As students focus on how to best approach the semester, one professor hopes to return attention to the potential dangers of hydraulic fracturing with an informative benefit concert.
Casa Nueva will host Friday’s Anti-Fracking Concert, which will feature live music by local acts Broken Ring, Hunnabee & the Sandy Tar Boys and Sport Fishing USA.
The concert, which is sponsored by the Athens County Fracking Action Network and Slow Down Fracking in Athens County, is free to attend, but donations will be accepted and forwarded to the Buckeye Forest Council and Appalachia Resist! organizations.
Attendees can enjoy music by homegrown folk, alternative-country, and Appalachian acts and learn more about fracking through prepared educational material.
Communications professor Austin Babrow organized the event as a way to energize, celebrate and support the community’s anti-fracking activists.
A campus screening of the documentary Gasland initially piqued Babrow’s interest in how the controversial drilling practice was affecting local residents and encouraged him to become more vocal in Athens’ anti-fracking movement.
“As I learned more about fracking, the things that concerned me initially became of even greater concern,” Babrow said. “It seemed like the industry wanted to move as rapidly as possible, far faster than necessary science and regulation.”
Jenna Richardson, a senior studying communications, originally proposed the idea to hold the benefit concert while she was a student in Babrow’s communication activism class this past semester and has been working with him since to make it a reality.
She said that students must be proactive in the fight against fracking in order to save the university and community from an uncertain future.
“OU students must rise up together and speak out against the implementation of injection wells in Athens County,” Richardson said. “What student would want to live in a place that could become industrialized in the next 10, 15, 20 years?”
The effort to inform students, past and present, isn’t falling on deaf ears.
Graduate student Andrew McMillian, who received a bachelor’s degree in communications from OU, said that he appreciates efforts to enlighten those who will have to face future repercussions of current environmental decisions.
“I think it’s awesome that these kind of benefits are happening,” McMillian said. “People, especially young people, need to be informed, since we’re going to be around for a while.”
jd202409@ohiou.edu
