“You think you can intimidate me? Screw you, choose your weapon.” ~Eliot Spitzer
The Gas Mafia’s intimidation tactics are escalating dramatically. People from many shale areas have contacted me with reports of intimidation and there is no doubt the intimidation is escalating.
DO NOT LET THEM SILENCE YOU!
IF THEY SILENCE YOU, THEY WIN!
Anytime they try to intimidate me, I make sure to expose them on this blog for the world to see and, if the threat warrants it, I contact the authorities. Exposing their dirty tactics is the best way to stay safe. I’ve been doing this for quite a while.
Here is some excellent advice on how to deal with intimidation from WORC:
If you are being intimidated, never forget why it is happening. It means you are doing good work, and that your opponents are desperate. It is a sign that you are taking actions which challenge the existing power relationships in your community, and that those with power want you to back off.
Here are some of the common intimidation tactics:
- Threatening individuals – They do this to weaken our groups. I have received threats of job loss, bodily harm, community respect and law suits. I still have a job, I haven’t been harmed, no one has sued me and I now get flown places to talk to government officials and advocate for you
- Refuse to deal with leaders – They like to call us “tree huggers” and radicals so the other people in the group will loose respect. (Go ask your children the difference between words and sticks and stones.)
- Isolate the group – They get others to attack your group and your group’s actions or they get your YouTube channel taken down in the hopes you will be too busy defending yourself to expose their dirty tricks.
- Divide and conquer – They like to buy off one member of the group and have that person work on the others. They do this all the time in neighborhoods.
- Group infighting – They try to get different groups to fight with each other. Sometimes this happens with no help from industry. It’s a big time suck.
I concur with this advice from WORC:
Shine a bright light on it.
The meanest and nastiest acts of intimidation, like cockroaches, are usually seen only in the dark. When exposed to public scrutiny, an opponent will usually stop – and may even apologize, or disavow the tactic.
I understand that intimidation can be scary and some of the recent tricks have been despicable. But, don’t give in.
“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.”
~Mahatma Gandhi
We are winning!
Update: Another horrific tale of intimidation sent to me by a reader HERE. I stripped the individual’s name out but I can give contact information to reporters.
About Sharon Wilson
Sharon Wilson is considered a leading citizen expert on the impacts of shale oil and gas extraction. She is the go-to person whether it’s top EPA officials from D.C., national and international news networks, or residents facing the shock of eminent domain and the devastating environmental effects of natural gas development in their backyards.
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This is an excellent post. Good advice. This kind of stuff has been going on (with some minor variations) in Booger county.
The intimidation of me was a one-time-only death threat, left on my answering machine as an anonymous message with a distorted voice.
I was organizing an educational event about fracking at the time, in a place where no drilling had occurred yet (still hasn't as of now, in PA, but it's coming–for sure).
I lived alone, and that was a big factor, cause the first thing I had to decide was if I wanted to make the threat public and thus BECOME the person who had been so threatened. I was against drilling, but did I want that stance to take over my whole life? Did I want to be a martyr? Even if there was no actual danger, once I publicized the threat, that's who I'd be. I saved the message on my machine for many months, but never publicized it.
Many other factors came into play finally. Despite years of community involvement, people started to treat me strangely, like I was being chicken little about this whole drilling thing. Public officials with whom I had a good relationship started shunning me or telling me privately that there was no stopping the drilling no matter what, too much money behind it. Neighbors whispered that I had gone off the deep end about fracking.
Well, I am not a pushover generally speaking, but I decided to move, and now live in another state. But I'm not simply a refugee, as I am now doing something new that I'd always considered and wanted to try anyway. Meanwhile, back where I used to live, the new (Republican) governor of Pennsylvania wants to turn the state into "the Saudi Arabia of natural gas" (actual quote). Not a surprise. But it was my despair about the old (Democratic) governor that sent me packing, because the gas drilling is a bi-partisan equal-opportunity form of corruption. Fossil money working like a cancer to turn us all into fossils.
I do feel somewhat guilty for not having spoken out about the intimidation I received, especially that I didn't even share it with other activists. But finally, I did what was right for me.
