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Shortly at er eleven o'clock in the morning, the group gathered in
Arch Park, a narrow strip of green framed by the Nationwide Arena
on one end and dominated by the massive oi ce tower of AEP, the
largest coal-burning utility in the United States, on the other. As a light
rain threatened, volunteers handed out pale blue “Don't Frack Ohio”
bandannas. Hand-painted signs revealed a litany of concerns. One read
“Drinking H
2
O Should Make You Glow But not in the Dark,” a nod
to worries that fracking was contaminating drinking water. Another,
“Eliminate Halliburton Loophole,” took aim at a rule that let drillers
avoid mandatory disclosure of the l uids they pumped into wells. A
third, “h is Is Our Land, Not Gas Land,” spoke to how the oil and
gas boom pit ed neighbor against neighbor, tearing communities apart.
Interspersed among these expressions of local concern were placards
emblazoned with the i gure “350,” which had become a rallying cry
for many who were concerned about climate change; exploiting new
oil and gas discoveries, they feared, would make planetary safety
impossible.
Josh Fox, a New York i lmmaker who made his name with a con-
troversial documentary titled
Gasland
, starkly summed up the stakes,
as he saw them, for the crowd: “h ere's a horizontal wellbore, going
down, from somewhere in the gas industry, snaking underneath the
Capitol, and injecting money, up through the chamber.” h e assembled
group roared. Drilling across the country for new oil and gas seemed
so patently foolish to them—so transparently insane—that only spe-
cial favors and borderline corruption could explain why anyone would
allow it to advance.
But their message wasn't all doom and gloom. At er the rally in Arch
Park wrapped up, the group marched through the streets of Columbus,
eventually gathering inside the rotunda of the Ohio Statehouse. As the
thunderous chanting subsided, a series of speakers stood in the center
and told their stories. One at er another spoke of woes inl icted by
oil and gas development, but nearly everyone also spoke of a dif erent
future. Jamie Frederick, a Youngstown resident who became painfully
ill soon at er a well had been drilled on a neighbor's property, begged
the crowd to take action: “It's a real shame that we have to come here,
in the year 2012, with all the technology for clean, renewable energy
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