 And a hundred of us walked in saying we won offshore when it was pretty wild. Good evening everyone. Thank you for waiting. Thank you for coming and thank you for waiting. I'm Jo Yarrington, the faculty facilitator for Fairfield University's two-year water theme. Last year we learned about water, water shortages, the effects of excess water, and other compelling reasons why we should all be concerned about water. This year we are continuing to expand our knowledge so that we can act as responsible stewards of the earth. Tonight's panel, the final panel of the university water theme, will focus on sustainability issues and environmental concerns. By sharing their personal and professional journeys, we hope the panelists will encourage all of us to take a more proactive approach, to help us articulate what we can do as individuals, as members of sustainability-focused organizations, and or for graduating seniors, how it will inform your choices of workplace. I want to thank John Hurleyhee and George Logan of Aquarium Water, as well as doctors Kate Wheeler and Pat Pauley for their help in putting together an excellent group of panelists to speak about their different perspectives and approaches to activism. I also thank our panelists for taking the time to travel to Fairfield to share their knowledge with us, and we're still waiting for Margaret, who will be here momentarily, so she'll be coming in just a little bit later. It is now my honor to introduce the provost of Fairfield University, Dr. Lynn Babbington. Thank you, Professor Yarrington. Good afternoon. On behalf of President Jeffrey Von Arks, I'd like to welcome you all to Fairfield University. This afternoon's presentation is part of the water focus here at the university. Over the past two years, a group of committed faculty, staff, and students have developed and launched a series of interdisciplinary initiatives focused on water, including specific classes, coursework, a film series, art exhibitions, a lecture series, and panel presentations. Before we begin the evening, though, as global citizens, we should take a moment to recognize and support our fellow citizens in Belgium who suffered immeasurable losses this morning as a result of terrorist activities. The theme of this evening's program is water, stewardship, and jobs. Today is also World Water Day, which is an international observance creating an opportunity to learn more about water-related issues, to be inspired to tell others, and a call to take action to make a difference. World Water Day dates back to 1992 during the United Nations Conference on Environmental and Development, where an international observance for water was recommended. Water stewardship, a component of our focus today, is defined as the use of water that's socially equitable, environmentally sustainable, and economically beneficial. So today on World Water Day, people everywhere show that we care and that we have the power to make the difference. We get inspired by information and use it to take action and to change things. This year, the focus of World Water Day focuses specifically on the power that water and jobs have to transform people's lives. Half of the world's workers, 1.5 billion people, work in water-related sectors. And water solutions that work are essential to the livelihoods of all of these people. Restaurant owners, farmers, school teachers, and health care professionals. So this evening, we have a panel discussion, including distinguished scientists, public officials, industry representatives, and grass-root advocates. Professor Joe Yarrington will introduce our moderator for the discussion. Professor Yarrington. Thank you, Dr. Babington. As I mentioned before, George Logan has helped us tremendously with his panel presentation, especially because he is our moderator this evening. I'm pleased to welcome Mr. Logan, Director of Environmental Management and Government Relations for Aquarian Water Company, to take charge of the program. Thank you. Thank you, Professor Yarrington. So again, my name is George Logan. We work at Aquarian Water Company. I think I've been there since 1992, working on various community-related projects, mainly in Connecticut, but also internationally as well, to some degree, as far as designing water treatment plants and pump stations and pipeline design and system planning. So today is World Water Day. And today on World Water Day, you know, it's an annual celebration that started as part of the United Nations' campaign to raise awareness about water scarcity and safety issues around the world. But while water covers almost three-fourths of the Earth's surface, it makes up a small portion of the global conversation. The day takes on increased significance here in the U.S. in light of the campaign that's currently going on for presidency here, and also in light of the crisis that's currently underway in Flint, Michigan, in which thousands of residents were exposed to water contaminated with unsafe levels of lead as a result of use of pipe-coroting water. The crisis in Flint became a major point of contention in the presidential election when, if you recall, the city hosted a democratic debate between Hillary Clinton and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. In a statement to commemorate World Water Day back in 2015, U.S. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said that to address the many challenges related to water, we must work in a spirit of urgent cooperation, open to new ideas and innovation, and be prepared to share the solutions that we all need for a sustainable future. So to celebrate Water's Big Day, there's an online publication called the International Business Times. They come up with some Water Day facts. I'm just going to read just a few of these here for you. 1.8 billion people around the world lack access to safe water, 1.8 billion. Globally, a third of all schools lack access to safe water and adequate sanitation. In low and middle class income countries, a third of all healthcare facilities lack a safe water source. The World Economic Forum in January 2015 ranked the water crisis as the number one global risk based on impact to society as a measure of devastation. The incidents of children suffering from stunting and chronic malnutrition at least 160 million is linked to water and sanitation. So today, we've got a diverse and varied group of panelists that are going to cover this topic and this subject in terms of water and jobs and how it impacts us all in very different ways. Hopefully we'll, I'm sure we'll all find it very interesting. As far as the format, what we're going to do is I'm going to give a brief introduction of the panelists. Then as each panelist is going to speak, I'll give a more detailed introduction. Each panelist will be given a certain amount of time to talk and speak upon their subject and then at the end we'll take any questions and I'll probably have a few questions for the panelists as well. So I'll start with Dr. David Brown. Dr. Brown is a Fairfield University faculty member. He is a pioneering environmental scientist and public health taxicologist who is a founding member of the Southwest Pennsylvania Environmental Health Project addressing the health effects of natural gas drilling, also known as fracking. Kim Fracek. She is the co-director of the SANE Energy Project, a grassroots group working to rethink our energy system from the bottom up, replacing the current drive to build shale, fracked gas infrastructure with the drive to build renewable and equitable infrastructure. Better broad. She's a Fairfield University alum. She's a New Yorker and long time activist for peace, social justice and sustainability. And also joining us is Margaret Miller. She is the executive director of Rivers Alliance of Connecticut, a statewide nonprofit organization formed in 1992 to protect Connecticut's rivers and streams by promoting sound river conservation policies and by assisting the many groups and individuals involved in watershed protection. So our first speaker will be Dr. Brown. Dr. Brown says that gas drilling can pollute the air, water and soil in nearby homes and can even harm food. The Southwest Pennsylvania Environmental Health Project tends to vulnerable populations who think their health