I would hasten to add here that I am not opposed to gas exploration and procurement on public land. I am opposed to doing it in an unsustainable and blind hurry. The current plan for leasing Commonwealth land for gas drilling is so large in scale, so cursory in planning, so overheated in implementation, and so thin on oversight, that appalling environmental damages are almost certain. These ghastly results will be most severe in the state’s most rural areas, where few voters live; a fact that I am sure has been included in the cynical political calculations that hatched this policy.
In my opinion, we are not very well led.
Slate Run
It was a long time ago. My guess is 1966 or so, but at this point I can’t really be sure. I’m thinking it was early May, because I remember that the morning was still chilly, but that the air was redolent of damp earth and things growing. I was a boy squatting along the banks of a trout stream in the forest, and there were two men in their 50’s peering over my shoulders. My uncle Art was a fisherman of some repute in Lycoming and Clinton Counties, Dad wasn’t much of an angler, but he loved being outside with his kids. I had one of Artie’s fly rods in my hands, and its heft and great and unfamiliar length made me feel clumsy. There was a gaudy fly, red and white, knotted to the leader, but I have no idea what pattern. Like as not, they didn’t bother to tell me its name.
Artie said, “Don’t try to cast. Just reach out there and try to drop that fly behind the rock, right into that pocket below the quickwater.” It was harder than it sounds. The rush of the stream created a breeze that pushed the fly and leader around, and the rod was eight and half feet long and unwieldy. I missed a couple times, then the fly settled in the pocket. There came a flash and I jerked involuntarily, which by dumb luck was exactly the right thing to do. I stood up and there was a small brook trout, maybe five inches long, wiggling around at the end of the leader. The men squeezed my shoulders and laughed. Dad unhooked the little fish, and put it in my hands. For a moment the trout and I regarded each other nose to nose, then he spasmed into a furious bid for freedom, slipped from my grasp, landed at the water’s edge, and was gone. I may have cried at this, I don’t remember. I do remember that Artie tousled my hair and Dad hugged me. More clearly than anything else about that day, I remember that I was happy beyond expression. I will likely recall it on my deathbed.
Slate Run hasn’t changed that much in the 40-odd intervening years. Floods, beavers and so on have moved things around. I think there are more brook trout and fewer brown trout than there used to be, but that’s just an impression. Small cascades still pour over ledgerock and boulders, and there are still pools over ten feet deep. You can still encounter a bear, deer, coyote, or even a bobcat almost anywhere along it, particularly if you are quiet and the light is low. In spring the canyon is still mantled in a soft and radiant green that looks best in rain. In the fall the maple and oak leaves still blaze with heartbreaking color on mornings that break with frost on small purple asters and goldenrod. It is like that throughout the West Branch Country where I was taken as a boy to fish and hunt by them who raised me. It seems timeless and primeval, but that’s illusory.
By the turn of the 20th century loggers had stripped nearly every stick of timber from the entire region. The industrial scale logging left enormous piles of slash in its wake, and huge fires followed. You can still find charred stumps from the epic 1910 blaze that famously jumped the Clarion River and burned up much of northern Pennsylvania. The logged and burned slopes unleashed devastating floods, and millions of tons of topsoil washed away. Most animals of any size were extirpated by meat and market hunters. Chestnut, the second most common deciduous tree in the woods was completely eradicated by blight in or around 1919. The enormity of the destruction, the public outrage over it, and the foresight of visionaries like Joseph Rothrock and Gifford Pinchot led to the creation of forest reserves, which eventually became Pennsylvania’s State Forest system. Trees were planted, trails built, game animals and fish re-introduced. When veterans returned from the Second World War, they went to these “people’s woods” to heal themselves, and they brought their boys with them.
