BRATTLEBORO — Early in August, a group of five families from Vermont traveled to the Pennsylvania Shalefields to bear witness to the impacts of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. These families are a part of Mother Up!: Parents Exchange for Change, a campaign of 350Vermont that engages parents to take action in their own communities and in those most affected by the fossil fuel industry.
Abby Mnookin, a Mother Up! organizer who lives in Brattleboro and traveled with her four-year-old daughter, will be part of a presentation with Mother Up! at The Root Social Justice Center on Sunday, Sept. 25, from 3 to 5 p.m., to tell more about this family trip, according to a news release. Childcare will be provided.
The four-day trip took them through Susquenhanna County, including the town of Dimock, the epicenter of fracking in the Marcellus Shale and the town prominently featured in the two “Gasland” documentaries.
The group worked with their local host, Energy Justice Network, to meet with families and individuals who face polluted waters and seized land, experiencing both nature's beauty and the suffering caused by extreme extraction of fossil fuels.
Participants in the family trip included children ranging in age from five months to 10 years old. One reason these families wanted to take the trip was to have a shared experience with other families and with their own children.
“I want my children to grow up not only aware of the beauty of our natural world,” said Maggie Pesce of Bennington, “but also that there is a struggle to protect [it].”
“I loved this trip as a radical reinterpretation of what a family vacation means,” said Jane Yager of Burlington. “It was very much a family vacation, with the kids swimming and petting goats and playing, but at the same time it brought us face-to-face with both the brutal realities of what extractive industries have done to the lives of the people we met and what inspiring resistance to those industries they have mounted.”