Prompt Blog #8: Reflections

Wow! I can’t believe that we are finished. It has been a long and winding road…through the woods! I feel reinforced and challenged now looking back on the past 15 weeks. A lot of my ideas about the genre, about my philosophical perceptions of the natural world, and in my spiritual relationship have been reinforced by the readings we’ve had, and the threads we’ve discussed together. Yet. I also feel that I have been challenged. Specifically, I think that I have been challenged by the scope of the genre. There’s so much more that I want to read and explore. I especially appreciate the text book and the posted readings, which I am going to delve into further and re-read as well.

Moreover, this course has provided me with a time in my hectic life to reconnect with the land and water that revitalizes me. With a new job, two young children, a wife who doesn’t work and needs me to relieve her of her rug-rat duties as much (or should I say as little) as I have the time to, I can’t really carve out the time to go outside. But this course has allowed me to do that, has given me the excuse. And for that…Mel, everyone…thank you!

This connection to the land…any land…it has always been a part of my writing and will continue to be. This class has fostered my ability to look at “nature” through new perspectives, which I feel has strengthened my writing as a whole.

That time has been extremely valuable beyond my writing, too. I really hadn’t made a connection with the land that is my new home, but the weekly place blogs have led me through a path to the land and back to the most important part of my home: my family, my girls.

Hopefully, though, I will get to spend a little bit more time with them after April 20, since I will not be taking six credits…for a little while at least.

Place Blog #8: The Other Side

This week I soaked my hands in blood, metaphorically and physically. I participated in all things sacrilege in my beliefs as a fly-fisherman…

I followed a stocking truck, dumped buckets of fish that were raised in raceways into Delaware Creek, a neighboring watershed to Lost Creek.

But I did it for my daughter.

We woke at 6 am, extremely early for my daughter. She did well, though, and got dressed quickly, letting me stuff her into these miniature neoprene waders my dad got her for Christmas, before she followed me into the misty morning. The air was damp and chilly as we stopped to get hot chocolate, egg sandwiches, and worms at a local gas station, but Clara didn’t flinch. She was excited; we were putting “trout-fish” in the creek.

I met my friend Zach Hosler on Zendt Hollow Road where the Juniata Stocking Club kept their pens. A small mountain spring, no bigger than a drainage ditch along a highway, fed this homegrown hatchery. The stream ran along the road, cutting through one of the club member’s farm, which--strangely enough--raised bison.

When we arrived, Zach was already standing in the bed of his truck, foot propped up on this huge white plastic tank. A black rubber tube, hooked up to a pump in the mountain stream, filled the tank while Zach’s dad and a number of other older guys ran around the pens with buckets and nets. When the tank filled to 180 gallons, the aerator pump kicked on and the old men started hauling up buckets of fish.

They brought the buckets up to Clara to see; it seemed as if there was more fish in the bucket than water. Sleek, marbled green backs, white-tipped fins of brook trout, golden bellies of brown trout, and jewel-sides of rainbows—they rolled over each other, slapping their tails, splashing Clara in the face with water. She laughed, and the old men laughed with her. Yet, they kept bringing each bucket for her to see…and to get splashed by.

I noticed that these fish were more colorful than most stocked fish and bigger than state bred trout, and asked Hosler about it.

“Fresh-water shrimp,” he explained, “this stream is full of them.”

I felt better knowing that these trout were somewhat educated, eating natural foods and not just trout pellets. Maybe I wasn’t just about to dump genetic Frankensteins into one of my new home creeks. These fish at least had experience that would lead them to hitting a fly.

After we filled the tank with about 400 fish, we headed down to the creek. We pulled out a few buckets at each bridge and road-side hole. Clara even got to put three buckets into the creek. Each time, she danced with joy, splashing in the shallows of the creek swollen over its banks from the past week’s rain.

Finally, we reached the public park where we emptied out the tank. When the last bucket of fish was carried off to the final hole, I broke out Clara’s Disney Princess rod so that we could try and catch some of the fish she just stocked in the creek. I place the bobber, tipped her hook with a wax worm, and helped her cast out into a nice current seam in the creek, right were the fast water eddied out into slack water along the far bank. It wasn’t long until we had our first fish, which she helped reel in. The fight wasn’t epic, the fish not huge. But Clara was so proud of catching her first trout ever (she had only caught sunfish before this), that she didn’t want to throw it back.