may be compromised by gas drilling activities, including compressor stations, waste water pits and truck traffic. It is the only institution in the country studying the health effects of natural gas fracking on families and farmers in Pennsylvania. In addition to providing information and assistance, Dr. Brown is also providing a model of public health justice that is being emulated by leading institutions such as Harvard and Yale. The endeavor involves over a dozen health scientists and is funded by three foundations. Dr. Brown currently directs the science portion of the project. A former member of the National Academy of Sciences, he earned his doctorate from Harvard School of Public Health, Dr. Brown teaches again here at Fairfield U, for the Applied Ethics Environmental Studies program. Thank you very much. I'm really going to tell the story of other people tonight, but when I was thinking about this, I'm going to talk about fracking our gas extraction and show the impact it's having on water, but I really want to talk about its hubris, and I would tell you a little bit more about Rain and Ripple and the head of our program in a little bit and how we got there. But first I'd like to ask you to do this. The Environmental Health Project is a project that was founded by, I'm sorry, the Environmental Health Project has a mission. The single mission is to take care of people who believe that they're being injured by gas fracking and gas extraction throughout the country. Our director Rain and Ripple said, I do not want you people doing research, I want you people helping people. So that's basically what we do. We started four years ago and we are in fact the only organization in the world that's collecting health data on people who are exposed to gas fracking. Let's think about this for a minute. You're in a country desperate for energy and you need to revive your failed economy. You receive what's believed to be a gift from heaven. An energy source has found 300,000, in a 300,000 year old formation, shale rock. It's under multiple states and available to all of us. By the way remember we evolved 200 million years ago so this gives you some perspective. The gift from God is new technology. It allows you to drill one mile to this 300 million year old shale formation and five miles horizontally. So if we were to drill one mile below the quick center, five miles would take us out into the middle of Long Island Sound and everything that comes back with that is there. You set up explosions in this five mile area, pump lots of water down there and then you shatter the shale rock and out of the shale rock comes natural gas and other stuff. And it's brought to the surface, piped through pipelines and throughout the land and burned for energy. Now, what could possibly go wrong? Well, what could go wrong is that what's coming out of the ground is not methane. What's coming out of the ground is methane and other chemicals that some of them have never even been studied, never seen. These are just an example of the kind of things that's coming up that has to be removed from the methane or else the methane is what's going through the pipes. The Marcellus shale covers a large region and there should be a star somewhere on there showing you where Southwest Pennsylvania is down in the corner and that's where we are and what you see there is the Marcellus shale stretching from New York all the way down into the south. And that doesn't allow fracking because the governor feels it's unsafe. Pennsylvania does allow fracking and this is an example. Each dot on there represents a well pad. Each well pad can have from 8 to 12 gas wells on it because one well comes down and goes north, one well comes down and goes south and you have to frack nearly every bit of the well pad to go there. Washington County has several thousand wells where we work. It's the largest area in the world where gas is being fracked at that sense. What is it being fracked in? Well, that's Washington County, Pennsylvania. It's looked at like for years. It's a community that's being changed. It's actually very near where Rachel Carson lived when she wrote Silent Spring. This is what happens. There's five wells being developed there. I'm not going to turn around with the pointer, but you'll see five wells. You'll see well pads. You'll see well containment vessels. You'll see areas that are present. That's what is the beginning of my understanding of shale. This is what a frack a well looks like when it's being drilled. The distance of the well to the nearest house was originally set so that if the tower fell over, it wouldn't hit the house. So the gas frack drilling is going on in neighborhoods, right on top of neighborhoods. And it has to because you have to frack every inch of the rock under the area. And the gas company has the right to do that because the mining laws in the United States do not allow you to prevent the gas company from getting its property, even if it's under your property. This is the Powder River Basin. Each, I don't know if you can see the blue dots there. Each blue dot is a house. The signs that the numbers are written on are where wells and release sites are present. The gas is around people tremendously, okay? This is Washington County, Pennsylvania, just south of Pittsburgh. Each dot is a well pad. This is even more, each dot is another well pad, Washington County closer. As there's a group called Track Tractor that's looking at identifying where wells are. We thought that was enough information until a person that worked with us in New Haven said, let me show you how much is being produced from each well. That be interesting, David? I didn't think it was interesting. But it was amazing because it showed that it didn't matter how close you were, it mattered how close you were to what. So people began to have to see those kinds of things. This is the result of a well. The well has just been fracked and you'll see a flame going off the top of that well. That is actually a flame that's burning excess gas. It's not yet clean enough to put into the gas line. And the flare is about 30% efficient. So 30% of what's coming up is being burned. The other 60 or 70% is raining down on people who live around the sites. That should be enough to make all of us sort of disturbed. But recently we found that within the gas, there's another part to this process. And these are the gas pipelines. I think there's seven there. You'll see them going through New York, coming out of Pennsylvania, going through New York. They're on their way to Boston. Because what we'd like to do is liquefy the gas, put it on a ship, and sell it to somebody somewhere else in the world. Every one of those dots is a compressor station. Gas does not flow through pipelines. It has to be pumped through pipelines. The compressor stations pumping it range from 1200,000 horsepower. The largest one that's being proposed is 80,000 horsepower. And they're actually diesel engines burning gas that is being pushed through there. What does this have to do with water? Well, water. There's thousands of gallons are used to simply, at the beginning, in the fracking process. It's mixed with chemicals and shale and sent down the pipe to the well to keep the shale. The pores open so the gas can flow back up the water system. Contaminated water, or what is called flowback water, comes up. That's contaminated and that's collected in ponds. You could have seen some ponds earlier. It's been dumped into streams. And George has been put through a treatment plants. There are some rivers in West Virginia that are flowing. It looks like they're estuary and rivers because of all the salts that are coming out of the gas fracking area. That would be enough. But actually, once the well is beginning to produce, the produced water comes up, which also has to be disposed of. One of the ways to dispose of produced water is to put it back down in a well. You've probably heard of the earthquakes. The problem with the produced water is that it contains radioactivity, primarily radium and a variety of other chemicals. One of the things that you can do with produced water is to melt ice on the roads of New England, except that the produced water has radiation in it, radioactivity in it. In addition to