Exhausting Legal Options, Residents of Texas Town Take Direct Action to Enforce Fracking Ban
Candice Bernd
Adam Briggle, Tara Linn Hunter and Niki Chochrek sit at the entrance gate of a Vantage Energy gas well site on the edge of Denton, Texas' west side. (Photo: David Goodman/Don't Frack With Denton)
For years, environmental philosophy professor Adam Briggle has opened his ethics classes at the University of North Texas in Denton with writings on nonviolent civil disobedience, usually Henry David Thoreau's classic essay "Resistance to Civil Government." But Briggle has never before engaged in such an action himself - until now.
On June 1, Briggle, who is president of the Denton Drilling Awareness Group (DAG), one of the driving forces behind a citizen-led initiative that banned hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in Denton city limits in 2014, delayed scheduled fracking operations at a Vantage Energy gas well site on the edge of the city's west side by blocking the entrance to the site Monday morning for about an hour.
Denton police arrested Briggle, alongside DAG vice president Tara Linn Hunter and resident Niki Chochrek, after they refused to move from the entrance of the Colorado-based oil and gas company Vantage Energy site, issuing criminal trespass citations to all three. The group sat down in front of a blown-up, wooden display of Denton's ordinance prohibiting fracking in city limits, which the police had to use bolt cutters to dismantle in order to open the gate of the entryway. Later that day, they were released from Denton City Jail on "personal recognizance" as upstanding citizens.
Also see: Fracking Protests Continue in Texas as New ALEC-Backed Law Bars Towns From Banning Drilling
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