No Fracking Way

Živjo people of Ljubljana, Slovenija, once again we are back for our second edition of Erasmus on Air.

So for those of you who weren’t tuned in last week, I won’t go into full details about how we ended on here- you’ll have to stream the first show if you want to find out- but to give you a quick overview of who we are and why we’re floating through your airwaves, we’re basically a group of international students and others who participate in international gathering Ljubljana, which sounds way more grand then it actually is, because in fact it’s just informal meetings at Rog where we have presentations and discussions on matters that we feel are important. 

Which leads me neatly onto our topic for today, so one of the things that came to our attention here was the issue of fracking (or hydraulic fracturing), which seems to be of increasing concern to some of the people we’ve met here in Slovenia. A couple of weeks ago some of us attended a march in Lendava, Prekmurje where fracking plans seem to be well underway. We walked around the area and were shown the sites where fracking ‘exploration’ as they call it is going on right beside peoples’ houses and land. Understandably, many people are angry and concerned about how these deals are being carried out without any consultations with the people of Prekmurje, but the anti-fracking movement in Slovenija is picking up. On Thursday we attended (and interviewed some people from) an anti-fracking protest outside ARSO, Slovenia’s apparently ‘Environmental Agency’ to speak out against signing the contract that would give the go ahead for fracking in Lendava.

These problems are not exclusive to fracking however, and cover a whole host of ecological and structural injustices, which is what we’ll be discussing today from Mexico to Europe.