Joanne Corey is an activist and a poet. A founding member of Third Act Upstate New York, she is a rural New England native and lives in Vestal, New York. Her most recent book, Hearts, was published in 2023 by Kelsay Books.
Growing up in a town of 200 along the Vermont/Massachusetts border, Joanne Corey learned early about the power of community. With a dad who worked for New England Power on the Upper Deerfield, she also learned early about renewable energy from hydro and pumped storage projects. One of her favorite things about owning solar panels now is generating her own clean electricity!
She has a long history of activism for various causes. Inspired by her mother, sisters, daughters, granddaughters, and friends from her days at Smith College, she advocates for the rights of women and girls, especially within her Catholic faith tradition. Catholic social justice doctrine, which includes respect for the dignity of each person with particular attention to those most vulnerable, underlies her activism. Since 2000, she ha
s been a member of NETWORK, an inclusive advocacy organization lobbying for social justice on the national level.
CARE FOR CREATION, another tenet of Catholic social justice doctrine, led to her involvement in the anti-fracking movement. Joanne has lived in Vestal, near Binghamton in Broome County, since the 1980s, so, when Binghamton became the epicenter for the fight over shale gas fracking in Southern Tier NY/Northern Tier PA, she joined with other New Yorkers to keep high- volume hydrofracking out of NY and offer aid to those suffering its effects. She attended numerous rallies and educational events, learning from PA activists and Ithaca-area experts, such as Bob Howarth, Tony Ingraffea, Sandra Steingraber, and Walter Hang. She was part of the state-wide Rapid Response Team, using her research to comment on articles in the media to counter the fossil fuel propaganda machine.
Nine years ago, with the NYS regulatory – and, later, legislative – fracking ban in place, her activism moved toward the climate crisis in general. Bolstered by Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’, she has been engaging with various climate organizations in their work. As a personal response, she worked with her family to decarbonize their home and nearly all their transportation. With the installation of a geothermal heat pump four years ago, they were able to disconnect their home from the methane system.
Joanne continues to read about energy and climate issues and subscribes to Bill McKibben’s Substack, so she heard about Third Act from its beginning. She was thrilled to join our Upstate NY Working Group and served on the Launch Committee. Eager to help others decarbonize, she is now part of the Democratize Energy Action Group.
This fall, the threat of shale gas fracking has re-appeared in the Southern Tier with a proposal to use supercritical CO2 instead of water in an attempt to skirt the NYS ban and cash in as carbon sequestration. The state-wide coalition that fought successfully 10+ years ago has remobilized against this new danger and Joanne is grateful to TAUNY for jumping in to support the effort. Although it seems at first to be a local issue, the scheme to use carbon dioxide to extract and burn fossil fuels for electricity is part of a plan by the oil and gas industry to keep their industry alive and polluting for decades to come. Our message is not only “not here in NY” but also “not anywhere in the world.”
Joanne enjoys writing beyond the practical needs of writing to government officials and correspondence. In 2023, she celebrated the tenth anniversary of her WordPress blog, Top of JC’s Mind. She turned to poetry as a means of creative expression about a dozen years ago; in May, Kelsay Books published her first chapbook, Hearts. Links to her blog and published work are available at joannecorey.com.
Joanne does not often write environmental poetry but does write a lot of poetry of place, often involving herself and her family. The following poem first appeared in the Spring 2022 anthology of the Binghamton Poetry Project. It recounts a visit to a dryland forest preserve on the Big Island of Hawai’i where her daughter had interned.
Kaʻūpūlehu
Wilds chanted to the forest
as we stood in a circle
asking permission to enter
Though I could not understand
the Hawaiian words, my eyes
welled, tears ran down my cheeks
The forest answered that we could
tread lightly on the jagged
lava rocks and visit the new
Trees, planted for their preservation
protected from invasive competitors
fenced from hungry goats
My daughter touched their leaves
told us their stories, more alive
than I had seen her in years
Awe
and tears
and tears