‘We’re writing a new future’: Sackville artist to launch community art project on anti-fracking movement
A Sackville-based artist wants to help people reimagine collective possibilities in the age climate crisis.
“We won’t build a new future with the same tools that got us to this crisis point,” says Shoshanna Wingate, Sackville’s former poet laureate.
“So we’re writing a new future, a new story for our future.”
Wingate is among three artists taking part in From Harm to Harmony, an artist-in-residency and mentorship program organized by the Conservation Council of New Brunswick.
“Their time with the Conservation Council will culminate with a community-engaged art event that will encourage New Brunswickers to take action to protect our planet and provide them with an avenue to do so,” the non-profit group announced last week.
Wingate’s project will focus on the movement in New Brunswick against shale gas exploration and hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” a controversial technique to obtain fossil fuels from shale rock.
The Indigenous-led movement against shale gas in New Brunswick came to a head in 2013, when the RCMP cleared an anti-fracking encampment that blocked a facility belonging to SWN Resources Canada.
In 2014, the provincial government under Liberal premier Brian Gallant introduced a moratorium against fracking.
The Progressive Conservative government under Premier Blaine Higgs “quietly carved out a small exemption” to the moratorium in 2019 for an operation near Sussex, according to the CBC. Recently he has pushed for new shale gas development in New Brunswick.
Higgs contends shale gas development will result in a financial windfall and provide “very clean natural gas” to Europe amid the energy crisis prompted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. … Continue