Helen Slottje was working as a commercial attorney at a large Boston law firm when she met her husband David, a colleague at the firm. Slottje left her corporate practice and moved to Ithaca, where David had moved to join a family business. They fell in love with the rustic, small-town charm of the Finger Lakes region and decided to stay for good.One spring day in 2009, Slottje saw an ad in the local paper announcing a meeting about gas drilling organized by a community group in Tompkins. She remembered seeing gas leases on every single property when she was helping her brother-in-law find a home in Ithaca.

 Her curiosity piqued, she went to the meeting—and left horrified at the pictures she had seen.Once pristine landscapes were scarred by construction, drilling equipment and waste pits. Families were left to deal with dirty water and air, suffering health problems as a result. Horror turned to resolve, and Slottje decided to stay in Ithaca to see this fight through.She received Goldman Environmental Prize in 2014 for The prize committee celebrated Slottje’s pro-bono legal assistance for “helping towns across New York defend themselves from oil and gas companies by passing local bans on fracking.”