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Our vision
is a world where all our children grow up in healthy liveable communities, and inherit a liveable planet that will sustain them in the future.
We advocate for clean air, clean water, and responsible stewardship of our environment for future generations. Our advocacy work is grounded in principles of inter-generational justice, climate justice, and environmental justice. Our campaigns on energy use and extraction promote official decision making that centers those principles.
Who we are
Liveable Arlington is a grassroots environmental advocacy organization. We advocate for a healthy, liveable community for our children to grow up in, and for a habitable planet they can thrive in, in the future. This is being endangered by reckless urban drilling in Arlington, and fossil fuel expansion around the world.
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We have organized effectively to stop and slow down new fracking permits in Arlington, stop an injection well, and win protections in local gas drilling rules. We have also gone to court to preserve those protections.​​​​​
Learn more by viewing the film above.
We have built coalitions with immigrant rights and anti-poverty organizations, faith communities, parents, and other allies to protect the most marginalized neighborhoods and the most vulnerable individuals in Arlington from drilling expansion.
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We are a community watchdog monitoring the impact of Arlington’s gas wells on neighborhoods and helping affected residents. We have raised the alarm locally, nationally, and internationally with legislators, policy makers and the media about the harms fracking causes in our frontline community, and to the global climate. ​
How we began
Liveable Arlington founder Ranjana Bhandari saw Arlington rapidly transform from a residential suburban community to an industrial mining town saturated with 56 drill sites with hundreds of wells and fracking infrastructure when the Barnett Shale fracking boom began. As a mother, she was concerned about the high incidence of several serious diseases in children raised near gas wells and the role of fracking in accelerating climate change.
She formed a small group of local parents and grandparents to fight against permitting of gas drilling close to children. The goal was to build a grassroots movement locally that could challenge powerful fossil fuel interests and campaign for inter-generational justice, climate justice, and environmental justice. In a decade of organizing, Liveable has grown into an organization at the forefront of fighting urban fracking in the Barnett Shale.
A string of victories by a grassroots organization deep in the heart of pro-oil Texas has attracted national and international attention
and inspired others to take similar action to protect
their communities from fracking.
Liveable Arlington is showing the world that opposition is possible, even in Texas. And while changing Texas's relationship with fossil fuels will not happen overnight, we are part of the movement to make Texas energy
renewable and sustainable.
Our campaigns
What started as the tenacious work of a small band of Arlington mothers has blossomed into an organization which has made unprecedented victories in local government, has been featured on national public radio, and has participated in international coalitions.
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Strengthening Arlington's gas well ordinance
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Liveable Arlington has campaigned for years to establish protective setbacks based on current scientific research, and to stop setback waivers that reduce the distance between gas wells and protected uses like homes, schools, preschools. ​​
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​Our organizing led to positive changes in Arlington's gas drilling rules, including:
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a super-majority vote of 7 council members required to grant setback waivers
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electric rigs required when drilling with a setback waiver
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stronger noise standards
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wider resident notification of new drilling
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preschool playgrounds declared to be protected uses
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Stopping Total from drilling new gas wells next to an Arlington preschool
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In 2020, we led a diverse, multi-racial coalition to stop the permitting of three new gas wells next to a preschool in an East Arlington neighborhood where a majority of the residents are people of color. The campaign was hailed as an important environmental justice win and widely covered by national media.
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Stopping Total, again
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Despite being denied on health and racial justice grounds in 2020, Total returned in 2021 applying for a permit to drill 3 gas wells next to the same preschool. In January 2022, after two years of community mobilizing and a lawsuit, we defeated Total a second time.​ Our campaigns have stopped Total from adding gas wells behind the preschool for 5 years.
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Save Lake Arlington - Protecting drinking water from fracking waste
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Our Save Lake Arlington campaign in 2017 involved close to 3,000 Arlington and Fort Worth residents in the hearing process for a wastewater injection well to bury toxic fracking waste. The well was to be sited on the shore of Lake Arlington - the drinking water source for half a million people in our county. The campaign succeeded in stopping the well and was hailed as a regional milestone.
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Organizing support for strong methane standards
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We took the EPA Region 6 Administrator and her team on a tour of urban drilling in Arlington, to help them understand the realities of "urban drilling". Along with many national organizations, we have advocated for a decade for strong federal methane emissions rules to protect public health and address climate change.
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Our approach
Articulate a positive vision. Our organization exists to fight for a liveable Arlington and a liveable planet for our children. It is driven by deep mother love for all children.
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Think globally, act locally. Fossil fuel extraction and use in Arlington doesn't just pollute our community and damage public health, it also accelerates climate chaos. Our organizing offers a way to not just win locally on pollution and health, but to contribute positively to the climate movement. Our campaigns on air pollution, fracking permits, and regulation may be local, but each success is also a win for our global climate.
Root advocacy in the most current science. We keep up with the most current public health research on fracking and often invite scientists like Dr. Sandra Steingraber and physicians like Dr. Anne Epstein to give presentations to residents, allied groups, and government officials about these issues. We then make the results accessible to the community with easy to read materials in English and Spanish, and in videos.
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Search for common ground. Team members talk to everyone. Children’s health is a shared concern across deep local political divides.
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Build diverse and inclusive coalitions across race, socioeconomics, gender, and identity. We work with a range of partners including concerned parents, health care practitioners, social justice advocates, teachers, small businesses, religious groups, and environmental experts. In our campaign to stop French energy giant Total from fracking behind a preschool, we allied with organizers working on immigrant rights and poverty, the Social Justice Committee at Arlington’s largest Catholic church, preschool staff, parents, and neighbors. Air quality and health are critical concerns for everyone.
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Be a resource to residents, government officials, media, and other organizations.
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Believe that each win is a cause for hope, not despair. Even though we see no end to fracking where we live—as mothers who feel very deeply the immorality of this enterprise that will condemn all our children to an unliveable planet and endangers their health and well-being every day in places like Arlington—we believe the act of resistance is absolutely essential.
Click here to view Faces of Fracking, a six-part documentary series by Michael Rowley, showcasing stories of Arlington residents harmed by fracking, from neighborhoods we serve.
Our core team
Ranjana Bhandari
Founder & Executive Director
Jennifer Quick
Social Media Specialist
