Organization Preps For ‘Greening the Statehouse’
Subscriber Benefit
As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowThe Hoosier Environmental Council will hold its largest gathering of the year Saturday in Indianapolis. The organization says Greening the Statehouse will focus on Indiana's most pressing issues and will feature a well-known environmental filmmaker. October 23, 2014
News Release
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. — Indiana's largest annual gathering of environmental advocates, the Hoosier Environmental Council (HEC)'s Greening the Statehouse, will be headlined by filmmaker Josh Fox, director of the Academy Award-nominated film Gasland this Saturday, October 25, from 8:30-11:30 a.m. at the IMAX in the Indiana State Museum.
Gasland and its recently released sequel, Gasland 2, are gripping, timely, and necessary films about the largest domestic natural gas drilling boom in history. In 2008, Fox received a letter from a natural gas company interested in leasing his family’s land in the pristine Delaware River Basin for drilling. Disturbed by the letter, he embarked on an odyssey to glean as much information as possible about significantly expanded natural gas drilling in the US — with movie camera in hand. The results are powerful films that uncover a trail of secrets and contamination and serves as an inspiration to environmental advocates worldwide.
In addition to Josh Fox's keynote speech, Greening the Statehouse will be an opportunity learn about and engage on Indiana’s most pressing environmental issues with a panel of policy experts, network with hundreds of others, and find new ways to be effective environmental advocates.
“Josh Fox's stories in Gasland of people's water wells being contaminated — alongside a remembrance of Americans who have suffered, just this year, from environmental contamination in Toledo, Ohio and Charleston, West Virginia — must shake any sense of complacency that we have about our environmental quality necessarily getting better over time. And there is a special urgency to keep environmental protection at the forefront of our minds here in Indiana as we face a real possibility that some Indiana lawmakers, and perhaps the Governor himself, will advance legislation in 2015 to weaken the power of Indiana's professionally-trained regulators to protect our environment,” said Jesse Kharbanda, Executive Director of the Hoosier Environmental Council.
Registration for Greening the Statehouse is $30 general admission and $15 for students. To register, visit hecweb.org. Since a discussion of Gasland will be central to Josh Fox's presentation, participants are encouraged to view the film in advance of the event.
The HEC Greening the Statehouse is made possible by a growing and diverse number of non-profit and green-minded business sponsors including: League of Women Voters, People for Urban Progress, Green Water Infrastructure, MPI Solar, Hoosier Interfaith Power and Light, Indiana Public Health Association, Indy Film Fest, Alliance for Clean Rural Environment, Butler University Center for Urban Ecology, Carmel Green Initiative, Citizens Action Coalition, Citizens for Appropriate Rural Roads, Earth Charter Indiana, Englewood Community Development Corporation, Green Broad Ripple, Health by Design, Herbal Art, Indiana Citizens' Alliance for Transit (ICAT), Indiana Recycling Coalition, Institute for Green and Sustainable Science, Irvington Green Initiative, NUVO, Centerplate NCAA, IMAX in the Indiana State Museum, Rocket 88 Doughnuts, and Sierra Club Hoosier Chapter, and Southern Indiana Renewable Energy Network (SIREN).
Source: Hoosier Environmental Council