Yoko Ono and her son Sean Lennon appeared in Albany, New York, on Friday to join protestors who have been campaigning against hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," a method of drilling for natural gas that opponents say can have disastrous environmental consequences, The New York Times reports.
Ono and Lennon gathered with the other activists and spoke with reporters before heading over to the office of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. After that, they went to the state Department of Environmental Conservation, where they dropped off 50 boxes reportedly filled with 204,000 anti-drilling comments.
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"Fracking kills, and it doesn’t just kill us," said Ono. "It kills the land, nature and, eventually, the whole world." Ono and Lennon both have a personal stake in the fracking debate, which could see the construction of a pipeline near the house Ono and her late husband John Lennon bought in the Catskills.
"He loved it there because we had our own well water," said Lennon of his father. He added: "I wanted to save my own house and drink the water first, and then it sort of escalated from there. That house was my dad's house and still is, so I'm sure he would’ve been on our side."
Lennon and Ono have been speaking out against fracking since this summer, founding Artists Against Fracking in July, writing about their opposition in Times op-eds and on billboards and urging Cuomo not to rush a study on the impact of fracking or reverse New York's ban on the process.
The governor and his administration are expected to announce next month whether they will allow drilling in New York, though Ono said that the fight would not stop if they reversed the ban: "If they do this, there will be a class action, and the class action is going to hit everybody who is doing this,” she said, adding: "It’s going to go on and on and on. Do we want that?"
