Expendable Ohio

By Randy Cunningham

While researching my book Where We Live, on grassroots environmental organizing, I broke down the question of the environment into an issue of expendable people and expendable places. The people I interviewed and the places I visited, from lead smelting towns to fracking sites, were fighting those who profited from their expendability. Ohio, in the eyes of the polluters, the oil and gas industry, and their hirelings, is an expendable place with expendable people, and when they finally wring every last dollar and resource from it, they will leave to find other expendables.

Ohio is one of the most anti-environmental states in the Union. This is doubly so in the Statehouse of Ohio, which houses senators and representatives of the majority caucus, who do not say the word environment. They spit it out as if it were something disgusting that they coughed up.

Currently there are two major preoccupations of the environmental community in Ohio: the fracking of State Parks, and the AI blitzkrieg with data centers. They are both tied together with Ohio’s antediluvian energy policies. We should start with that general topic and go from there for our damage assessment. What is currently going on with energy policy is that the oil and gas industry in Ohio is within sight of its holy grail — outlawing renewable energy in Ohio — specifically solar and wind energy. We need to realize that the definition of what is and is not renewable energy to the denizens of the Statehouse has nothing to do with what those words mean to normal people. They believe that reality is what they say it is. In Ohio, renewable energy means hydraulic fracturing — better known as fracking ― and nuclear power. Now, in every place but Ohio, this definition of renewable energy would not pass the laugh test. But in Ohio, Statehouse officialdom says it with a straight face and worst of all, believe it.

Another example of the alternate reality known as Ohio is its unique definition of public land. Public land in most places is defined as land that is set aside for the public’s enjoyment of nature and outdoor recreation. There is something sacrosanct about it. Ohio is not only public land poor, but the public land we have gets no respect. It is perfectly legal, and it is encouraged to view public land as a playground for extractive industries such as fracking, coal mining and logging. Ohio is the only state whose public lands are subjected to this level of abuse. Saying that Ohio has public lands in the usual sense of the term is a sick joke.

The fossil fuel industries have been gang raping the Ohio environment for over one hundred and fifty years. Whatever was not looted by King Coal has been left for the oil and gas industry to destroy. According to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, over eighty thousand fracking wells have been drilled over the sixty years of fracking in Ohio. The greatest boom in fracking began in 2010. This is on top of thousands of other conventional wells that were just abandoned once they ran dry in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Those are just the wells we know of. Fracked or conventional, old or new, there is no such thing as an environmentally harmless gas or oil well. The fracking of the well, the water used, and the waste produced are all highly toxic. The pollution from fracking is permanent pollution. There is no way to safely plug fracking and injection wells. Even done properly it will require further maintenance plugging – forever. The question must be asked if these heavily mined and drilled parts of the state are even safe to live in. That is not a concern of the fossil fuel servants who hold the levers of power in Columbus. They will continue to prosper until retirement, and if they have any sense at all, they will move as far away as possible from the regions they enabled the destruction of.

A movement that is always on the defense is a movement that will always lose. Notwithstanding the doom, gloom and despair I have inflicted on you with this Rant, I am not planning to live anywhere else. But for us to accomplish enough that we can avoid writing off the state as a wasteland, we must go on the offensive. The despoilers live rent free in our heads; we should return the favor. We must promote an environmental politics that is not always on the defensive, but one that recognizes our nightmares while fighting for our dreams. A movement that will take back territory from the frackers and the hacks of Columbus and force them to defend the indefensible.

I think we should concentrate on public lands policy. The oil and gas crowd are ideologically fixated on an extreme form of conservatism that looks upon any public sector activity, anything that does not put profits into the pockets of their wealthy sponsors, with contempt. However, most people in even the reddest parts of Ohio support their public libraries, their public schools and other public services. Most of those fortunate to have ready access to metro parks or state parks and land, use those reserves to death. People want to be served by public institutions and do not look upon them as a communist plot like the majority caucus of the Statehouse does.

I used to be on the board of trustees of the old Buckeye Forest Council ― the ancestor of the current Buckeye Environmental Network. One of our board members proposed launching an initiative to expand and finance public lands in Ohio with a dedicated revenue source. Given the paleo-political consensus in Ohio at the time (it has just gotten worse since then), we never seriously took it up. However, at about the same time my native state of Missouri passed a similar idea that resulted in the explosive growth of public recreational lands beyond anything I knew as a child and young adult. Even states whose conservatism is breathtaking can do what’s right. Missouri is so conservative it makes Ohio look like Portlandia. If they did it, we can do it.

Most Ohioans do not realize that the Ohio Statehouse has sold our public lands out from under them to the oil and gas industry. Those who find out about this treachery do not approve of it. We need to not only protect what we have. We must ask for more — much more. For every crazy ass proposal made in the state legislature from what even past Republican governors have called the caveman or crazy caucus, we need to propose two pieces of legislation to give people what they want ― clean air, clean water, and public lands that are public lands, not lands held in reserve for extractive industries. We need to change the culture of Ohio. The culture of the Robber Barons, and the titans of industry and corrupt opportunists like the Householder crowd, should be buried before it causes more grief. We need to promote a culture that says there is much more to life than the market can provide and build a culture that appeals to values other than greed, meanness and selfishness. An Ohio where no person and no place is expendable.

This post first appeared on April 4, 2026 in Randy’s Rants, a newsletter going out to the left community of Cleveland, featuring the type of essays, commentaries, and opinion pieces that Randy Cunningham has become both noted and infamous for over the years. Randy’s Rants is in honor of the anabaptist sect called the Ranters in the English Civil War, who would chain themselves to the carriages of the nobility, and denounce them by ranting at them; denouncing their greed, depravity, and oppression of the common people. You can find the archive of rants here: https://substack.com/@randysrants