As regards what is right for Pennsylvania, I feel we are into almost Biblical territory here. Sodom and Gomorrah or Noah and the Ark or one generation's acts having their actual impact many generations later. I am not especially religious, but that's the only scale on which I find I can think about the magnitude of what they are doing in PA. The political leadership of PA (both Dem and Rep) is committing environmental terrorism against future generations. That's another way to think about it. But that's not the kind of thing I was prepared to stand and fight. It's going to take the judgment of reality and history to set these fools right.
Sometimes I feel that I ran away and that I let them "win." But I also don't sense that by staying and fighting that I would have stopped them from winning anyway. As I was told so many times, too much money behind it. And what did they win? A temporary battle to keep destroying the world?
Philosophically, if you will, I have moved on to a more abstract version of the same struggle. Because everywhere you look, from the standpoint of sustainability, everything is wrong. It may go on this way for another twenty or fifty years, but at some unknown point in that direction there's a cliff that it's all going to go flying off of. I may not be able to have any impact on stopping that disaster either, and maybe staying and fighting would have been the most practical way to fight the larger battle, but at least I am not involved in the local soap opera of it any longer. In general, and I say this without anger, people get what they deserve.
I am not sharing this to discourage anybody who continues to fight big oil and gas. I have the greatest respect for everybody doing that. I just wanted to share this story–for the first time.
The intimidation of me was a one-time-only death threat, left on my answering machine as an anonymous message with a distorted voice.
I was organizing an educational event about fracking at the time, in a place where no drilling had occurred yet (still hasn't as of now, in PA, but it's coming–for sure).
I lived alone, and that was a big factor, cause the first thing I had to decide was if I wanted to make the threat public and thus BECOME the person who had been so threatened. I was against drilling, but did I want that stance to take over my whole life? Did I want to be a martyr? Even if there was no actual danger, once I publicized the threat, that's who I'd be. I saved the message on my machine for many months, but never publicized it.
Many other factors came into play finally. Despite years of community involvement, people started to treat me strangely, like I was being chicken little about this whole drilling thing. Public officials with whom I had a good relationship started shunning me or telling me privately that there was no stopping the drilling no matter what, too much money behind it. Neighbors whispered that I had gone off the deep end about fracking.
Well, I am not a pushover generally speaking, but I decided to move, and now live in another state. But I'm not simply a refugee, as I am now doing something new that I'd always considered and wanted to try anyway. Meanwhile, back where I used to live, the new (Republican) governor of Pennsylvania wants to turn the state into "the Saudi Arabia of natural gas" (actual quote). Not a surprise. But it was my despair about the old (Democratic) governor that sent me packing, because the gas drilling is a bi-partisan equal-opportunity form of corruption. Fossil money working like a cancer to turn us all into fossils.
I do feel somewhat guilty for not having spoken out about the intimidation I received, especially that I didn't even share it with other activists. But finally, I did what was right for me.
As regards what is right for Pennsylvania, I feel we are into almost Biblical territory here. Sodom and Gomorrah or Noah and the Ark or one generation's acts having their actual impact many generations later. I am not especially religious, but that's the only scale on which I find I can think about the magnitude of what they are doing in PA. The political leadership of PA (both Dem and Rep) is committing environmental terrorism against future generations. That's another way to think about it. But that's not the kind of thing I was prepared to stand and fight. It's going to take the judgment of reality and history to set these fools right.
Sometimes I feel that I ran away and that I let them "win." But I also don't sense that by staying and fighting that I would have stopped them from winning anyway. As I was told so many times, too much money behind it. And what did they win? A temporary battle to keep destroying the world?
Philosophically, if you will, I have moved on to a more abstract version of the same struggle. Because everywhere you look, from the standpoint of sustainability, everything is wrong. It may go on this way for another twenty or fifty years, but at some unknown point in that direction there's a cliff that it's all going to go flying off of. I may not be able to have any impact on stopping that disaster either, and maybe staying and fighting would have been the most practical way to fight the larger battle, but at least I am not involved in the local soap opera of it any longer. In general, and I say this without anger, people get what they deserve.
I am not sharing this to discourage anybody who continues to fight big oil and gas. I have the greatest respect for everybody doing that. I just wanted to share this story–for the first time.
The intimidation of me was a one-time-only death threat, left on my answering machine as an anonymous message with a distorted voice.