Normally, when Clara has gone fishing with me, we would reenact a catch-and-release ritual. I bring in the fish (sometimes with her help, sometimes not), unhook the fly or bait-hook from its mouth, extend it to her so that she can pet it with one finger on its head before she says “Ewww, it’s slimy; throw it back!”

Today, though, as I reached out the trout to her, she petted it on the head like normal but then said, “I wanna eat that fish; keep it!”

Shocked, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t carry a stringer because I didn’t usually keep fish. Moreover, when I have kept fish they usual have been big enough to make  a meal out of just that one fish…so it had to be 15 inches or greater. This fish was only 9 or 10 inches at best.

I begged some of the other fishermen that were in the park, and one of them gave me a plastic bag to keep the fish in, but I quickly realized that we would have to be mass murderers today. Within the next hour, we had three more fish of equal size in our plastic bag creel, while having thrown two others back just so we could keep fishing.

As we packed up our gear, a light drizzle swirling in the breeze that began to pick up, the last of our fish flopped in the plastic bag. It hurt me to watch that trout struggling, not because I minded killing a fish, but because I minded killing one so small, and killing so many. I was saddened because I knew that these fish would not be here in days to come to bring more times that Clara and I could bond and behold nature’s wealth.

When we got home, though, Clara holding the slick bag of slimy fish up to mommy, saying, “I am going to eat these fishies I caught,” I thought that maybe there was no foul today. We “paid” for those fish with our work. The stream in which we planted them would get too warm for trout later in the year anyway. Moreover, I didn’t just plant fish; I hopefully planted a fingerling of a tradition in my daughter’s memories. I’d like to start joining the club on more stocking trips. Probably the next one will be to Lost Creek. I’d like to fish more streams where Clara gets to catch trout that she placed there with her own hands. I want to share memories with her that I didn’t get to with my dad because of the confusion and hatred bred in divorce.

So, yeah….that’s right. All of my fly fishing friends…if you can find this blog in the overabundance of blogs on the internet: I have participated in a trout stocking; I have caught fish with bait; I killed those fish, took them home, and fried them up; and I liked it!

Prompt Blog #7: Brook Trout

I have hiked four miles on Black Forest Trail, off of Rt. 44, to get back into County Line Creek. It’s a narrow, shallow creek cutting down through the Alleghany plateau. Nothing seemingly special; not what one many would call a “destination” fishery. Its banks are choked with rhododendron and laurel, making it hard to cast a fly. The few fish I do catch are only promising to be a half-foot long; a ten-inch trout here is a real trophy.

Why go through so much effort? Because County Line, like hundreds of other nondescript runs, streams, and brooks in the Pennsylvania Appalachian Mountains, is one of the last strongholds of the Brook Trout.

Often criticized for its small size and lackluster “fight” in angling circles, the brook trout gets a bum rap. These relatives of the mighty Arctic char and the long, sleek lake trout have the ability to get massive in size, as large as the largest brown trout or rainbow trout or salmon. However, these hillbilly trout have been pushed out of their native habitat into the last remaining pristine waters of the East, waters like County Line which don’t have the room or the food chain to support larger fish.

All up and down the spine of the Appalachians, brook trout survive: barely. They have been relegated to the fringe of humanity because we humans have made “humanity” incompatible with “nature.” Pristine might as well mean “without human” even though all of our pristine and damaged lands alike have always been affected by humans. However, our accentuated industrialism in the past 150 years has deforested our lands, heated and polluted our waters with factories and dams, and introduced foreign fish such as brown and rainbow trout, as well as small mouth bass, whose aggressive nature will outcompete trout parr in any watershed where they meet.

But it hasn’t always been this way; the upper reaches of the Susquehanna all contained brook trout, which thrived so well that early settlers recorded catching basket after basket of 16 + inch fish until they couldn’t carry the baskets home. Moreover, the supply seemed limitless, so they set no limit on the harvest. As our modern world replaced “nature,” though, it became very clear that the brook trout’s day was numbered, so brownies and rainbows were imported from all over the world to replace them.

