'Gasland' Goes for Oscar Vote this Week, While Council Delays Real-Life Drilling Decision

Early in January, Change.org wrote an email asking some of our members to support Arlington, Texas resident Kim Feil's campaign to stop Chesapeake Energy's natural gas drilling proposal in her neighborhood and near the Dallas Cowboys stadium.

The national attention—more than 6,000 signatures in about 24 hours—showered upon the Arlington City Council and mayor successfully achieved one of its goals of raising the profile of her issue: The campaign gained coverage from the Dallas-Fort Worth area media at a key point in the debate, the day the council was likely supposed to vote on the permit.

But that vote did not happen. Instead, as desired by Chesapeake—which did not and still does not have the legally-required of support of nearby landowners—the vote was tabled (or delayed). And delayed again. And one more time, the permit does not appear on tonight's agenda, though the council could decide to call it up for a vote at any time. Ms. Feil is frustrated: "This is not fair to the citizens that Chesapeake decides when this gets voted on. The opposers have to keep showing up at every city council meeting IN CASE it goes to vote," she wrote me in an email.

I just found out a little bit more about how much Kim Feil has gotten under the skin of Chesapeake Energy, a corporation that bills itself as "the leading urban drill of natural gas." She sent me a presentation she found posted on Chesapeake Energy's community website and addressed to the Arlington City Council on January 4, 2011. She stumbled upon it this week, and hadn't seen it presented at any council sessions she's attended.

The presentation (pdf) argues for the drill site and dismisses Kim Feil's petition on Change.org because many signatures came from non-Texas residents. This was a defense echoed by Arlington's mayor in news reports, and this type of dismissal, in my opinion, is wholly besides the point. The national attention simply demonstrates that issues with "fracking" go way beyond Arlington and are shared by people around the country. What's more, additional national signatures do not in anyway invalidate the serious concerns of more than 500 Texas residents who have indeed signed the online petition or the hundreds of neighborhood signatures Kim Feil has also collected with old-fashioned pen and paper.

Chesapeake Energy restates the Change.org email's claim that a defeat of this one project would be a big win for the environmental movement—as if there is something insidious or wrong about that. In fact, a tight network of citizen activists just like Kim Feil are fighting their own local battles against drilling companies around this country—from Pennsylvania and New York to Arkansas and Wyoming—and a victory for one of them is indeed an important victory for all. This is an environmental grassroots movement of our time. Don't believe me? Check out the community around the Facebook page of the Oscar-nominated documentary Gasland, which spends 10 minutes of screen time detailing the scary consequences of major drilling operations in North Texas's Barnett Shale.

The company also dismisses the claim in Change.org's email that "fracking pollutes the air and contaminates the water"—brushing off health concerns of the many renters, homeowners, churches and businesses in the immediate area with the proud claim that "Chesapeake has successfully drilled approximately 2,300 wells in the Barnett, of which more than 100 are in Arlington - our safety record speaks for itself" and promising not to disrupt Dallas Cowboys stadium events. Taking a look at the health issues citizens are attributing to community drilling operations in the Barnett Shale, a defense that states how much of that is attributable to Chesapeake is not, in my mind, a defense at all.

This is not to say that Chesapeake's record is bad or that it does not obey the law. After all, it's not necessarily the industry's fault that Texas environmental and health regulators have rolled out the red carpet for them.

But naturally Chesapeake does not want the Arlington City Council to focus on the larger-scale health questions of natural gas drilling operations in populated urban neighborhoods, particularly where renters don't get to approve or disapprove a project because they don't "own" the mineral rights. The company portrays the issue of what's at stake rather differently: "The mineral development of more than 1,000 Arlington families are at stake"—as if every "family" has the right to sell off their minerals. Do they?

Right now, activists in the larger Arlington and in the Dallas-Fort Worth area are winning ground. Dallas recently declared a 9-month moratorium on new drilling permits and, in Fort Worth, parents and the Fort Worth League of Neighborhoods are gaining momentum to stop drilling operations just a few blocks away from local schools, and in Flower Mound citizens are working to beat back larger centralized gas facilities.

I'd like to close by emphasizing that these activists aren't "political" environmentalists and don't necessarily oppose gas drilling as a knee-jerk reaction. They are just looking for a reality-check—drilling in neighborhoods, near schools, and in downtown centers is not worth the health and quality-of-life degradation, and they've seen this first-hand.

And, at this point, the Arlington City Council owes Kim Feil a final answer on her petition. Please continue to sign and support her campaign.

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