that, there are cuttings that come up. If you drill a well five miles out, there's a big pile of stuff. That stuff is waste stuff, and that's transported to various places to get rid of. The state of Pennsylvania will not let you leave certain cuttings within the state. You have to truck them out. They'd say, take them to New Jersey. Maybe you could take them to Connecticut. The Environmental Health Project was formed four years ago by the Heinz Endowments. It was formed a brief story when it was formed. I was asked by the Heinz Endowments to go down and look at Southwest Pennsylvania because I worked at CDC. They said, David, what do you think about what's going on here? I said, you're making a super fun site. So they said, would you tell us how to fix it? And I wrote out on it. I like to write on napkins. They're on a napkin, hand it to them, so they're fine. Do this. And a few days later, I got an email back from them and said, would you expand on your proposal? I said, it's on a napkin. So I wrote it in an email. I figured that would do it. And I sent it back. They said, how much would it cost? And I thought, better put an end to this. So I said, a million dollars. They said, when can you start? About that time, I was smart enough to say, let me get some people around me that know what they're doing. So we put together the Environmental Health Project. That's how it began. And we view this as a health crisis. The next few slides, I'll tell you why. What's happening, those are the areas of Pennsylvania that are being exposed to things. There's pipelines, compressor stations, processing plants, and so forth there. So people are being exposed widely. I'll show you a little bit more. People have been found to have all sorts of problems with these issues. We find health effects. We actually look for health effects. And the problem is this. It's a decentralized, unregulated business. Anybody can do anything that they want to do because we don't have a lot of help on. I'm going to skip the next two slides, I think. I'm going to turn around. I'm going to show you one bit of groundwater in honor of George. This is a groundwater study that we've done in Southwest Pennsylvania. We looked at the health of people who are getting their water out of groundwater and the health of people who are getting their water from public water supplies. And we could leave that slide up a little bit longer, which I can't. You would see that there's a tremendous increase of higher health effects in those people getting water from groundwater. The groundwater is polluted with the fracking material that's coming back. This is a brief slide of many sink, New York, where we went to many sink to see what would happen in many sink. If you look back, you'll see exactly the same things happen in many sink miles away from the gas fracking as happened in Southwest Pennsylvania. The gas, apparently, that's in the pipeline, is in pure methane. I wanted to get to the hubris. What could go wrong? What could go wrong depends on who you are. If you're in the industry and you want to know what could go wrong, the main thing you're worried about is that regulation slows down the energy development. If you can't get your gas to the ports or you can't, there's a liability that you can't deal with, or the price of gas falls, which it did. If you're people and what's going wrong, what happens is you're worried about health and safety. You're worried about loss of property and homes. You're worried about environmental impact. You're worried about streams. So the streams, the waste that's coming, if we're getting into Connecticut, would be carrying the fracked, those fracked contaminants with it, and that waste would be getting into our groundwater, and it's getting into groundwater along the way. What was the response that has been the response to this? First of all, the government decided to accept the industry from certain regulations. Secondly, they enacted laws and policies that blocked collection of information. We've sent our health information to the CDC, and they've not been able to respond to it because they're not allowed to look at health information. The water has been made an enemy. There's an idea of share the load. So some states are saying if their DEPs get in the way, just make them a Department of Energy and Environmental Protection together and see if that doesn't help. And all decisions on safety for gas is made by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and that's the commission of the industry. It's believed that it's patriotic to support clean energy, and there's a whole set of things there that I would just like you to think about. The government's first priority is energy. Health and welfare has been removed from the equation. We're going to pay a severe price for doing that. I want to show you that nobody does anything by themselves. There's a whole bunch of people. If you look very carefully there in your Fairfield, you'll see Lydia Griner, who I can tell Lydia Griner stories for a while, but I won't do that. And if you'd like to know a little bit more about our organization, that's the Southwest Pennsylvania Environmental Health Project. Excellent. Thank you, Dr. Brown. Lots of insightful and interesting information. Thank you. Our next panelist is going to speak for us is Kim Fracek. She has a background in both corporate creative direction and social justice and street art. She co-founded St. Energy's Allied Group Occupy the Pipeline, which was active from 2011 through 2013. Stain and Occupy the Pipeline together created an efficient team fighting spectra's New York, New Jersey expansion pipeline with Stain focusing on engagement of agencies and officials, while Occupy the Pipeline established itself as a creative education and direct action front producing smart street performances, art and music-filled rallies and marches, and direct actions that garner significant media attention. Ms. Fracek continues to spearhead the imaginative strategy side of campaigns and helps direct movements towards their goals with community and joy. I like that. She is committed to using art as a tool for social engagement and has brought a wise and considerate hand to various ongoing campaigns. So as you see, she's tackling the issue from a different angle of front. Please take your way. I think I'm gonna speak up there so I can see my slide. Sure, I'm taking my water. Great. So as George said, I'm from St. Energy Project. I'm the co-director. We fight shale gas infrastructure that Dr. Brown was just talking about. The way that we've worked is we know that we need to shut down the gas and the fossil fuels because we as a species have to stop digging stuff out of the ground and burning it for energy like cavemen and actually start moving on towards renewable and sustainable energies to be able to sustain life on this planet. We know climate change is happening. Species are disappearing at an astronomical rate and we have to actually act and be a proactive part of that. So St. Energy Project believes in shutting down the shale gas infrastructure, the pipelines, the compressor stations and moving towards a renewable energy system using solar, wind and tidal power. One of the things that we're known for we're a very small organization. We tend to bring lots of art into a lot of the actions and educational tools that we do. I was here to, I was asked to come here to talk to you guys about career choices and I just wanna make a mention to you that there's many ways to graduate from here and move into the world and become an active part of the world. You know, you don't have to go out there and just find a job and work for somebody. You all have amazing, tremendous gifts that nobody else has that you need to bring into the world and actually think of yourself as a seed and a garden and actually start to fulfill the world and what it needs for us to be able to sustain life on this planet. We're here to talk about World Water Day. Our water is at an absolute crisis. I happen to be very interested in the gas industry and shutting it down and that is one way that I'm working towards it. Many of you may have many different ways of working towards saving our water and protecting life on the planet. So there are many ways of organizing