“Unfortunately”, rainbows could never reproduce in the East very successfully and brown trout, while they could reproduce, did not do so with the same prolific abundance as the brook trout used to. Yet, even though they couldn’t reproduce, Americans kept (and still keep) on stocking these “more successful,” “more sporting” trout in the brook trout’s native habitat. Much more aggressive and territorial, browns and rainbow out competed brook trout and pushed them further and further up watersheds until they were only left the County Line Creeks of the East Coast.

So, all of this being said, why do I make this trek to places like County Line Creek? I don’t know. I guess I’m a romantic. I guess that a small native fish is more of a treasure than a large exotic to me. I guess that the brook trout seems to be the only connection someone like me has to a time they were born too late to witness first hand. I guess I’m trying to bear witness before the last native brook trout are gone or replaced with genetically similar hatchery trout.

Place Blog #7: Lost Again

Spring has sprung in PA for sure. The April showers are here and have been here, on and off, for a week. I stand on the bridge over the culvert where I have brought Clara to fish. I wouldn’t bring her here now; I don’t want to instill any kind of discomfort for her to associate with the outdoors…not yet.

I stand here, though, not because this assignment forces me to, but because I want to bring myself to the heart of nature; to the wet, muddy, fecal matter of nature.

The grey vagueness of day is slowly folding into the darkness, but the rain persists. It drips off of my ball cap in individual drips, beads up on my waterproofed jacket. Yet, it streaks, it runs, it flows back to the puddle at my feet first, then back to the stream below.

I, too, melt, flow back into the stream of unconsciousness. Seriously, nothing is going on in my head. It’s as vacant as the clouded, moonless night, silent but for the irregular, persistent beat of the rain.

I wish I could say that I was transported back to trips into the woods where I sat around with friends who I haven’t spoken to in years, that I remembered our conversations over a fire spitting and sputtering, defyingly staying lit in similar rains. I wish that I could say that memories of rain-soaked fishing trips with my father, where we’ve stared at each other through the beaded-curtain of rain, smiling through soaked beards, lifting heaving trout out of the river into the rain.

I wish I could, but that’s not where I am. I am here; I am in the rain; I am not a tree, nor a rock, or a blade of grass bending under the weight of rain. But I am something like that, though, I don’t know what.

A car stops behind me. Maybe confused by the long hair sticking out of my hat, maybe confused because I’m utterly soaked, the driver, an older man wearing a green and yellow trucker hat, spins down the window of his Ford pickup and asks (almost stereotypically), “You alright, son?”

There isn’t any condescending tone in his voice, but general concern, as if he is my father, as if he worries if I’m sick. “No, I’m fine,” I answer.

“Well, you just looked like you were lost starin’ out in space like that,” he said. “You gonna get hit or catch a cold out here.”

“No, no,” I lie, and thank him for his concern before walking back over to my Jeep. He nods goodbye as he passes. I wave back.

In the Jeep, I shake off the wet chill, crank the heat, locate myself again. I wish I could say that I didn’t know where that locale is, that my existence is as fluid and consubstantial as stream. But I am here, now, again, within the world of man’s creation.

Prompt Blog #6: There’s a trout stream in PA

I propose that we make a new license plate here in Pennsylvania. I can imagine it now. There, on the plates of the cars that pull off Rt. 35 before me, heading north with me on Jericho Road. Across the top it’ll read “There’s a Trout Stream in Pennsylvania”; at the bottom it could read the name of the stream that serves as the rock of that fly fisher’s faith. “There’s a Trout Stream in Pennsylvania: Pine Creek.” “There’s a Trout Stream in Pennsylvania: Penn’s Creek.” “There’s a Trout Stream in Pennsylvania: The Little ‘J.’” Maybe Trout Unlimited could even incorporate this saying into the plate that they already produce in conjunction with PennDot. That way the extra money anglers are paying to evangelize their sport and their holy shrines will go to an organization that will help preserve the land and the water that they share in communion with others.

