Who We Are
Buckeye Environmental Network (BEN), formerly Buckeye Forest Council (BFC), works to support grassroots environmental and environmental justice organizing and to protect Ohio’s native forests. Working with grassroots community groups, we provide activists the tools and support needed to mobilize their communities for effective action against the harms caused by corporate assaults, aided as these assaults are by state and federal government agencies. We foster public pressure on government and corporations to protect communities and Ohio’s environment. Through community action and ecological protection, we seek fundamental changes that improve our relationships with each other and the land.
As Buckeye Forest Council and now BEN, we have worked for almost 25 years protecting Ohio’s native public forests, influencing policies and practices of our state and federal governments through grassroots organizing, media campaigns, and legal efforts. With the onslaught of deep-shale drilling and horizontal hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in Ohio and escalating impacts on human and environmental health, we have expanded our focus beyond public forests to address these broader threats to human and environmental health. Our goal is to support clean energy solutions, forest protection, and climate stability by engaging and empowering citizens to create a voice in public discourse and the media for more protective policies and to influence decision makers to implement these policies.
Our new name reflects well our interest and work in supporting grassroots environmental and environmental justice organizing. As BEN, we will continue BFC’s long efforts to watchdog federal and state agencies entrusted with protecting our forests, air, and water.
Our History
Communities around the state have been grateful to BEN for taking on fracking in 2011 when it first emerged as an environmental and public health issue in Ohio. In spring, 2011, under BEN’s leadership of grassroots opposition, fracking was fought in the Ohio state legislature after the Kasich government pushed to open state parks, state forests, and public university lands to fracking.
BEN took on fracking not only due to its threats to Ohio’s public forests and parks but also because if this extreme carbon fuel industry isn’t stopped, our forests as well as our planet will be destroyed. Fracking’s high methane and CO2 emission rates threaten climate. Fracking and associated industrial development for production and transportation also directly impact forests with fragmentation, water contamination, and air pollution. These severe impacts as well as the severe impacts on human, environmental and economic health from air and water pollution, water consumption, and waste production, transportation, and “disposal” make fracking and its associated industrial development the most urgent environmental crisis our state and nation may have ever faced.
BEN seeks an end to deep-shale drilling and high-volume horizontal fracturing (fracking), because it is inherently and irrevocably dirty, dangerous, and destructive of climate, land, and water as well as of communities’ economies, health, and well being.
Activists and community leaders around eastern Ohio have depended on BEN for organizing support, data, technical information, and watchdogging of ODNR, known for lax regulation and enforcement, as Teresa Mills, as BEN’s program coordinator and past executive director, has done since 2011. We often work one-to-one with fledgling activists, supporting their outreach to activate others and linking them with other activists around the region.