NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mark Ruffalo and other Oscar nominees will wear a blue water droplet pin during Sunday night’s Academy Awards as a way of asking Americans to be stewards of our treasured water supply, which is currently in jeopardy due to extreme drilling and includes natural gas hydro-fracking. The pin is an initiative of WaterDefense.org, a new campaign calling attention to the impacts on drinking water caused by increasingly extreme methods used to extract fossil fuels. The water supply for over 15 million people, including New York City and Philadelphia, is currently at risk from a plan to drill 20,000 hydro-fracking wells in the Delaware River Basin. The proposal has earned the Delaware River the status as America's “most endangered river.”
“Water is our most treasured resource, it’s the most basic element of life and not having access to clean and safe water changes everything,” said Academy Award Nominee Mark Ruffalo. “Look at the people of Dimock, PA, Pavillion, WY, and Silt, CO, and so on who can’t use the water coming out of their faucets and need to have their water delivered by a tractor trailer from miles away - that’s us. This is our America, and we’re not going to just let that continue to happen.” For the past three years Ruffalo has been an advocate for protecting communities, including his own in upstate New York, from the hazards of hydro-fracking.
The fracking process to extract natural gas from the earth requires incomprehensible amounts of water, which comes from the same supply that Americans use to sustain their everyday lives. Natural gas companies use this water without paying a cent, and add toxic chemicals that make it undrinkable and simply unusable when they're done with it. As of 2008 over 1,000 incidents of groundwater contamination have been documented across the country. In Pennsylvania alone where only 2,400 wells have been drilled, the industry has racked-up over 2,000 violations from the Department of Environmental Protection. Due to controversy, and as some residents in gas drilling areas claim - industry pressuring them not to speak out, overarching statistics of the industry’s impacts have been impossible to measure. Additionally, the process is not federally regulated due to exemptions in key environmental laws. The 2005 Energy Policy Act exempted fracking from provisions of the Safe Drinking Water Act, Clean Water Act, and other basic environmental protections.
WaterDefense.org’s Oscar initiative follows a recent day in D.C. where Mark Ruffalo and “GASLAND” Director, Josh Fox, met with Congressional members about the issue. “Gasland”, a documentary about natural gas hydro-fracking, is also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary this year. Ruffalo, who’s nominated for Best-Supporting Actor for “The Kids Are Alright”, and other Oscar celebrities, will be wearing their water droplet pins at the Awards gala and other festivities to help raise awareness for the issue. The pin is two-fold in meaning - it represents our prized natural water resources and is also a tear for what’s happened as a result of it not being protected.
WaterDefense.org is a new initiative to celebrate water as a necessity for life, and a call on today’s generations to take over from those before as the stewards of this precious natural resource. In our lifetime, our limited supply of drinking water needs protection from the devastation caused by the production of dirty fossil fuels. An aggressive clean energy policy is the essential solution for ensuring every American generation has access to clean and safe water.