structures. So if you see on that way, on the left hand side, you can see that there's a way for leadership where there's like, I'm the boss and people work for me. Well, this is how we're taught to think of things and developing that sort of structural way of thinking sort of got us into this mess that we're in. If we start thinking of ourselves as more of a circular way where we all have strengths and we all have to cooperate together, then we can be able to actually find where our strengths overlap each other and elevate each other to lift the consciousness of the planet so we don't have the water crisis that we're facing today. So I'm an artist. I went to art school. Like how on earth did I get involved in fighting the fracking industry? Well, one of the things that I do is I was a volunteer when I started. There was a gas pipeline coming into New York City. I knew about fracking. I grew up in Pennsylvania and I knew it was bad. It was destroying water. I know people who aren't able to give their children baths because drilling is happening on their property. They can't drink the water from their faucet. This is real and this is just in our neighboring state in Pennsylvania. So this isn't something that's, I mean it's happening all over the world. It just happens to be coming now to the United States. And so one of the things that I like to do is use art to communicate. A lot of the stuff that Dr. Brown covered is very, very important. But a lot of people walking on the street, if you tell them that, they're like, okay. But if I do something like have a giant storybook that rhymes like a Dr. Seuss book called A Conta Story and explain to people what's going on, people generally stop and listen and wanna get involved. Up here at the top, you'll see, I don't know what the pointer's working. We taught little kids about a liquefied natural gas port that was going to be proposed off the coast of Connecticut and New York. And the little kids got it immediately. They're like, why would they wanna build a pipeline off of our beach and send liquefied natural gas off the coast? Isn't that polluting? Immediately they got it. The kids here, they started a campaign called Save the Mermaids and got the city of Long Beach, New York all involved in the Save the Mermaids campaign. Well, my colleagues up here took the parents in the front of the room and explained to them what was happening and talked to them about property value and future safety and water and things like that. So we were able to actually work holistically with the community using art and using conversation. Down here is, we do walking tours every year in New York City to talk about the spectra of fracked gas pipeline that's coming into New York City. It happens to be connecting to the Con Edison Vault in the basement of the Whitney Museum of American Art that likes to tout itself as a big, clean, new American way of looking towards the world. So what we, what me and my friends do, we're all theater and artists. So we dress up as, here's me dressed up as a Roy Lichtenstein painting and we'll come to life and actually give people a tour around the West Village where the pipeline's coming in and we're actually able to change the way that we communicate with people and get them involved. And now we have an entire lower Manhattan that's pretty angry about the spectra pipeline, which is really good. So then we can figure out how we're gonna collectively shut it down. This is all about communication. These, this is a piece of art I made for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that Dr. Brown talked about. They approve all of the interstate infrastructure for gas in our nation. They are a completely corrupt agency. So what me and a group of my friends did is we decided, you know, if they're not gonna listen to what's happening to families and to people across our country, we're gonna bring the families to their front doors. So this is a picture of the Bound family from Minisink, New York and the Hind Horsts from Cove Point, Maryland where they wanna build a liquefied, where they're building currently a liquefied natural gas port. And we decided, you know what? We're gonna blockade the entrance and we're not gonna let them into work. So we blockaded their entrance. We believe in civil disobedience. And we said, if you wanna get into work, you're gonna have to do exactly what you do and you're gonna have to break these families apart in order to go into FERC and work that day. So that's what we did. And they actually turned away and didn't go in. They were ordered not to go to work that day. So our direct action was very successful. If we didn't have that giant piece of artwork and we linked arms and didn't let them into work, it would have been a different story. We were actually able to change the communication of what the story was that we're trying to tell. Just so you can get an idea, here's a group of people hanging out in a park throw in a statue of Liberty Puppet and that changes what that group looks like. I'm gonna grab my water. This is a maypole that we made that we're standing all in the middle of Union Square talking about grievances of capitalism. And take that away and you just have a people standing in Union Square. Excuse me, art definitely changes the way that you can communicate with people. This was a big rally we had about the mortgage crisis and student debt and banks capitalizing on student debt, which I'm sure a lot of people in this room probably know about student debt. Take that away and it's just a group of people hanging out. But because we had this guy, we were actually able to create a conversation, which is what this is all about, right? We wanna create a conversation so we can actually talk about these problems because if we don't talk about these problems, we're not gonna be able to come up with solutions. So by having a conversation, we are able to actually change the narrative and we wanna change popular consensus. We wanna be able to change that and I believe that bringing art and visuals into our conversations and our narratives is a way that we can communicate with each other and actually change the world. This is also a picture of the front of FERC. We had a second blockade where we thought, okay, well, the family portrait was one thing. There are family portraits all over the United States. So what we did is I had 50 telephone calls with different people from every state of the United States that's dealing with gas infrastructure and we created a 50-foot banner of all the different stories that were collected from these telephone calls and we created a giant banner that served as a blockade called the United States of Fracking. So the FERC commissioners that were going into work could actually read the stories about what it actually was that they're approving. They're not out on the front lines. They live in Washington, D.C. They don't see what's actually going on out in our country and the suffering that is actually taking place because of decisions that they're making in this building. So this is how far it stretched. We surrounded the entire entrance of the building with these different stories. But not only making art to communicate, but the process of making art together helps to build community and the community, building community is actually what's really, really important and how we're actually going to be able to interact with each other as we move into the new world. We're gonna be facing very, very serious problems from the climate crisis, but if we know that we have connected with each other, we know we have each other's backs. So I believe the process of actually making the art together has brought us so much closer. Like all of these people that helped, I drew this with a friend of mine and then I explained to people how we're all gonna paint it in. Everybody has this very deep spiritual experience with each other now and we've all felt really proud on taking that to this demonstration. Graphic design is another really interesting way to explain what's going on. We are very lucky, we have George here that's running the public water utility. In Maine, the state of Maine, they're not so lucky. They have a company called Nestle that most of us have heard of. They are trying