Illinois’ fracking and coal rush is a national crisis

Illinois’ fracking and coal rush is a national crisis

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Residents are also asking for concerned supporters to call members of Illinois’ legislature to vote against a bill that health expert Sandra Steingraber has denounced as unscientific and unsafe.

Over a half century ago, Nobel laureate William Faulkner confronted Southerners who quietly allowed the South to “wreck and ruin itself in less than a hundred years” with segregation and civil rights violations. He begged his fellow Southerners to “speak now against the day, when our Southern people who will resist to the last these inevitable changes in social relations, will, when they have been forced to accept what they at one time might have accepted with dignity and goodwill, will say: ‘Why didn’t someone tell us this before? Tell us this in time?’”

That time has come to speak now against the day in Illinois — and the nation is watching.

From water contamination to air pollution to earthquakes in one of the nation’s most deadly seismic zones — conferring with a U.S. Geological Survey, there is already a 90 percent chance that a magnitude 6 or 7 earthquake will occur in the New Madrid seismic area within the next 50 years — the unleashed fracking rush promises to leave southern Illinois in shambles.

If passed, Illinois’ so-called historic compromise of regulatory doublespeak — hailed by Gov. Quinn as “a new national standard for environmental protection and job creation potential” — will open the floodgates for similar fracking operations across the nation.

Not only fracking. Unleashed under the same illusory regulatory guise, Illinois is the midst of one of the biggest coal mining rushes and export pushes in the nation.