york/)
I’d like to focus on the accusation made by the fracking proponents that what opposition to fracking amounts to is “not in my back yard”-NIMBY. It is striking that this acronym has been converted into a noun to be used as a form of ridicule and name-calling as if not wantIng a drill rig, compressor station, transmission lines, deep injection well, or other fracking infrastructure in one’s “back yard” were morally objectionable or elitist.
While it’s true that unless we in the opposition are willing to put our money, time, and energy into the conversion to renewables as well as into significant conservation we DO risk the hypocrisy evinced by the NIMBY epithet, the fact of the matter is that many of us are working very hard to use less, do much more with less, convert, recycle, compost, and actively invest and use renewables-in addition to our sustained activism against fracking.
Our opposition cannot be read and dismissed as NIMBY, but rather must be understood as Not In Anyone’s Back Yard-or on anyone’s farm, or in anyone’s orchard, or in anyone’s lake, or on anyone’s university lands, or in anyone’s state park, game lands, or forest lands, or next to anyone’s daycare center or public school or hospital or nursing home, etc.
The NIMBY argument is a strategy to divide communities by making it seem as if those opposed to fracking are really just opposed where it concerns their properties, water, air. This is absurd. There’s no such thing as “their/our” water or air. While there may be something called “my property,” because it can clearly be compromised both in market value and in the quality of things like water, soil, and air, there is no such thing as a “my property” that is isolable from “your property” in any other way than the limited rights that accrue to my rightful name on a deed. If I go to sell it, it’s value may be compromised.
The NIMBY strategy aims at turning citizen against citizen by making it seem that some “we” are happy to sacrifice some “other” so long as this protects “our” interests. But this characterizes not the anti-fracking acrtivists, but rather, for example, Pennsylvania’s Governor Corbett who is quite willing to exempt the counties of his own fracking friends from fracking. Take, for example, Bucks County-the home of Nick De Benedictis, exempt from the provisions of the unconstitutional Act 13 which strips municipalities of the right to self-determination qua drill rigs and the like.
We in the anti-fracking movement MUST insure that ALL of our voices are heard regardless class, wealth, property status. “Damn right!” we must say in as unified a voice as possible. “Damn right! Not in my back yard! My back yard is the planet!”
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Little do the name callers know that we are fighting for them, too. In that weak moment of financial insecurity, or the moment when the thoughts of that cement pond overshadowed your good sense, as the land man handed you the pen, all we were thinking about was the health, safety and welfare of ALL OF US. Then our thoughts went to our property values and increased costs to test well water now and the animals that we must get ready to evacuate when the thing explodes (and they do blow up).
We didn’t let our minds go to a selfish place. We were thinking about your back yard to.
Thank you, Deb.
Have ignored the NIMBY nonsense since we are all NIMBYs one way or another, and it is a knee-jerk distraction from the issues at hand. Which is typically the only rhetorical gambit the frackers can come up with . . .
Here is the link:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/31/the-inevitable-slow-path-to-fracking-in-new-york/
NIMBY is not the point anyway, even if fracking is going on 100 miles away in someone elses neighborhood those chemicals can effect the food grown in that area and that food may wind up in my supermarket. The gas industry sees only the dollars they can made from gas development. What they cannot or will not see is that what they do and the chemicals that they leave behind in everyone’s environment effects the lives of everyone around their gas extraction clusters. If the gas drillers had good intensions and concern for people why do they keep their chemicals a secret from doctors who are treating the people who are poisoned by them? We must stop Fracking and every thing that surrounds gas extraction and development of Natural gas and oil. It is a FILTHY business.