I'm from Minneapolis. Minnesota, but I live in West Philly. I'm here today to try and make a statement about our whole way of life. I think it's even bigger than fracking, we really have to start thinking about how we live, the amount of energy we use, the amount of resources we consume and exploit from this planet; and fracking is exhibit A. We are running out of natural gas and so we're getting desperate using other methods that are poisoning our water, destroying our earth, that are causing people to have to move out of areas where fracking has been done. And, it's just really exhibit A for the insanity of the economic growth system and our industrial model that just pollutes and destroys.

Voices of Shale Gas Outrage Protestors in Philadelphia

While those who are murdering our environment met inside, protestors filled the streets outside of the Pennsylvania Convention Center demanding an end to hydraulic fracturing, a toxic method of drilling for natural gas.

For more information visit:
Shale Gas Outrage
Protecting Our Waters

Excerpts from the audio which you can listen to by clicking here:

I'm from Minneapolis. Minnesota, but I live in West Philly. I'm here today to try and make a statement about our whole way of life. I think it's even bigger than fracking, we really have to start thinking about how we live, the amount of energy we use, the amount of resources we consume and exploit from this planet; and fracking is exhibit A. We are running out of natural gas and so we're getting desperate using other methods that are poisoning our water, destroying our earth, that are causing people to have to move out of areas where fracking has been done. And, it's just really exhibit A for the insanity of the economic growth system and our industrial model that just pollutes and destroys. No one is thinking about 100 years down the road, no one is thinking about 200 years from now; we're at 7 billion people on this planet, we're supposed to be going towards 9 billion by 2050. We're facing epic problems here, epic environmental issues. So, yeah, that's why I'm here.

Hi, My name is Vanessa G., and I'm from Philadelphia, from the East Falls neighborhood. I'm here at Shale Gas Outrage to express my dissatisfaction with fracking in PA. We're putting a lot of our communities and people at risk by allowing dirty gas drilling in PA and other states like New York, Ohio, Delaware, Maryland and West Virginia. What a lot of people don't realize is that the practice of hydraulic gas fracturing is poisoning our water, our air and our land, and also affecting the health of individuals who live in these impacted areas.  So I came out today in solidarity with all the organizations and people fighting against fracking, and to tell the gas drillers who are here in town for their conference that we do not approve of this practice, and we're going to continue to fight them until there's a moratorium on fracking in Pennsylvania.

My name is Zachary H., I'm with a group called Earth Quaker Action Team; we're a Philadelphia faith based organization that works on an environmental issue really similar to this called mountain top removal. Without going into it too deep, we've seen the kind of consequences of it in the region where it occurs in Appalachia and the southeastern United States. Down there they call it "fracking's big brother." Same type of dirty extraction policies, health impacts pushed out on the community, externalities paid for by the state and by the people instead of by the corporations who are causing it. And now the place is a wasteland; it looks like a moonscape, over 500 mountains have been destroyed by this process. The same sort of companies and banks profiting off of that are moving up to Pennsylvania to get involved in fracking. And so something we see as really important is not so much understanding the technical details, it's more about understanding the roles these companies play in taking the wealth out of the land and away from the people and keeping it for themselves. So that's why we're here today as Quakers, as people of faith and people of conscience, and it's been a great rally so far.