to privatize the water of the state of Maine and steal the natural resources there to bottle it and sell it back to the public. So we created a campaign called Stolen Spring with the Maine water sentinel named Nikki Sakura who's an amazing woman and we've been able to actually, and we've been able to get funding to make stickers. We apply for grants. Like there are ways that you can take your skills and create a living for yourself off doing good for the world. I just wanted to touch back on home here in Fairfield, Connecticut, in Connecticut, you guys have the Spectra Pipeline which is running through the state of Connecticut. I would encourage you all to connect with a your local group called Capitalism versus the Climate. There's a really great guy named Dan Fisher who he may have left already but he is very welcoming to all of you guys getting in touch with him. Go to capitalism versus the climate.org. They're fighting the Spectra Pipeline. This is what we thought that's going into the basement of the Whitney. The Spectra Pipeline is now expanding through the Northeast, going through Connecticut, through compressor stations, enlarging these pipelines. Here is my friend Nancy Vann. She's standing on her property that Spectra Energy took by Eminent Domain and this is right on wetlands property too. They're breaking all sorts of laws but they can because they have FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, on their side telling them they can do whatever they want. So we're up against something really vicious and if we're not creative and community minded about it we're not gonna win. So just to close, rise up. Trust in your gifts. Everybody in this room has an amazing personal story to share with the world and there's no other you. We need everybody to create the world that we need to see. We need a sustainable planet where we can all survive. Organize with people that share common goals. This is a beautiful thing to do. Look for grants. There are organizations out there that want to fund people who wanna get stuff done. That is their gift to give to the world and there are ways to create your community where you don't have to go and work for an employer and do things and then do this on the side. You can actually make this your life and protect your water first and foremost. We can't survive without it. Change the world and that's my presentation. Thank you very much. As you can see a much different perspective on the issue than Dr. Brown but very much so as relevant. Next we have was this our next panelist is Betta Broad. As I mentioned before she's a Fairfield University alum. In college she worked on a campaign to unionize the janitors on campus and as a statewide student organizer for the AFL-CIO. After moving back to New York City she was involved in multiple organizations and campaigns including advocating as a non-governmental organization representative for children's rights at the United Nations fighting to repeal the Rockefeller drug laws, managing a Brooklyn community art space and producing anti-war concerts called Party for Peace. Betta Broad worked as a deputy director of Earth Day New York for five years organizing the major Earth Day festivals in New York City and in 2011 she began working full time on the campaign to ban fracking in New York State. As part of her anti-fracking work she produced a short video series called Love New York. Don't frack it up. Currently she is the outreach director of a new campaign aimed at accelerating the transition to a clean energy economy in New York State. She serves on the board of directors of Brooklyn for Peace and Citizens for Local Power as well as on the Kingston Conservation Advisory Council and the Kingston Climate Smart Commission. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Fairfax University with a BA in political science. I'm gonna come up here too. Happy World Water Day everyone. It is so great to be here. I was really honored when Joe Earrington reached out to me and invited me to come back to my alma mater and be here with you all. A little did I know that Kim, my friend and activist ally in the city would also be here so that's a treat and as always inspired by Kim's fantastic art and dedication and creativity that she brings to our movement. And I've been hearing about David for many years and his traffic work raising awareness about the health effects of fracking in Pennsylvania. And I'm looking forward to Margaret Minor and hearing all of the great work you're doing. So we all come at this from different perspectives and I figured I would start by activism. So what is it? Joe asked me to talk a little bit about activism and my personal journey, which started at a pretty young age. I was 13 or 14, I can't remember when I went to my first march in New York City for Free Friday, but it wasn't until I came here to Fairfield U that I really got to experience what it means to be a part of a campaign for social justice. I had the good fortune to have some truly amazing professors here, including Simon Herrick, a Jesuit priest, who encouraged me to get involved with a new group on campus called Concerned University Community Members. And that was a group of students and professors who were concerned that the janitors on campus who had recently been outsourced were now being treated unfairly by this outside contractor. They were doing the same work, but they'd lost their benefits and a lot of their rights. So we organized and with the help of a union organizer from SEIU, we petitioned, rallied, we had a sit-in at Bellarmine Hall, and we demanded that the janitors had a right to form a union. Finally, we even had a hunger strike, which luckily only lasted a day because I get grouchy when I'm hungry, but then the university, I think, realized, the administration realized that it was the right thing to do to support the janitors. And they were the most vulnerable members of our university community. Many of them were Spanish-speaking, and although they risk losing their jobs by continuing to fight for their rights as workers, they did so with courage and dignity. And being a part of that effort with professors and students and the janitors really had a profound effect on me. So I dug up this picture of me when I was, you all, the age here in front of Bellarmine Hall at one of our protests. So for a while, I felt called to join the Catholic worker movement, which some of you might be familiar with. I was started by Dorothy Day in the 1930s, and Catholic workers served the poor in a way that goes beyond charity. They truly give their all to live in community, to resist injustice, and commit to nonviolent struggle. If Jesus were here today, I think that he would probably be most comfortable hanging out with Catholic workers. At the time, I felt overwhelmed with guilt about being a white middle-class American, and the role that this country has unfortunately played in invading other countries, exploiting natural resources, and imprisoning poor people of color. But I'm grateful that I had a wonderful professor and friend, Kevin Cassidy, who counseled me that guilt would only immobilize me, and that we can all play a role in this movement. So I didn't have to completely give up my bougie desires, not that I was dying for a fancy car or designer clothes, but I did wanna be able to go out with my friends sometimes for margaritas, so that's not so much to ask, right? I still adhere to that belief that you don't have to give up everything or be a martyr to the movement to contribute something meaningful, and I still really like margaritas with my friends. So speaking of fun, while a big part of my life as an activist has been with awesome people like Kim at exciting protests, marches, and rallies, there's also been petitioning, door knocking, hosting small community meetings, tabling at festivals, organizing cool events like concerts and film screenings, and really trying to raise awareness and reach people who aren't already a part of the movement. And there are so many ways to get involved and contribute. Not everyone has to get arrested protesting a pipeline or at a Trump rally, although if you were called to put your body on the line or consider it, I definitely wouldn't discourage you, but being an activist has a