This is the Tom Harbin Program.

Tom Harbin here with you, local communities are standing up and in some cases standing

up for the rights of nature, an extraordinary process, an extraordinary event.

Thomas Lindsay, the Senior Council for the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights,

CDER, Center for Environmental Rights.org, and CDER underscore org is the Twitter handle,

is with us.

Thomas, welcome back to the program.

Yeah, thanks for having us, Tom.

So tell me about this story here with this Pennsylvania victory.

Yeah, so it goes back a while back to 2014, folks may not know, but the fracking explosion

in the United States is hydrofracking for natural gas that's occurred in the country.

Produced about 189 billion gallons of fracking wastewater in the United States, and that's

equivalent to 14 and a half days of Niagara Falls basically falling into the earth.

And so fracking companies have been taking this carcinogenic, heavy metal laden, radioactive,

fracking waste, and dumping it into the ground.

So that's produced about 36,000 oil and gas wastewater injection wells across the United

States with one of those planned for this very small community of 700 people in a place

called Grant Township in Western Pennsylvania.

And starting in 2014, the folks in Grant Township not wanting to be used as a toilet for

this kind of fracking waste decided to adopt a local law with our help to ban wastewater

from being injected into the township.

And when they passed the law, of course, as happens often with communities that pass these

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