Ellen Cantarow

Dirty Energy vs. Clean Power

Let’s amend the famous line from Joni Mitchell’s “Yellow Taxi” to fit this moment in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. There, Big Energy seems determined to turn paradise, if not into a parking lot, then into a massive storage area for fracked natural gas.

July 20, 2015

No pipe dream: Is fracking about to arrive on your doorstep?

Suddenly, I’m in the crosshairs of the fracking industry, too. We all are.

January 31, 2014

The Downwinders

More than 70 years ago, a chemical attack was launched against Washington State and Nevada. It poisoned people, animals, everything that grew, breathed air, and drank water. The Marshall Islands were also struck. This formerly pristine Pacific atoll was branded “the most contaminated place in the world.” As their cancers developed, the victims of atomic testing and nuclear weapons development got a name: downwinders. What marked their tragedy was the darkness in which they were kept about what was being done to them. Proof of harm fell to them, not to the U.S. government agencies responsible.

May 7, 2013

Society

Frack fight

There’s a war going on that you know nothing about between a coalition of great powers and a small insurgent movement. It’s a secret war being waged in the shadows while you go about your everyday life.

November 19, 2012

How rural America got fracked

If the world can be seen in a grain of sand, watch out. As Wisconsinites are learning, there’s money (and misery) in sand — and if you’ve got the right kind, an oil company may soon be at your doorstep.

May 21, 2012

Society

Shale shocked: Fracking gets its own Occupy movement

This is a story about water, the land surrounding it, and the lives it sustains…But for once, this story isn’t about tragedy. It’s about a resistance movement that has arisen to challenge some of the most powerful corporations in history.

January 23, 2012

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