Imagine There's No Fracking

Susan Phillips

Recent Stories

Susan Phillips tells stories about the consequences of political decisions on people's every day lives. She has worked as a reporter for WHYY since 2004. Susan's coverage of the 2008 Presidential election resulted in a story on the front page of the New York Times. In 2010 she traveled to Haiti to cover the earthquake. That same year she produced an award-winning series on Pennsylvania's natural gas rush called "The Shale Game." She received a 2013 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Award for her work covering natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania. She has also won several Edward R. Murrow awards for her work with StateImpact. In 2013/14 she spent a year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. She has also been a Metcalf Fellow, an MBL Logan Science Journalism Fellow and reported from Marrakech on the 2016 climate talks as an International Reporting Project Fellow. A graduate of Columbia School of Journalism, she earned her Bachelor's degree in International Relations from George Washington University.

August 28, 2012 | 12:52 PM

Kevin Winter / Getty Images

(L-R) Musician Sean Ono Lennon, his mother singer/artist Yoko Ono and singer Iggy Pop perform at "We are Plastic Ono Band" at the Orpheum Theater on October 1, 2010 in Los Angeles, California.

Lady Gaga, Paul McCartney, Salman Rushdie, My Morning Jacket, Roberta Flack, Jimmy Fallon, The Flaming Lips, Yo La Tengo, the B-52’s, Patti Smith, and the list goes on, rolling across the screen on the website of the latest anti-drilling group Artists Against Fracking. Led by Sean Lennon and Yoko Ono, the organization will hold its first event Wednesday, a press conference in New York City.
Sean Lennon has an op-ed in the New York Times today, writing about his childhood memories of the family farm in upstate New York, where large natural gas deposits lie beneath the ground.

“A few months ago I was asked by a neighbor near our farm to attend a town meeting at the local high school. Some gas companies at the meeting were trying very hard to sell us on a plan to tear through our wilderness and make room for a new pipeline: infrastructure for hydraulic fracturing. Most of the residents at the meeting, many of them organic farmers, were openly defiant. The gas companies didn’t seem to care. They gave us the feeling that whether we liked it or not, they were going to fracture our little town.”

Gov. Cuomo is expected to announce new gas drilling rules soon, thereby lifting the moratorium on gas drilling in New York State.