By now there are three generations of those boys, and more recently girls, who spent important parts of their childhood in the West Branch Country. When we stare at a map of Pennsylvania north of Interstate 80, the names on the map are a potent incantation. They conjure the magic of wild country, of trout lilies and striped maples, of dark nights without city lights and shot through with stars, of icy water, of grouse and woodcock and whitetails and elk, of old hemlocks, of some of the best parts of our lives. They fall in consecrating rhythm: Tiadaghton. Tioga. Young Woman’s Creek. Cedar Run. Hammersley Fork. Kettle and Cross Fork. Algerine, Black Forest. Wolf Run. Tamarack, Beech Bottom…We remember fish caught, our first backpacking trip, paddling a canoe, cross-country skiing at night under a full moon, drinking from a spring, seeing a bear, deer camp, our Dads. It is sacred ground.
The Wolf at the Door
I have pulled over along the highway just south of Milton, and taken a close look at the geologic map on the passenger seat. I drove up here today to meet the enemy face to face, and this appears to be the spot. I get out and walk up to the outcrop. The rock is austere but very handsome, a deep and uniform grey with many fine strata like the pages of a book, and shot through with the occasional white vein of pure quartz.
I’m a little shocked. The Marcellus formation is much in the public consciousness right now for its potential for both good and evil, and there are innumerable feature-length articles and websites and radio and television news reports devoted to it. None of them mention that it is, in its way, quite lovely.
Marcellus Shale contains natural gas, and this has been known to several generations of American geologists. It has never been exploited to any extent because of the expense and difficulty inherent in its extraction. In the last decade or so events and technology have conspired to generate considerable commercial interest in it. The world’s stock of fossil fuels is beginning to decline, making the remaining sources more valuable. The world is becoming a more dangerous place, making the production of domestic sources of energy critical to our security. It is also becoming a dirtier place, and natural gas is the cleanest burning fossil fuel available. These considerations have spurred technological change, and extraction methods based on hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling have evolved from interesting experiments to a viable approach to energy production. That technological change was developed and perfected in the American West.
I spent most of my twenties in extremely rural parts of the Northern Rockies. I went to see the mountains, and I saw them. I also met and lived with the people who lived there, and I learned a lot. Energy development, timber production, precious metal and coal mining, and other kinds of large scale extractive industries are woven through the environmental and economic history of the West. Any Westerner can tell you that this legacy is complicated. No poverty is so harsh as rural poverty, and a job as a gas driller or logger or gold miner bestows dignity and can be the antidote to running a meth lab, subsisting on food stamps, or burning the furniture for heat. Those same jobs have produced cancer, birth defects and silicosis, biblical-scale erosion, dead wildlife, poisoned rivers, and immense superfund sites that will never be cleaned up. Economies tied to resource extraction are economies that are bound just as tightly to real trouble.
The hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling technologies about to be applied to the Marcellus Shale were pioneered in places like the Upper Green River Basin in West Central Wyoming, on land owned by the BLM. I have been making the long desolate drive between Rock Springs or Kemmerer and Jackson off and on for almost 30 years, and I am an eye witness to the development of this gas field. It is high desert country, the wind is constant and carries the perfume of sage. There are always antelope visible from the road, and as one approaches Pinedale the jagged massif of the Wind River Range rises like a wall on the Eastern horizon.
First there was one gas pad on the horizon visible from US Routes 189 and 191. The next time I passed through, a handful had appeared. A couple years later, there was a forest of drilling structures and a spiderweb of gravel roads and pipelines. It looks like a First World War battlefield now. The problem is much more serious than simple visual pollution. It is a land forsaken.
Both gas company officials and regulators say that gas drilling can be done with little permanent effect to the environment. In theory I’m sure that’s true. In fact, gas exploration and extraction is done by people. I believe most of those people to be decent and conscientious. They know that high desert like the Green River Basin doesn’t have much water in it, so they must be very judicious in its procurement for use in drilling. They know that the millions of gallons of water they pump into the bore holes to fracture the shale (AKA frac fluid) has additives in it that make it extremely toxic and must be contained. They know that the resulting waste water must be held in a secure pond, protected from wildlife access, trucked away, and properly treated. They know that the well pads must be restored to as close to natural conditions as possible when they’ve finished their useful life. They know all these things, but they’re human beings working with a relatively new and complicated technology in a harsh and unforgiving environment, and sometimes things don’t go as planned.
