Last Friday, hundreds of young people and adults, including students and teachers from Proctor Academy, converged on Veterans Park in Manchester to take part in the first-ever Manchester Youth Climate Strike. Stonyfield Farm supported the event by giving away yogurt at the park, and people took selfies with Climate Warrior frames.

Liberty Utilities is looking to run a natural gas pipeline that would run under the Lamprey River two times through my hometown of Raymond.  The Granite Bridge Pipeline would run from Manchester, through Raymond, out toward the seacoast, putting neighborhoods and communities along the route in danger.  Just last week Liberty Utilities held an LNG (liquid natural gas) “science fair” in Epping at which they purported natural gas to be safe. 

How many of us remember as kids jumping into a clear, cold river to cool off on a hot summer day? Remember how invigorating and refreshing that felt? Now how many of us remember questioning if the water was too polluted to swim in?  The Granite Bridge Pipeline (GBP) is a 27-mile pipeline proposed by Liberty Utilities that would transport fracked gas from Manchester to the seacoast.

With the Granite Bridge project currently trying to build a 27 mile fracked gas pipeline through southern New Hampshire, now is the time to consider what we want the future of our region’s energy sources to look like. As a teenager living in this region and facing a future threatened by climate change, I am very concerned that this project aims to increase our reliance on fossil fuels rather than moving towards cleaner, renewable energy sources.