lot of different manifestations and they don't all involve getting hauled off in handcuffs. One of the most important things for my life as an activist has been having faith that we can change the world. It's easy to get discouraged, especially when it comes to big overwhelming issues like climate change. I can certainly understand why people think that their small individual actions won't really make a difference or are irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. But time and time again, history has shown that small groups of people that get together because they're compassionate and concerned and bound together with other people who are oppressed themselves, have organized to change things and won. So I was gonna go into a little bit about what's happened in Pennsylvania and how that inspired our movement in New York City, but I think we heard a lot about it from Dr. Brown, who spoke very thoroughly and eloquently, so I won't go too much into it, but you can see Mark Ruffalo up in the corner who was an amazing ally and came with us to Dimmick, Pennsylvania and met with families like Ray Kim who had his water poisoned by the fracking industry, and unfortunately they were really abandoned by the companies and by the government at the time. So in New York State, we saw what was happening in Pennsylvania and we organized and we realized that we couldn't let that happen to our state and as much as we could, we would work in solidarity with Pennsylvania. So many of you may have heard that in New York we had this very big win recently with the campaign to ban fracking, a campaign that many people said was impossible. But it turned out that fracking wasn't inevitable and despite the fact that the oil and gas corporations have more money and power than any corporations in the history of the world, we won by having faith, working together, and not being afraid to try different tactics. You saw some of them with Kim's slideshow. We put enough pressure by showing up everywhere Governor Cuomo was. He couldn't step foot outside of his door without hearing, ban fracking now. And eventually he did the right thing, and he banned fracking. So without those thousands of dedicated activists across the state, not to mention inspiring artists, medical professionals, elected officials, business leaders, faith leaders, everyone bringing their talent and heart to this movement, we never could have done it. Now I know that many of you are getting ready to graduate and start your careers. There are many choices to consider and certainly the initial path you take is not necessarily where you'll end up. But I would recommend that you consider a job that might not pay the most, but does allow you to work with other people to contribute to changing the world, even if it's just a small part of it. Of course there are some days when I wish I made more money, but it feels great to not only be able to pay my bills, but to know that I'm following my calling. And I can honestly say that if I won the lottery tomorrow, my life wouldn't change that much. I might stop stressing a little bit about that student loan that Kim talked about, but ultimately my daily existence and how I spend my time would stay mostly the same, and that's a pretty great thing to be able to say. I feel so fortunate to get to spend my life working with other passionate people and have the opportunity to share moments like this with all of you. And even if your day job isn't as an organizer or an activist, there's so many other ways to get involved and to contribute to your community and the world. More and more, as Kim mentioned, people are waking up and realizing that in order to avert catastrophic climate change and create sustainable, healthy communities, we need a new paradigm and a new way of doing business. Oh, that's us delivering petitions to Governor Cuomo. And there's Mark. And there's the slide I was looking for. Done by one of our artist friends in New York State, Will Sweeney, who, again, really contributed his talents to the movement. And I think that perfectly shows the crossroads that we're at right now, not only in New York, but everywhere in this country and around the world where we have a choice to make. Do we go in the direction of green energy and health and safety or fracking? So again, luckily in New York State, we made the choice to ban fracking, although we did win that battle. The war is far from won. And as we heard, there's a lot of pipelines and compressor stations and other gas infrastructure that we're continuing to fight at the same time that we promote clean renewable energy solutions. So this new way of doing business, for those of you who are business majors, I would urge you to consider applying to work for a green company or in the clean energy sector. There are a ton of job opportunities in the new green economy, and fossil fuels are literally going the way of the dinosaur while careers in solar, wind, and efficiency are truly 21st century. This is Dr. Mark Jacobson, who has really been an inspiration to many of us in the movement, who has documented how we can transition to 100% renewable energy with wind, water, and solar. We don't need to continue to rely on fossil fuels or nuclear for that matter. Plus beyond your job, you can always volunteer for a great group fighting to prevent your water supply from being privatized. That recently happened in the town I live in now in Kingston, a group of folks got together and they organized and put pressure on the local elected officials and everybody said, no, we don't want this. We wanna keep our public water supply public, not have it bottled and shipped to God knows where. So you could get involved with a group like that or you could work to make your town more bike-friendly. There's so many different ways to get involved. You can make choices to limit your plastic consumption or decide that your next car is going to be a plug-in hybrid. Buy local and organic and avoid processed food and a lot of packaging. In fact, one really simple thing that you can do is bring your own water bottle, fork, coffee cup, reusable bag with you. Now, some people might look at you a little funny when you pull out that fork, but think how crazy it is that a plastic fork you use for what, 10 minutes, maybe an hour, and then it goes into the ocean or into a landfill forever. That's what I call crazy. There are 500 million plastic straws that are thrown away every year. So please, consider bringing your own stuff. That in itself is being an activist. And then they're staying informed. I highly recommend Democracy Now as a way to get your news every day. There's a lot of terrific media outlets, but I can promise you that if you start to tune into Democracy Now, the way you see the world and experience life will never be the same. So check that out. Also, an issue that is really important to me right now and I hope is important to all of you, which Democracy Now talks a lot about, but you don't necessarily get the full story from the mainstream media is the TPP. How many people have heard of the TPP? Okay, a couple of people. That's good, I'm impressed, because if you're not listening to Democracy Now, it's often or some of the other outlets that really cover the story you can miss just how important it really is. It's going to be if it goes through, which if we have anything to say about it, it won't. The largest trade deal in history, these are the countries that would be involved. And the TPP is really a massive giveaway to multinational corporations that would offshore jobs, undermine workers' rights, threaten the environment, exacerbate things that we don't want fracking. Literally, it could allow corporations to sue local governments that have banned fracking or enacted other regulations to protect our health and the environment. The TPP is part of corporate globalization or neoliberalism, and that's really accelerated the exploitation of our natural resources and workers. But increasingly, people are organizing in their own communities as part of a movement for democracy to oppose trade deals like the TPP and instead choose to support local and fair trade businesses. And I can tell you, once you start learning more about causes and campaigns that interest you, it's really great