For the Wild. Sarah M. Pike
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of actions can be unpredictable, especially with over a hundred people involved. It is uncertain if anyone will be arrested or injured and whether the news media will show up to publicize the action. Not everyone at the Rendezvous stays for the action. Some have records for previous actions and cannot risk arrest; others have young children at home or have come to the gathering to learn and share information but do not want to be involved in direct action, even if they support those who do.
Preparations for the 2012 action in Western Pennsylvania took place throughout the week of the Rendezvous, though details of what we would be doing and where we would be going remained vague. Participants divided into affinity groups and decided what level of risk they wanted to take during the action: green, orange, or red, with red carrying the highest risk of arrest and green the least. Some of us volunteered to serve as legal and jail support, or media and police liaisons. Medics paired up with other medics to work in teams. Other participants made banners, posters, and bucket drums or practiced chants.
On the morning of the action, we set out before dawn. It was a lovely but nerve-wracking drive through the rural hollows and thick forest as we tried not to lose the taillights of the car in front of us on the dark and mist-covered road. Through the mist, in a long caravan of cars, the five activists I was riding with talked quietly. We finally arrived at our destination and parked along a rural road near the entrance to a fracking site in the Moshannon State Forest. As a member of the “green group,” I was stationed at the entrance to the forest, in front of the first blockade, but far away from the main action site. We sat in chairs in the middle of the entrance road with a banner reading, “Our Public Land is not for Private Profit.” Other banners at the protest were “We All Live Downwind” and “Marcellus Earth First!, No Fracking, No Compromise.”16 We got out our bucket drums and held up signs while one of our members played guitar. A young woman from New York City sprinkled some “holy water” around the protest site that had been “blessed by a medicine man” and given to her by a friend who could not participate in the action. “It can’t hurt,” she told us. Like many activists, she was practicing a spiritual eclecticism that borrows from and melds together bits and pieces of various religious traditions and worldviews, in this case Catholicism (“holy water”) and indigenous traditions (“medicine man”).17
The center of the action, which we could neither see nor hear, was up the road from where we were stationed. Earlier in the morning, a couple dozen activists had hiked through the woods and constructed barricades of fallen trees and branches across the road. Two activists in the “red group” climbed about sixty feet into some trees and drew their support lines across the road. One of them was in a hammock rigged so that if anyone tried to get through the lines, the hammock would fall. Meanwhile, some “scouts” went ahead to see what was happening at the drill rig farther up the road. The seventy-foot-tall rig was operated by EQT Corporation, one of the largest drillers in Pennsylvania, with about 300 active wells in the western part of the state across what is called the Marcellus Shale.18 Activists approached the workers who were already at the site to let them know that the action was intended to be nonviolent. Before long, Pennsylvania state police arrived and walked around with assault rifles. “You are supposedly adults,” one of the officers told activists, “and you’re acting like children.” As law enforcement personnel became increasingly frustrated and tensions seemed to be escalating, an activist locked his head to one of the anchor lines with a bicycle u-lock to help protect those in the trees.
Fracking site road blockade. Photo: Marcellus Shale Earth First! Used with permission.
Back down by the entrance, members of the green group, including myself, were trying to draw attention from locals driving by on the county road. We spent hours chanting and banging on drums every time a car passed us. Most of the cars slowed to look at us since there was probably not much else happening on a Sunday morning in rural Pennsylvania. In the afternoon, some local farmers showed up with a big basket of blueberries. They sat down with us on the side of the road and described how a nearby fracking operation had polluted groundwater on their organic farm. Local politicians had ignored or dismissed the seriousness of their concerns, so they were hoping our presence might help raise awareness about the issue.
Periodically, someone would come down the forest road to update us on what was happening at the barricade as the situation there continued to escalate. Marsh, who had his head in the u-lock, told me later, “there was a lot of drama, everyone yelling, because the police weren’t being careful.”19 By early evening the police decided to act. In a video made of the action, a cherry-picker (a bulldozer-like machine with a lift) and a group of police officers started to approach the blockade where the two activists were perched. As the cherry picker followed behind them, officers approached the support lines while frantic activists yelled at them to back off: “Don’t touch the line!” We’re nonviolent,” shouted one activist, “and what you’re doing is violent.” “Please listen to my friends,” called the activist from the hammock, “my life is at extreme risk right now. Please think twice before you cut that line. I’m begging you.” The bucket of the cherry picker hit the support line, but eventually they brought the activists safely down to the ground and arrested them. Three arrests were made at the action, but in less than an hour, all three activists were released without serious charges.20
After a long day in the forest, I drove away from the 2012 action, joining other participants leaving camp. Some activists went back to clean up the campsite, while others journeyed to other actions near and far or hitched rides to the homes of new friends. Still others drove home to their families or work lives. Many participants returned to campaigns in their local regions, from antifracking in Maine to antilogging in Oregon. Two participants in the 2012 Rendezvous told me they were heading back to their hometown, inspired to start an Earth First! group in their bioregion.
The 2012 Rendezvous action was the first shutdown of an active fracking site in the United States, although the site was up and running again the following day. In the several years following the Rendezvous action, Marcellus Earth First! and other antifracking activists held rallies and educational meetings about fracking and the Marcellus Shale.21 In March 2014, they organized a road blockade during which protesters in the middle of a forest access road locked themselves to a tube full of sixty pounds of cement. Shalefield Justice Spring Break, modeled on a similar program in West Virginia to fight coal mining, brought college students to the area for activist training and to support the blockade. During the blockade they organized a simultaneous rally at Anadarko Petroleum’s corporate offices.22 In January 2015, Pennsylvania governor Tom Wolf announced he would sign an Executive Order “restoring a moratorium on new drilling leases involving public lands . . . ending a short-lived effort by his predecessor to expand the extraction of natural gas from rock buried deep below Pennsylvania’s state parks and forests.”23
Direct actions are defined as successful or unsuccessful in various ways. In this case, widespread concerns about fracking facilitated by activists’ public actions and educational efforts seemed to make a difference. In tree-sits to prevent logging or pipeline construction, sometimes areas are protected (as was the case when a timber sale in Warner Creek/Cornpatch Roadless Area in Oregon was dropped after an eleven-month blockade that began in 1995). Other times they are long running in nature, such as the 2012 Tar Sands Blockade tree village in Texas, which eventually failed to achieve activists’ immediate goals (construction continued by going around the tree village).24 Yet even the Tar Sands Blockade was effective on some level. Publicity helped bring attention to links between oil spills and pollution, between fossil fuels and climate change, and activists forged coalitions with local landowners and churches, suggesting possibilities for a broad-based movement against extraction industries.25 The Earth First! 2012 action in Pennsylvania, which was covered by national news sources, also served to draw attention to fracking, making visible what might otherwise be hidden deep in forests or rural areas away from critical eyes.26
CHAPTER 2
At the Turn of the Millennium
Youth Culture and the Roots of Contemporary Activism