If you wander around those gas leases in the Green River country, you’ll find wildlife fences with big holes torn in them. You’ll find dead critters nearby. You’ll find small tributaries and irrigation ditches that lead to the Green River that have been poisoned dead by frac fluid which somehow seeped through the groundwater or flowed over the surface. Most of these were full of trout not that many years ago. You’ll find erosion channels left by all the new roads and pipelines that allow sediment, and God-knows-what-else, into the stream channels. You’ll find trash flung out the windows and blown out of the beds of trucks that service the gas pads and pipelines. You won’t find so many antelope, mule deer, or other former wild residents. You’ll find the serenity of the desert landscape long gone. I doubt anybody wanted these things to happen, but they happened anyway.
The gas companies created a place of utter destruction that covers many square miles. The destruction was accepted by the good people of Wyoming and by the BLM because a sacrifice was required to procure relatively clean, home grown energy. Some of Wyoming’s chronically under-employed native sons and daughters got good, well paying jobs out of it. The Federal Government got some much-needed lease revenue. In part the sacrifice was acceptable because the Upper Green River Basin is not in the fashionable and popular back yard of Jackson or among the shining mountains where the tourists go. It happened in a well hidden backwater of one of the big square states that straddle the Great Divide.
The briefest glance at a map of the US will reveal that Wyoming is more than twice the size of Pennsylvania.
Riffle and Pool
It is at this point in the essay that I am supposed to offer economic and tourism-based arguments against the proposed wholesale leasing of public land in my home state to the gas companies. I am supposed to bring up the problem of community drinking water as well. I am supposed to cite the pitfalls of the boom and bust economics that attend the energy business. I am supposed to discuss the example of the early 20th century desolation of the woods by extractive industries and the decades and millions spent in their reclamation. I should mention the potential for harm to the Commonwealth’s sustainable forestry program, and the probable damage to endangered species and wetlands. I am supposed to propose a pause or moratorium in the permitting process to allow for the development and implementation of thoughtful safeguards to help minimize the environmental effects. In short, I am supposed to protest or moderate the coming desolation on the solid and immutable grounds of its effects on our collective pocketbooks or our health or other empirically defined and no-doubt critical aspects of the public good.No thanks.
I usually approach the Frying Pan hole at Slate Run on my hands and knees because the fish will see you and scatter if you walk up. Dignified it ain’t, but it helps. So does kneeling there in silence once you do get in place to make a cast, and quietly observing the water. It helps the trout calm down if they did spot you moving in and it helps you to see what they’re up to and decide how best to fish to them. It provides contemplative clarity. It conveys perspective. Here is mine.
I think the large-scale exploitation of Marcellus Shale gas deposits on our public lands will degrade and destroy many square miles of them. I think that the economic, environmental, security and technological conditions that make this exploitation viable and attractive are entirely engendered by the presence of too many of our own kind on the tired old planet. I think that reducing our rates of consumption and waste are infinitely more important public concerns than finding more ways to (literally) squeeze blood out of rocks. I think there is value in open, public, wild land that is not measureable in dollars or BTU’s. I think a generation of kids who aren’t dragged away from their Gameboys , taken to the woods and shown trout lilies and black bears and swimming holes and bright stars in a black sky is a generation profoundly lost. I think that my Dad’s ghost is out here, and I would speak with him undisturbed in a quiet forest by a clear trout stream many miles from a gas well. I think that a government that elects to sacrifice public land and water gold-rush style as an easy financial fix for a budget shortfall is performing the civil equivalent of turning tricks, and as with all forms of prostitution there will follow a consequent, permanent and ugly loss of virtue. Kneeling here along Slate Run I think that I am in the center of something important, something we can’t and shouldn’t live without.
I am aware that this kind of thinking is anachronistic, and died with Ed Abbey, and I don’t give a rat’s ass. For all the good things that this place has given me I will not see it poisoned and watch it die without raising my voice, and while I may not be listened to I will, by God, be heard.
There is a trout rising near the head of the pool now, and I think I will try to catch it. Artie and Dad would greatly approve.
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