From Fracking to Data Centers
Hamster Wheels and that Same Old Song and Dance
Welcome to Truth and Reckoning, a newsletter from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth.
For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance. This op-ed was written by CELDF’s Tish O’Dell.
As a community organizer and environmental “activist” for over 15 years, I have often used the metaphor that “we are spinning on a hamster wheel” when describing our environmental laws and policies as well as the bigger system of government that we have all been born into.
That phrase has gotten mixed reactions from people. Some nod in agreement without really knowing how true it is, and some have gotten angry, telling me to stop calling them lab rats. The truth is not always easy to hear, let alone accept – I understand that from my own experiences.
I got involved in the Community Rights and Rights of Nature movements when I learned that fracking for natural gas and oil was happening in my own community. Like many others back in 2009, I started researching what fracking was. What I found wasn’t good:
Toxins being released into the air,
Poisonous chemicals being injected underground,
Water withdrawals that would drain local water sources,
Farmland being bought or leased for mineral “rights” at unprecedented pace,
Tax incentives and abatements subsidizing all these harms, and
In the end, the community would not even benefit with lower energy costs!
The fracking boom was happening to communities all over Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Colorado — anywhere the fossil fuel industry sniffed out deposits for profits, and people were angry. My neighbors and I tried to use the tools we had been taught the people had at their disposal in our supposed great democracy “by and for” the people.
In a nutshell, we went to local and state electeds, we went to regulatory agencies and institutions like the EPA and Health Department, and we sought out environmental organizations to help us. After contacting the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), we even tried using the citizen initiative process to prohibit fracking. The people voted yes for the fracking ban and then two drilling companies (not from my community) sued to have our democratically enacted law overturned for violating their corporate “rights” to profit. The court agreed with them, overturned their law and also reminded us that the drillers had a legal permit to frack our community. Democracy and its people be damned..
Even after this all went down, I convinced myself that it was my/our failure for not getting more people clued into the harms of fracking, and that if more communities would take action like we had, the right kind of change would come. So, I started working and organizing in many other communities across Ohio and then in other states which found themselves in the same position... about to be royally fracked! The same cycle was repeated over and over. The people in the communities had no voice and no authority within the system to stop fracking and the harms it brought to both the people and the environment where they lived.
Some communities, like New York, touted “bans on fracking” and claimed success. However, they didn’t ban the use of fracked gas in the state, and so my community (along with many others) was sacrificed as a resource colony to make sure Times Square stayed lit 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. No offense to New Yorkers or Times Square, just pointing out a hard truth of the world we all find ourselves in. It is how the system is set up to work and we are all more deeply connected than we may realize.
Other communities turned to regulations. People convinced themselves that if they had further setbacks from schools and homes, somehow toxic water wouldn’t seep through the underground cracks that the fracking explosions caused and seep into natural water sources. And the air couldn’t possibly blow airborne chemicals and toxins from evaporating waste pits, from hundreds of trucks hauling chemicals and waste back and forth, or from hundreds of compressor stations pushing the fracked oil/gas through pipelines. Or that the volume of water needed to frack one well, anywhere between 1.5 and 16 million gallons depending on the geographic location, somehow wouldn’t totally deplete the aquifers, rivers and streams if we just had those “stricter regulations.” Talk about delusional thinking.
It became all too clear that we the people were indeed acting like hamsters spinning in a wheel. All the actions and tools which we grew up believing would protect us and our communities wouldn’t do so; they were just diversions to keep us occupied as the government and the fracking industry drilled well after well.
Now, it is 2026 and communities are up in arms again over an issue that causes many of the same harms fracking does: data centers. I get calls and emails every week from communities all over the country with people sharing issues they are upset about :
Farmland is being purchased at unprecedented rates
Massive water withdrawals from the community drinking water source
Air pollution and toxins being emitted
Astronomical energy usage and increasing rates for the community
Chemicals being used and waste produced
Tax abatements & subsidies given to these mega tech corporations
Some days all I can hear in my head is the Aerosmith song, Same Old Song and Dance. In case you don’t know the lyrics, the song is about how the “justice system” does not apply justice equally to all of us. They weren’t singing about fracking or data centers, but they may as well have been. Whether we use metaphors like spinning in a hamster wheel or cliches like “same old song and dance”, we can’t deny that this is how the system is set up to work. It is set up to protect industry, capitalism and the profits of a few and not the people and environment where the extractive projects occur. People fighting coal and mineral mining, mining waste disposal, big agriculture, industrial energy of any kind, clear cutting of forests, plastic pollution, etc. are all trapped in the same hamster wheel and yet we approach each of these individual issues the same way we did decades before.
We must jump out. This will take facing hard truths, like the fact that holding up signs in front of public meetings, writing letters, and giving testimony to regulatory agencies won’t protect you and your community. Once we can begin reckoning with these truths, maybe we can turn toward each other and turn away from the existing system. Maybe we can free our imaginations and creativity to experiment with new ideas. Maybe we can work together in community to build grassroots power, take direct action, disrupt unjust systems, and resist corporate encroachment rather than jumping back into the hamster wheel. Maybe we can start being effective.
My colleagues and I at CELDF have some ideas and would love to talk with you to share our experience and to listen to yours. If nothing else, we can be here to soften your landing when you finally decide to jump off that hamster wheel.
Tish O’Dell is the Consulting Director for the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). She has been involved in community rights and Rights of Nature work since 2012. She started in her own community of Broadview Heights, Ohio, leading to the adoption of Ohio’s first Home Rule charter amendment creating a Community Bill of Rights banning fracking and recognizing Rights of Nature. She went on to work with dozens of Ohio communities on anti-fracking, anti-pipeline, right to a livable climate, fair and free elections, and water privatization issues.
Today, Tish works with communities all over the country and internationally, most recently working with residents and a state legislator in NY to introduce the Great Lakes Bill of Rights. In 2019, she worked with the people of Toledo to pass the historic Lake Erie Bill of Rights. She has taught workshops, CELDF’s Democracy Schools, and is a founding member and current board member of the Ohio Community Rights Network.
Tish, along with other CELDF staff and community members, has been featured in the documentaries We the People 2.0, Invisible Hand, What We do to Nature, We do to Ourselves, and edited the book Death by Democracy. In her free time, Tish likes to spend time on or near Lake Erie, in her yard, or with family and friends having lively discussions or playing a competitive game…for fun of course. Contact: Tish@celdf.org
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