During the early 1970s, before Sean Lennon was born to John and Yoko, the couple bought a farm in Delaware County, three hours from their home at the Dakota in New York City. As a toddler, Sean remembers one of the goats chewing on his blue jeans.
Today, that property near the Catskills belongs to him and sits within potential drilling territory above the sprawling Marcellus Shale, where Governor Andrew Cuomo might reverse the state's ban on hydraulic fracturing – known as "fracking" – for natural gas.
Ono and Lennon, who founded Artists Against Fracking in July, gathered the coalition on Wednesday at New York's Paley Center for Media and called on Governor Cuomo to discuss developing renewable alternatives to wells, some of which have been linked to leaking methane into the groundwater.
"I feel like the end result of wanting to make profits through fossil fuels and drilling for oil and gas is that you overlook individual people and small-town farmers," Lennon told Rolling Stone after the event. "That's what's happening in New York right now: they're promising that we won't drill near the reservoirs that supply Manhattan, but that basically means that places that are less populated are somehow less important."
"New York City's going to suffer. They're not thinking about that," Ono added. "The thing is, the governor is intelligent enough to know that he doesn't want to side with very unpopular people who are doing terrible things for money."