if you share them with your friends on social media. We have something now that nobody before us had, which is the ability to connect with people beyond who we know, connect with friends that we made 20 years ago. It's truly amazing. So don't hesitate to post about what you're passionate about on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and please feel free to find me on those. It's just better broad, and I'm on all the sites I just mentioned. I would love to be your friend and learn about what you care about. So whether protesting the war in Iraq or organizing to ban fracking and promote renewable energy instead, which is mostly what I'm doing now. Oh, there's me and my friend and colleague, Renee Vogelsang, tabling as usual, trying to get the word out about renewable energy, and we have a lot of fun doing it. I've truly gotten to know some amazing people, and it's been an adventure. I wish that all of you could experience the joy of working with other people who might not have started as your friends, but you're brought together around a common goal to make the world a better place, and you end up developing an incredible bond. And of course, at times it's extremely challenging, but as they say, nothing really worth creating comes easily. And what we're working to create is a new economy that supports life on this planet. There it is, Mother Earth, and really create a society that places people before profit. And if we're going to succeed at changing everything, which I have absolute faith that we can, we really do need everyone to play a part. So please join us, I promise it's a lot of fun, and we're gonna be out in the street and down in Pennsylvania this summer, July 24th for March for the Clean Energy Revolution, I would love to see you there, I would love to see you online, and I just wanna thank you all so much for being here and being interested in activism and World Water Day. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Broad. Your mission and career choices and experiences are truly inspiring, I must say. Thank you, it's excellent. Also, I'd like to add that I am an executive at Aquarian Water Company, which is the seventh largest privately owned water company in the United States, but we consider ourselves stewards of the environment and we have no plans of bottling, watering, shipping them out anywhere. We consider ourselves stewards of the environment, only wanna do good on them, as far as that's concerned. Next we have Ms. Margaret Miner. She is the executive director of Rivers Alliance of Connecticut. As I mentioned before, that's a statewide nonprofit organization formed to protect Connecticut's rivers and streams by promoting sound river conservation policies and by assisting the many groups and individuals involved in watershed protection. She serves in several statewide capacities, including co-chair of the Water Planning Council advisory group prior to coming to Rivers Alliance. Ms. Miner was executive director of the award-winning Roxbury Land Trust and before that, she was a local newspaper reporter specializing in politics, land use, and the environment. Among her publications are the fully annotated Oxford Dictionary of American Quotations compiled with her co-author and husband, U. Rawson. And Margaret and I, we run some of the similar circles together, so we are friends for a number of years. Margaret? Okay, is there that little clicker? Little clicker, I see a little clicker, is this the... I'm sorry, I think I left it there. Do you want me to help you with the clicker? Oh, I'm happy to do it. I only have three slides and they all show the same thing, sort of, but they say they can put it up. Let's see, I don't see anything that was... I'm not sure. Yep, to the right. The slides are coming, Margaret. Oh, they're covered? Yes, we have to activate the screen. When it gets up there. I hope it works a little better than my Garmin, which took me about at least 20 miles out of the way I tried to get here. Okay, this is, I believe, the Fenton River at the University of Connecticut in 2005, a beautiful local river that completely dried up, as had the university had been warned, it would be if they kept pumping it at the rate they could legally pump. This desiccation of the river led in 2005 to a law in Connecticut intended to protect stream flow. Maybe another one will come up we'll see. There will be two more that will come up. It will show other dry streams actually from this year. An interesting thing about these streams is they are all three important habitat for fish. One is a trout management area of the state of Connecticut, and they are also all three wherever they are. They are also all three in drinking water, water sheds. So in Connecticut, we're looking at a situation even though we are, as they say, water rich and certainly privileged, yes. And this is, I believe, Coppermide Brook in Burlington. This is a trout management area. And I think that's a well house. You see just that building up in the corner. And the Wikipedia River in Southbury is also very dry all summer. A very well-studied watershed, the Papua Rock River Watershed Coalition. The state has invested a lot and the communities have invested a lot in studying that water and what we need to keep the stream healthy. And that enables us to say, without a doubt, it's not healthy. This summer, the stream was drawn down partly the natural drought, but partly pumping. Rivers Alliance of Connecticut was founded in 1992. We're a small organization. We work on not just rivers and streams because when you're trying to protect those, you realize, well, it's wetlands, it's headwaters, it's vernal pools, a little bit less. So lakes are a horrible problem because they typically tend to stagnate. We work also with Long Island Sound Advocates and recently were elected to the Citizens Advisory Committee for the Long Island Sound Study. That's a federal group. So that we'll be able, with that connection, to demonstrate that the continuity between the uplands going up into Vermont, up north of Connecticut, but certainly in Connecticut, we are the watershed. Our whole state, except for maybe 1%, drains into Long Island Sound. So the health of the sound, a very important part of Connecticut, depends upon healthy conditions in the Northwest Hills and healthy conditions as you approach. And by healthy conditions, I mean the sewage treatment has to work and it doesn't always work as it should, especially with respect to nutrients. We have, in terms of dealing with fracking, there is a definitely pressure to bring fracking waste to Connecticut. Deep will be our Department of Energy, Environmental Protection will be writing regulations and regulations almost always say, you can do it as long as you do it safely, even when it's almost impossible to do it safely. If there are three towns in Connecticut that have adopted anti-fracking waste ordinances, that's Washington, Connecticut, Coventry, I think Bradford, and next week I'm speaking at Litchfield and Litchfield, Connecticut, is introducing its selectments to the idea of a ban on fracking waste and the, as Dr. Brown said, it's very tempting, you know what it costs if you work for a town, what your winter snow budgets are, something that in some cases they're paying you to take the waste, it is attempting to take it. The kind of thing we did, we did research, it's up on our website, okay, the fracking waste would go to the state's three hazardous waste facilities, how are they doing when they take fracking waste and attempt to treat it to go into a public treatment, wastewater treatment facility and put it into the river or into the sound. They're not doing well, in fact, they are out of compliance with the Clean Water Act. The three facilities are out of compliance more than 90% of the time. Some of these non-compliant issues are small, some are quite serious. We are not equipped to deal with more fracking waste. We can't actually deal very well with the waste we have right here in Connecticut. If we desperately do need activists, but not all of us are good activists, so I am so glad for the energy and the artistic talent that get people out there. George and I are very retiring and soft-spoken and the legislature together last, I think we were testifying