I know that there’ll be more than enough interest in such a venture. I’ve talked to numerous fishermen who describe, in detail, their altar stream and invite me to fish those waters as freely as my grandpa invited any stranger to church. These fishermen can, of course, recite the names of pools and swifts better than they can recite even one Bible verse, and they are only inviting me to fish with them so they feel less guilty about praying for a rise instead of kneeling to pray on Sunday. They need partners in crime. These fisher-types would be glad to personalize and purchase a license plate that would boast of the glories of their trout stream. Then, when they’re gathered around the tailgate, beer in hand, they can talk about how their waters are superior to the Henry’s Forks and Big Horn Rivers of the West—that theirs is the one and only, true trout stream. They’ll have the proof right there on their bumper and in their creels.

As I think about it, though, many fly fishermen whom I know (and whom I fall into ranks with on some issues) would discount the value of buying these license plates—and for many different reasons. Some would just say that fishing is just fishing and wouldn’t agree with my associating fly fishing with religion. Others may claim this license plate scam is just more evidence of how commercially trendy it has become to be a fisher of flies since that movie with Brad Pitt came out. But most of the people I fly fish with wouldn’t buy a plate with their favorite stream on it because they don’t want to blow the whistle on their whole operation. They (as well as myself) don’t want anyone else eavesdropping on their creek-side meditations. To some of us, the connection with our fish and our God is a personal one—a private, individual relationship, where God whispered into our ear where the fish are! We’ll fish the bigger waters—the Delawares, the Lehighs, the Clarion Rivers, etc.—but only when we don’t have the time to make it to our favorite streams. Those bigger streams are very nice cathedrals with wonderful gospels written about them that attract the devout and the faithful. But on them, it feels as if you’re only going through the motions, as if you’re not having a genuine experience.

I haven’t been to my trout stream in a while. I haven’t even thought about its currents in over a year. But as I cross over Lost Creek on an open-grate bridge in Jericho Mills, its currents remind of the quintessential trout stream—the stream that’s there in Pennsylvania for me, and I am transported to its banks.

It is the kind of pilgrimage that only a few people take. I’m looking for some obscure splinter of wood that’s supposedly a part of the Crucifix and is displayed on an altar in South America. You can’t locate it on the Internet or read about it in books; the only way you’ll ever find it is by talking with the locals.

Along the way, you’ve got to shuck pretension and ritualism like a nymphal skin. You’ve got to feel the grass in an oaken grove with your hands or bare feet. Splash the water on your face; put the rod down for a while. You’re only about an hour and 45 minutes from the intersection of Jericho Road and Rt. 35, somewhere in that vast north you spy on your commute home everyday. There’s a dirt road leading back to an old stone and timber bridge where you park since it’s too old and narrow to cross. The only sign of civilization is an abandoned camp made out of the same stone as the bridge. Down below there’s a series of runs and holes that hold decent trout, but you decide to wade slowly into the flatwater right in front of you. It’s not winter now; it’s that time of year, and you know the sulfur duns will pop up through the surface tension of the water. Anyway, you know there are some big trout in here, so there’s no reason to go tramping all over the countryside. The sun is starting to sink below the ridge that rises immediately due west, and you know you won’t have a lot of time before you can’t see your imitation on the water. This means you might not catch a fish, but—man!—it is just enough to be in a setting like this.

And that’s just it—you know. From faith or experience or whatever you want to call it—you know that stream so intimately that you have names of fish you caught on the back of your pictures. That place is so much a part of you that you might want to slap it on a license plate. Then again, you might not.

Place Blog #6: Not quite lost.

Sometimes, things aren’t “lost” but simply overlooked. In our haste, we rush around, looking for what we assume to be big and flashy and to jump out at us with blinking lights and signs saying “HERE: THIS IS WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR!” But often, we miss whatever it is we’re looking for simply by oversight: the “lost” keys in your old jacket pocket, the “lost” wallet in your dresser drawer, the “lost” drive in your life…well I guess that’s what I’m looking for.

