I want you to stop fracking

I am writing this op-ed because I want to know why the biggest, most powerful industry is picking on kids who are trying to educate their peers about an issue they are passionate about.

MY STORY: My name is Xiuhtezcatl Martinez. I am a 13-year-old boy from the Aztec tradition and I have doing environmental activism since a young age. My first public speaking engagement was 7 years ago, at a local climate change rally. I began speaking out on issues that are directly going to determine the kind of world we the youth are going to be left with, because I started learning facts about our environmental and climate crisis’s.
I had been giving presentations in schools on these issues for the last several years when I learned about Fracking and started uncovering the disastrous effects it was having on our health, the water, the air, and our community. I did hours of research, and reviewed many many studies about the direct hidden impacts of fracking in our community. So I decided I wanted to educate my peers on fracking by giving a multi-media presentation called “The Inconvenient Proof”.

I was invited to do a Fracking presentation for two classes of about 200 middle school kids total in Evergreen School and the students were all very excited and participated by asking questions and joining us on the chorus of the Fracking song we performed.

It went great and the kids loved it and they were all talking about how cool the presentation was. I was totally psyched, until I heard that one of the kids went home and told their parents who work for the Gas industry about the presentation and the song me and my brother performed called “What the Frack”. The parents got so mad and started calling other parents. Then they contacted the schools and said it wasn’t fair to give a one sided presentation to their kids, which I can see the point in that, but the oil and gas industry have gone into schools to convince kids Fracking is safe. One fracking company even made a children’s coloring book to tell kids that fracking is great. They talk about the coloring books in this Colbert Report if you go to the three minute marker: http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/391552/july-11-2011/anti-frack-attack
The whole thing escalated when conservatives and oil and gas parents pulled a video of our Fracking performance at Evergreen school and started posting it all over the web bullying me and my little brother with horrible comments on our facebook and youtube pages. I even got emails and one someone who said they were Brian Crowthers and work at the school I go to wanted to talk to me about the hate mail they were receiving. My mom talked to the school they said no such person worked there. Was that just a warning letting me know, they know the school I go to?

Their was study done by NOAA on the air quality in Erie Colorado, close to my home where their is lots of wells, and it stated that they found levels of Methane, butane and some other carcinogenic chemicals in the air were higher then levels in big cities like Houston Texas and Pasadena California. The Lisa Mckensey study and report shows that living within a half mile of a fracking well results in a 66 percent increase in cancer. Wouldn’t you want to protect your kids from being exposed to these dangerous chemicals. The kids I have worked with in Erie who live near wells have severe nose bleeds, migraine headaches, asthma and other symptoms they never had until fracking wells showed up practically in their back yards.

More and more people are learning about how bad fracking is, even well known environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy jr, first supported fracking before he realized it was bad. He came out and publicly admitted that Fracking is not a safe bridge away from fossil fuels and is worse for climate change then using coal because of the fugitive methane emissions that ar