on the same side of an issue. Sometimes we're testifying opposite sides because he's the utility and I'm the stream person and we have to work out who gets what water. But I think we can work it out pretty well, but there are large interests that aren't particularly interested in either the drinking water or the what I would call green infrastructure, the water in its natural condition. So the only time I came close to getting arrested was in Weston on an environmental mission and I talked my way out of it. My son was so disappointed. He said, mom, you have to ask yourself, what would Al Sharpton do? So I said, okay, but I just chickened out and talked my way out of it. How do you get into it? Water, it's interesting that people are here, they're talking about medicine and science, social justice, different art, torn activism, a lot on clean energy and this is World Water Day because water, as we all know, is essential, it's an essential element in the energy that we use, in how we live, our health, whether crops will grow or won't grow and you see the most of the most troubled and turbulent areas of the world have been experiencing drought for a number of years. Syria, Iran, Iraq, parts of Africa, they're losing agricultural ground because of the drought so rapidly that it's created a really humanitarian crisis and a breeding ground for all kinds of horrible violence because there are too many people fighting over a shrinking resource and very little technology that could, in fact, at least maximize the resources that are available. I'll say that in Connecticut, well, let me just say briefly, if you want to work in, if you are starting at any career, if you think about any aspect of your work, you'll see that you can really take a stand. At the League of Conservation Voters, the executive director there started off working in New York State for a construction school, construction department and thought, oh, we have to have an Earth Day. So she organized the big Earth Day at her corporation, Sierra Club got involved, she got involved with the league now she's employed in the environmental field. Chris Murphy, our senator, he got involved with the environment because there is famously polluted water in Southington, polluted groundwater. And so he joined as a, I think still in high school, picketing for that. Now water has not been, when he was in the state legislature, he was co-chair of the Public Health Committee. His main interest has been health, but water and the environment have always been there as part of his realizing that if you live in Connecticut, you have to be an environmentalist. They're really, you're running for office, you cannot run for office saying, I'm against open space, clean water, and I would like to see fracking here, which luckily I don't think we can get. That's not a viable political position. Gina McCarthy was an anthropology major in high school. She's head of the EPA now. She then became involved in public health work and then policy. And I was at a hearing where an attorney was trying to discredit a witness for the other side. And this witness was testifying on an energy issue, but this attorney said mockingly, she's not even a scientist, she's an anthropologist. And Gina looked up and he kept emphasizing it to Gina, the anthropology major. An anthropologist is trying to give us testimony on water, that's ridiculous. So he actually won the case, but he was embarrassed when he found out later. So we have major water fights in Connecticut that reflect what's going on around the world. We're around, well, at least around the United States, we have a big fight up at Bloomfield because Niagara Water, a water bottling company, and the big utility there, the Metropolitan District Commission utility, which is a public utility, by the way. Without any transparency set up a deal such that Niagara will build a plan for making plastic bottles, putting water into them and shipping them out, that will be, they'll make more than a million bottles a week. They are getting a discount on their water, less than they're paying less per gallon of the residence, which sometimes happens. Activists have come forward and people with all different kinds of talent. I can tell you, if you're an artist, if you're an economist, because people have been examining, was this a good deal financially? If you can write or communicate, if you can do anything on the internet in the way of social media. Above all, oh, a number of my friends have come into environmental work through science. Almost everybody did something in the out-of-doors that they loved, out in the woods, and they're fishing or whatever, as children. But then older, in the professions they may take up, as a scientist, they may begin to tend toward ecological science and end up helping with the environment. And of course, our volunteers are invaluable. We have, if you wanna get into waterfights in Connecticut, there's the Bloomfield issue, and what place do we want bottled water companies to have in this state? There's a pipeline coming right through the metropolitan districts, class one and class two, watershed protection lands. So we're all engaging with FERC on that to try to at least make them take a different route and actually look at the safety. There are three major gas companies coming through Connecticut, now Spectra, which I think you mentioned, Kinder Morgan and Iroquois. And they have different, and then they all come together. It looks like a spider web of pipelines as you get up around into Windsor, Connecticut. So we have pipeline issues. One of my favorite issues is another question of our protected watershed lands. And you know them with Aquaria and some of the most beautiful lands we have in the state. And there's a large rock mining company, Till Con. You may have seen it if you drive around. They want to expand their quarry in the town of Plainfield in land that's owned by Bristol, by a new Britain water company. And they're ready to go. The only thing is it's a protected open space. So they said, well, if we blow, if we could dig it out, you know, and you just totally dig out the whole thing, all the earth's vegetation, we can make you a new reservoir. And this will be excellent thing for the whole region. So here's again, where you need scientists, you need hydrologists, you need botanists, the Botanical Society testified. You need all kinds of people with different talents and neighbors to step forward and say, this is a bad idea. We don't need another reservoir because unless you bring more water into the watershed, which they're not doing, what does it do to build another reservoir? It doesn't really add that much to what you've got. And what you're doing is getting rid of water storage. All that earth and vegetation stores the water and actually cleans the water. So good quality water is delivered to the water company. Blowing it up and building a reservoir is not a good idea. Lots of people think not. It's gonna be studied, I believe. So you can start simply by looking out your back, going out your back door and seeing a stream dried up or to your park and seeing a mess. You can join any town group or volunteer group. You can look for a job in the green industry. I hope that you do call us Rivers Alliance of Connecticut. We want really people to stay here in Connecticut and work on the environment and water issues or at least go to a neighboring state. Okay, thanks. Excellent, thank you, Margaret. Okay, so we're running a little towards the end of our time here. Is there, are there any, anything that we missed that any of the panelists now would like to say or present to the group? There being none, how about the audience? Any questions? We'll take one or two if we have any. Excellent, well thank you very much, all right? We are over time. Joe, anything you'd like to say? Sure. I wanted to thank all of you for all of you in the audience for attending this presentation. I thank all our participants as well as those who work behind the scenes to make this program possible and you've given us a lot to think about and exactly what I was hoping for to get us all fired up and get involved. It's a great, great cause and we're all in this earth together. So it's very, very important. So thank you very much.