After examining our movement’s challenges last week, one truth stands out: While the oil and gas industry operates as a coordinated and funded machine, our resistance, our friends often fight in isolation.
Every time the industry launches a new project, pollutes a community, or pushes dangerous legislation, local leaders and groups scramble to respond. Each group feels forced to reinvent the wheel while precious time slips away.
This isolation isn’t just inefficient. Isolation causes missed opportunities and wasted resources. Every hour spent duplicating research is an hour not spent organizing with neighbors. Every delayed response gives industry time to spin their story. Finally, every isolated group fighting alone makes it easier for industry to dismiss them as “special interests” rather than a unified movement representing public concern.
The solution lies beyond more coverage, more petition signers, more outreach (all important but not sufficient on their own).
The solution lies in fundamentally re-imagining how we build and wield power together as a network
We need an intentional effort that connects local expertise with national resources in real-time, turns isolated efforts into coordinated action, and amplifies rather than competes with local leadership. This is what network based movement makes possible. This is Halt the Harm Network.
A network allows each of us fighting industry to overcome isolation and marginalization.
Every day, we watch local leaders invest so much time hunting for support. Which expert can verify our water tests? Who has fought this company before? Where can we find legal help? Which messaging works? This friction burns time, drains energy, and slows resistance efforts. It’s wearing out our leaders and frustrating the good people trying to help. When friction prevents connection, it stamps out momentum against the petrochemical industry.
When we started Halt the Harm Network, we started with in-depth interviews with 36 frontline leaders. Our conclusions and first principle upon which we build our work is that communities have the passion and local knowledge to fight industry, but lack the connections to win. It wasn’t just about accessing resources or information, it was about building relationships that turn isolated resistance into networked power.
What we’re up against is a massive, well-oiled machine with deep pockets across hundreds of locations and millions of miles. The industry never sleeps, pushing to consume more landscape and communities. Consider a typical scenario: A community discovers plans for a new compressor station. Local leaders act, but industry has lined up their experts, bought influence, and prepared their narrative. While crucial weeks pass, the community starts from scratch researching health impacts, building their case, and searching for allies.
Experience shows that local resistance emerges wherever industry operates. But these frontline fighters often struggle alone, trying to decode complex threats, craft compelling arguments, and build organizing momentum. They’re searching for trusted partners and effective strategies, but accessing help shouldn’t require a treasure map.
The 4 Strategies for Networked Power
We created Halt the Harm Network (HHN) with the ambition to be the largest movement of people working for and with other groups fighting oil and gas harms.
Imagine being connected to people across all kinds of organizations, boundaries, and borders who share your dedication.
Networks are a movement’s connective tissue. A strong network enables rapid response and coordinated action at a scale matching industry’s reach. Today Halt the Harm Network has grown to over 5,000 leaders and 900 organizations and growing over 10% annually.
Our role isn’t to lead from above to amplify power from below. Our role is to make sure power flows in all directions to the edge, across folks at the edge, and out from the most connected folks to the marginalized. We work to make sure power and connection flows to the spots where it is needed to win.
We transform isolated resistance into networked power through four core strategies.
Strategy 1: Connectivity: Build Strong Network Relationships
Trust is the currency of network power. But trust doesn’t scale naturally; it must be intentionally cultivated. Connecting folks is the simple strategy and strength in what we do. Here are some of the ways we seek to build stronger network relationships and build trust:
- Host a secure platform for discussion, sharing resources, and finding events
- Welcome each new leader that signs up and participates
- Organize regular online events to deepen network relationships
- Facilitate strategy sessions across regions
- Match experienced leaders with newcomers
- Create direct pathways between HHN participants and technical experts
- Share updates and expand the reach for leaders and groups in the network
- Provide a platform for breaking news and reports from network leaders
Our target for increasing connectivity among leaders is to continue the trend of 10% growth, growing the leaders served by HHN from 5,000 to 5,500 and the most engaged leaders from 1,300 to 1,430.
