Where do we go from here?

The gas lies beneath us; lots of it. The gas companies will get it out because they have the power and money to do so, purchasing influence over our legislatures and the White House. And today’s economic reality makes it easier for the gas companies to obtain leases from homeowners struggling to make ends meet.

It is unconscionable that anyone must sign a lease, risking water, land and air contamination to keep their land. Small-scale dairies get less for their milk than it costs to produce it, while we bail out the crooks who perpetrated an international economic meltdown. The farmers are left to struggle under debt, give up or take a gas company’s check.

Thanks to tough negotiations, people who joined the precedent-setting landowner alliances have fared better than some others in obtaining environmental protections and more compensation. I myself signed a Northern Wayne Property Owners Alliance lease with Hess for three acres in Damascus because I was surrounded by signers and wanted to have some protection under the alliance umbrella (I am donating my bit of money to local non-profit organizations). But even these leases are not a guarantee against problems once drilling activities begin. There have already been spills and weird problems with water wells at various privately leased sites.

New York and Pennsylvania are not ready for this. To get our regulatory ducks in order, I suggest we:

• Reinstate regulation over fracking, which was exempted from the Clean Water Act in 2005 by the Bush Administration. Push for passage of S. 1215 in the Senate and HR 2766 in the House, which would do this.

• Throw out the recent New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) draft environmental impact statement that all the experts (including the employees’ union of the DEC) say is inadequate. Demand a better one. Get Pennsylvania to issue a cumulative environmental impact statement.

• Reverse the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) decision, fueled by gas company pressure, to remove the oversight of erosion and sediment control at well sites from local conservation districts. Local control is more efficient.

• Implement a gas severance tax in Pennsylvania and New York to help local communities, the DEP and the DEC deal more equitably with drilling impacts. The Pennsylvania legislature handed our state forest and game lands over to drilling instead, “balancing the state budget on the backs of the gentle beasts that call those forests home,” as Bob Wasilewski, president of the Greater Wyoming Valley Audubon Society, put it.

Throughout this mess, I have tried to encourage civil and constructive dialogue among people with differing points of view. In that spirit, I give thanks to those who are doing their homework and the hard work of protest, negotiation, study and regulation without name-calling and condemnation of others. The more scrutiny we give this issue the better.

Our country was built on protest, vigilance and participation. There is every reason for all of us, signers and non-signers alike, to continue to use these tools to protect our water, air, soil and health. We are a population manipulated by sensationalist media, drugged on consumerism and trapped by debt. Let us not lose our way under those pressures. Section 27 of the Pennsylvania Constitution reads: “The people have a right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment. Pennsylvania’s public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come. As trustee of these resources, the Commonwealth shall conserve and maintain them for the benefit of all the people.”

[Kathy Dodge is an artist, environmentalist, president of Northeast PA Audubon and member of the Northern Wayne Property Owners Alliance.]

This monthly column is a part of a valley-wide initiative to encourage an engaged citizenry. Visit upperdelaware.com for a complete archive of visioning statements and for more about the visioning initiative.