Holy Ground in Kentucky: Monks and Nuns Fight Fracking

[cbayer]

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/culture/7267/holy_ground_in_kentucky__monks_and_nuns_fight_fracking/

August 28, 2013
By M. SOPHIA NEWMAN


From left to right: Sr. Ceceliana Skees, Sr. Maria Visse , and Sr. Theresa Coyle of the Sisters of Loretto in central Kentucky.

M. Sophia Newman
M. Sophia Newman, MPH, is a freelance writer, a health researcher currently completing a Fulbright fellowship in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and a Gits fan. Her writing often focuses on psychology, feminism, and politics in South Asia. She blogs at msophianewman.com.

Two monastic orders in rural Kentucky, the Sisters of Loretto and Our Lady of Gethsemani, have made news recently for refusing to permit a gas company to install a pipeline across their property.

Collectively, the orders own 3,000 acres in central Kentucky. Both have rejected company requests to discuss the prospective “"Bluegrass" Pipeline,” which would transverse much of the state carrying pressurized natural gas.

Williams Companies, a Tulsa, OK, company, and Boardwalk Pipeline Partners of Owensboro, KY—the companies that are developing the project—may be able to access the land via eminent domain, but the sisters have gathered petitions against such a prospect. They've also sung in protest against the pipeline, which they say will involve hydraulic fracking, a controversial process of extracting oil reserves by fracturing underground rock with injections of water.

In a reflection posted on the Loretto website, Susan Classen explains, “

We learned that the pipeline is to hold highly toxic, explosive chemical bi-products [sic] of fracking called Natural Gas Liquids (NGL's) which are to be exported for making plastic. We've read timelines of explosions and contamination caused by flagrant safety violations and the speed with which contamination runs through the porous, unstable limestone of Kentucky geology.”

more at link

[shenmue]

1. I hope they win

Fracking is awful.

[okasha]

4. They're doing it here in Texas

at the Eagle Shale. It's horrendously destructive.

[Tanuki]

2. Thanks for posting this. As the article points out, the monastery of

Our Lady of Gethsemani was the home of Thomas Merton for some 27 years. He would be gratified to see his tradition of activism being carried on today.

[cbayer]

3. You are welcome. It's really a good news story, imo, which we don't

get nearly enough of.