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That Monday morning, the hottest August Bank Holiday on record, Cox, who is a local councillor, was having coffee in bed before getting up to go for a walk with her family. Then the whole house started to shudder. Her children shouted their beds were moving – bouncing, no less. Cox and her family have become accustomed to checking the British Geographical website and saw there was a huge spike in seismic activity. It was the biggest fracking related tremor recorded in the UK, bigger than the 2.3 magnitude quake that resulted in drilling being suspended in 2011. ‘You’re living on your nerves now.
We are experiencing aftershocks that Cuadrilla have no control over because they have stopped drilling.
Two days later, Cox was standing on the front line of the Preston New Road fracking site in Little Plumpton in Lancashire with about 20 or so other women. Unusually she was not dressed in white, which is the colour the women protestors have adopted since they started their weekly vigils every Wednesday morning in the summer of 2017. They started their Call for Calm after a particularly violent period of protest, and the idea of meeting that July morning in 2017 was to take some time to regroup. ‘We thought about the Vietnam protest when women put flowers in the butts of soldiers’ guns,’ says Cox. She and the other women who did not want to be pushed around and risk injury as they carried out their right to peacefully protest against the fracking of shale gas from the ground beneath their homes, decided to line up opposite the police who were stationed outside the Preston Road site. They stood and looked at them without speaking for 15 minutes. It unnerved the police, and the women realised this was an effective form of protest.
The Women in White have been carrying out their gentle but powerful protest every Wednesday ever since.
The women dress in white because it is the colour of peace and it is eyecatching on a grey, rainy morning. Cox explained that she felt too grief-stricken to wear white since the drilling had restarted on August 15 with work on a second well. Before that, there had been no fracking since December when fracking was stopped because there were 57 tremors in 60 days. This was their 107th week of protest.
Because of the latest series of quakes, Cuadrilla had to stop drilling again to analyse their data, which Cox predicted would take months. The drilling work has to be paused for at least 18 hours following any seismic activity of magnitude of 0.5 or more. But this latest quake would stop the work in its tracks.
Planning permission for the fracking runs out at the end of November, so that could be the end of it for Preston New Road. ‘We’ve made an impact on Cuadrilla,’ said Cox. ‘We’ve been a constant thorn in their side. Anything we think is suspicious is challenged.’ And they have been able to educate their community about what the fracking company has been doing and the impact of fracking on the local environment as well as the madness of extracting fossil fuels when we are in a climate emergency.
Until Cuadrilla started their explorations for shale gas in Lancashire, Cox, like most of the local women, had never put herself on the front line of a protest. She says she was briefly a hunt saboteur as a student but felt it was too dangerous. Since then, she had just done the usual things, sign petitions, write letters, what she describes as an ‘armchair activist.’ But since the Women’s Call for Calm, she has been a dedicated presence whenever she has the chance, and diligently every Monday and Wednesday as part of the Women in White.
‘We have a presence 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The Women in White will continue to raise awareness to build on a newfound enthusiasm for protest,’ said Cox. ‘We will continue the fight against this extreme form of energy extraction.’ Since the latest quakes, even locals who haven’t been vocal in their opposition to the fracking have been galvanised to write letters and show their solidarity.
How would Cox like our energy be supplied in an ideal world? ‘Solar, wind and tidal,’ she says. ‘Better housing design, more energy efficient design and planning with better infrastructure and getting people off the roads. Renewable is out of reach for a lot of people at the moment. But as far as fossil fuels are concerned, keep them in the ground.’