I was organizing an educational event about fracking at the time, in a place where no drilling had occurred yet (still hasn't as of now, in PA, but it's coming–for sure).
I lived alone, and that was a big factor, cause the first thing I had to decide was if I wanted to make the threat public and thus BECOME the person who had been so threatened. I was against drilling, but did I want that stance to take over my whole life? Did I want to be a martyr? Even if there was no actual danger, once I publicized the threat, that's who I'd be. I saved the message on my machine for many months, but never publicized it.
Many other factors came into play finally. Despite years of community involvement, people started to treat me strangely, like I was being chicken little about this whole drilling thing. Public officials with whom I had a good relationship started shunning me or telling me privately that there was no stopping the drilling no matter what, too much money behind it. Neighbors whispered that I had gone off the deep end about fracking.
Well, I am not a pushover generally speaking, but I decided to move, and now live in another state. But I'm not simply a refugee, as I am now doing something new that I'd always considered and wanted to try anyway. Meanwhile, back where I used to live, the new (Republican) governor of Pennsylvania wants to turn the state into "the Saudi Arabia of natural gas" (actual quote). Not a surprise. But it was my despair about the old (Democratic) governor that sent me packing, because the gas drilling is a bi-partisan equal-opportunity form of corruption. Fossil money working like a cancer to turn us all into fossils.
I do feel somewhat guilty for not having spoken out about the intimidation I received, especially that I didn't even share it with other activists. But finally, I did what was right for me.
As regards what is right for Pennsylvania, I feel we are into almost Biblical territory here. Sodom and Gomorrah or Noah and the Ark or one generation's acts having their actual impact many generations later. I am not especially religious, but that's the only scale on which I find I can think about the magnitude of what they are doing in PA. The political leadership of PA (both Dem and Rep) is committing environmental terrorism against future generations. That's another way to think about it. But that's not the kind of thing I was prepared to stand and fight. It's going to take the judgment of reality and history to set these fools right.
Sometimes I feel that I ran away and that I let them "win." But I also don't sense that by staying and fighting that I would have stopped them from winning anyway. As I was told so many times, too much money behind it. And what did they win? A temporary battle to keep destroying the world?
Philosophically, if you will, I have moved on to a more abstract version of the same struggle. Because everywhere you look, from the standpoint of sustainability, everything is wrong. It may go on this way for another twenty or fifty years, but at some unknown point in that direction there's a cliff that it's all going to go flying off of. I may not be able to have any impact on stopping that disaster either, and maybe staying and fighting would have been the most practical way to fight the larger battle, but at least I am not involved in the local soap opera of it any longer. In general, and I say this without anger, people get what they deserve.
I am not sharing this to discourage anybody who continues to fight big oil and gas. I have the greatest respect for everybody doing that. I just wanted to share this story–for the first time.
Anonymous 7:47 AM
Thank you for sharing your story. It's good that you were able to move in time. Many of us have not been so lucky. Our property is now worth nothing so we can't sell and move on.
You are right, about all that you say except we do not have fifty or even twenty years before we go flying off the cliff. We don't have nearly that long.
It's one thing if we want to fling ourselves off a cliff but we are flinging ourselves, other species and future generations off with us. It's completely immoral.
Right now, I'm finding that most people are too busy shopping for the holidays to be involved in activism. It sickens me. We continue to make the same mistake over and over.
Good for you for getting out. Try to enjoy life some everyday. You story will be shared here. I have a large readership that includes the news media.
So where is the class action law suit to regain the value of your property? That value was stolen from you, as surely as if somebody tipped a poker table from one end and slid all the chips over to their side. And… it's another of the many "buried costs" of gas drilling. The big gas companies only generate a profit by masking all those other costs, some put off on neighbors, some on public infrastructure, on public health, water, air, quality of life, and of course, the future. If they had to pay all those costs, there'd be no profit. Sue them for the lost value of your property. If you're stuck there anyway, do it.
Proof is the issue but we are working on obtaining the proof.
To Anonymous 7:47–excellent story and I agree with you 100% There's no way to win, you can only RUN! If we're going to have shale gas drilling in an area, the guvment needs to move all willing residents out–and the sooner the better! YOu can't live and have a quality of life living in a shale drilling area–no way!