Strategy 2: Intelligence: Sharing Knowledge for Strategic Action
When a Pennsylvania community discovers a new health threat from fracking, the knowledge should be shared instantly – it should never take months to reach leaders facing similar threats in Colorado (or another part of the world).
Our intelligence strategy aims to ensure crucial information moves at the speed of industry. Here are some of the ways we seek to uphold our intelligence strategy:
- Host expert-led trainings for skill exchange among leaders
- Host interviews & discussions to share new research as soon as it’s released
- Provide direct connections to subject matter experts
- Run working groups focused on emerging threats like chemical disclosure
- Transform complex research into practical campaign tools
Our target for increasing intelligence is to produce training events and prepare them as online courses in key relevant topics.
Strategy 3: Agility: Making Expert Resources Accessible
Industry moves fast. We move faster. We think of ourselves more as a firefighter team showing up with fire equipment and trained firefighters vs. many other groups that are building for the long haul and are showing up with construction crews and architects.
Here are some of the ways we seek to uphold our agility strategy to support leaders to deploy resources where they’re most needed:
- Transform complex knowledge into clear, usable tools
- Package legal, technical, and campaign resources for immediate local use
- Provide fellowships for leaders engaged in emergency response
- Develop an on-call expert network
- Host programs that pair experienced leaders with emerging leaders
- Facilitate the exchange of toolkits and campaign resources
Our target for becoming agile is to release at least 3 new services leaders ask for in 2026.
Strategy 4: Coordinated Local Action: Supporting Community Leadership:
Experience teaches us that there is no silver bullet – no solution that works in every situation. A coordinated network-based approach to fighting oil & gas industry power can be described as death by a thousand cuts.
The “Death by a Thousand Cuts” strategy mirrors the oil & gas industry’s decentralized yet unified approach. The industry operates across hundreds of locations and millions of miles, constantly pushing to expand. An effective intervention must somehow match this expansive, relentless pressure.
Instead of relying on a single, massive blow that the industry can easily absorb or deflect, this strategy emphasizes a multitude of smaller, coordinated actions that collectively weaken their operations, public image, and political influence over time.
Each exposed lie, each delayed permit application, and each project cancelled represents a “cut” that, while seemingly minor in isolation, cumulatively erodes the industry’s power and momentum. Our leaders and assessments really see the landscape this way.
A network makes this possible by distributing the tools we all need (the proverbial “blades” so to speak).
Just as a thousand small cuts can eventually bring down a giant, a series of coordinated local efforts, supported by a network, can dismantle the influence and systems the oil & gas industry needs to continue.
We seek to apply this strategy to transform isolated battles into a unified, systemic campaign that is too widespread and too adaptable for the industry to effectively counter.
Here are some of the ways we work to support campaigns:
- Provide direct campaign support through digital tools and expert connections
- Facilitate strategy discussions with local leaders from different areas
- Debrief wins and losses to broaden awareness of what works across different fights and campaigns
- Offer connections and coordinate pro-bono digital services
- Create campaign planning and messaging toolkits
- Synthesize complex research into practical resources
- Help local campaigns grow their own supporter networks
Our target for supporting community leadership is to commit to supporting 6 major local campaigns to completion.
The Networked Movement We Need Now
The vision of HHN isn’t of a single leader, group, or campaign, but of a simple and approachable method of building power.
We’re working to create a movement where:
- Local leaders drive strategy but never fight alone.
- Resources flow more quickly to where they are needed most.
- Every victory strengthens the local leader and the network.
- New leaders quickly connect to existing knowledge.
- The collective power of the movement grows with each engagement.
Next week, we’ll dive deeper into how we think about networks and share specific ways leaders can plug into and benefit from this growing power source.
The industry may have money and political influence, but we’re building something they can’t buy: a network of passionate, connected leaders who become stronger with every fight.
Learn more about the work behind the network
If this vision resonates with you — if you too believe in the power of connecting people into coordinated networks, this is also an invitation to dig deeper with Netcentric Campaigns (below).
Together, we can build the ties of connection that make every local victory part of a larger progress to be more networked movements.
Share your story. It helps all of us get stronger together.
Sincerely,
Marty Kearns