Affirmative: Fracking Awareness North Somerset is go, go, GO! 30th April

Fracking Awareness North Somerset (F.A.N.S) is a new organisation seeking to mobilize community based resistance against fracking. We aim to build a network of groups all over North Somerset to collectively struggle against the insidious threat posed by fracking to our local communities and landscape.

F.A.N.S. will encompass and offer support for all anti-fracking/environmental groups in North Somerset, providing them with up to date information, encouragement and solidarity in fighting this cause.

Our Facebook page is now up and running and we are currently in the midst of designing our new North Somerset focused leaflets. We are also creating a new website so that we are easily contactable and can provide information and help for other groups around North Somerset.

Once our leaflet and website are finished, we are planning F.A.N.S Fortnight – two weeks of talks, presentations, meetings, workshops and film showings around the towns and villages of North Somerset. F.A.N.S Fortnight aims to educate the residents of these areas on the often complex issue of fracking. We seek to show them how they may be affected by fracking in the coming years, but also that there is light at the end of the tunnel.

So it’s all go from North Somerset! Please feel free to get in touch if you are interested in supporting us or have a new group that would like to join F.A.N.S. We would also very much like to hear from anyone interested in helping out with festivals or ideas for promotion.

Fracking will bring industrial North Sea gas extraction to our very doorsteps. Together, we can stop it.

Community resistance will be one of the most effective tools deployed against the fracking corporations. Despite what may appear at first glance to be a very bleak situation, hope can be found by standing together in focused solidarity.

Therefore, we will be encouraging and providing support for anyone who would like to start their own local group. Our aim is to help as many people as possible take their first tentative steps in this struggle. United communities are key to ending (with a firm and resolute full stop) fracking's threat to North Somerset.

A lot of promotion is needed to ensure that residents know who we are and when we will be in their area. Therefore, members of F.A.N.S are planning to visit a large number of local South West summer festivals this year to manage stalls, run workshops and hold talks. We will also be promoting F.A.N.S Fortnight and the events/meetings that are going to be held during that time.

Last on our current agenda is 'Love and Rage' – a monthly spoken word poetry and acoustic music night held in Bristol. Love and Rage will be a regular fund-raiser to help contribute towards the monetary demands of our campaign. It will also be a platform from which to inform people of the dangers posed by Fracking and, at the same time, hopefully mobilise them into action.