I live in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. It is beautiful. It is a region of wine and green and hills and small farms and shale and human scale solutions to world problems. www.fingerlakeswinecountry.com/... All three of my children were born here in Ithaca, NY. My husband, grown children and I were all very active in the fight to ban fracking in not just New York state, but everywhere and we continue to make this a central issue for how we regard the world. Being concerned about fracking means we are concerned about endocrine disruption for our children, grandchildren and great grand children’s lives. It means we don’t want to see people in Bulgaria or Afghanistan or Africa or Britain or (in my back yard) the souther tier of New York having their ground water ruined with fracking chemicals, their air destroyed and their roads and farms turning into fracking infrastructure. It means we recognize that the best chance we have to mitigate climate change is to LEAVE FOSSIL FUELS IN THE GROUND.
The organization Physicians, Scientists and Engineers for Healthy Energy started in our living room. psehealthyenergy.org My children have participated in and even led direct action protests against fracking infrastructure in our state. Going to court with them is just something we do and we are proud of them. www.wearesenecalake.com
The beauty of our area is the water, and also the shale that makes the gorges of our region so stunning. I will not belabor the overwhelming science pointing to the dangers of slick water horizontal hydraulic fracturing. But for me, this is possibly the most important issue in the election. Are we willing to export this nasty technology and poison the water of people around the world?
I want to say this: I respect Hillary Clinton for many things she has done. I respect her intellect and her courage and her fortitude and her grace under pressure. On this matter, however, I can not respect her judgment and therefore can not vote for her for president. The evidence is overwhelming. She has supported hydraulic fracturing and used her position as Secretary of State to try and expand it.
I can attach a lot of new articles that support this claim that Hillary has supported fracking. Please just use your search engines for the news sources you trust the best and google “Hillary Clinton Fracking.”
For those hundreds of thousands of people who marched in September of 2014 in NYC to raise awareness about climate change, and who carried signs against fracking, ask yourself if you can support a candidate who even as recently as this past month still felt this was a safe technology.
Again, I respect Hillary Clinton. But I can not support her for this reason. The fracking fights are just starting (they did not end with the ban in NYS) and we need a clear message from our White House in the years ahead that the US will not continue, nor will it export as a matter of state sponsored development, this toxic technology.