But for me, it took a slow meandering drive through the Lost Creek watershed, with my daughter in her booster seat in the back of our Jeep, for me to find some semblance of what I’m looking for. Throughout this process of discovering Lost Creek, with the idea of finding a home, I’ve tramped up and down the watershed—mostly alone, mostly in the cold. But today it was so nice out, I brought Clara along, hoping that we could find some place to walk along the creek, skip stones (or just throw them in as she does at only 3 and a ½ years old).

From our house, we only needed to wiggle around some back-country roads for a mile before we crossed a small bridge on Sunset Road with a culvert channeling Lost Creek underneath it. There we pulled over beyond the guard rail where enough road gravel made the muddy ground a little more stable. If driving fast enough on this road, you might not even notice the creek. It’s barely more than a trickle, and its banks are choked with tangling green briar, grape vine, scrub oak, and a plethora of other low-lying shrubbery. But, I know what I’m looking for, the knot of vegetation a sign, however slight, that something more might be beneath.

We got out of the car and walked up to where the water spills out of the culvert, the only place that has some briar removed enough to walk up to the edge of the creek. Above the bridge and a few yards below this spot, the creek is no more than six feet across and probably only shin-deep at best, even now a week after a major flood event. But right below the bridge, the channeling of the waters through the culvert has dug out a plunge pool, deep enough and dark enough to hold trout beneath the ice in winter and to provide enough cover from predatory birds in the low-water summer.

“Daddy, I want to fish,” Clara declared.

Be still me heart! My daughter: a fishing nut with the same cracked shell as me. In my mind, I quickly thought about what gear we had in the car: her Disney Princess rod, left over from a sunny pond fishing trip last fall, my fly chest- and back-packs, but no fly rod. With our lack of equipment and the sun really starting to fade behind Shade Mountain to our north and west, I tried to persuade her that we ought to go home, that we’d come back another day and fish.

“No,” she said in a sweet, not demanding way, “We can fish for a little bit. It’s not too dark.”

I couldn’t say no to her enthusiasm and persistence, so I got out her rod. I attached a bobber and below that, since we didn’t have any worms for her to use, attached two weighted wet-flies that I normally would use to nymph this time of year. We walked over to the edge of the creek. A scraggly pod of briar still clung to the bank here, but I could cast out over that for Clara, and then she would reel it back in after letting it drift for a few yards. This lasted for a few casts before she was picking up road gravel that was kicked under the guard rail toward the bank and was putting handfuls of this stone in my jeans pocket.

“Ready to go home?” I asked.

“No, you keep fishing daddy.”

So there I stood, in the fading light, pink Princess rod in hand (oh yeah…did I mention that the handle lit up when you pushed the button on the reel to open the bale…) and a pre-schooler filling up my pockets with rocks. I wonder what the few cars that drove back Sunset Road were thinking when they saw our motley operation.

But honestly, I didn’t care. It was here, in the waning glow of the first really nice spring evening, my daughter with me by the bank of this artificial hole dug out by the culvert currents, that I think I might have found at least a piece of what I was overlooking. It wasn’t about a creek. As much as moving water is part of me, the creek was only part of “it.” A landscape alone cannot be a home; it has to be filled with people. It has to be shared with those you love.

So as I reeled in the Princess rod for the last time, the sunlight nearly gone, Clara asked, “Do we have to leave yet…,” and pulled her rocks out of my pockets to toss in the creek. They made a blast of tiny splashes, that we could only hear, not see, and she laughed: “I want to do some more.” Pure, simple.

Here was…is…this little girl. I’ve always told my wife that Clara is something special to me, not only because she’s my first child, but because she’s the first blood relative I’ve ever known due to fact that I was adopted. It blew my mind that very first time I held her up and sang “Blackbird” to her in the hospital, and it blew my mind now because I know that there’s more than my blood coursing through her; the same river that moves through me moves through her.

Prompt Blog #5: PA’s Marcellus Shale Policy: FUBAR

I wracked my brain all week to decide what I wanted to blog about for this week’s prompt. There are so many issues that are close to my heart because they’re close to my home. I thought about writing about the siltation problem on the Susquehanna because of the lack of a riparian zone in the mostly agricultural landscape of Central Pa. I thought that I could write about the thermal pollution in the lower Susquehanna, caused by the reissuing of “cooling” water from power plants, which causes some areas of the lower river to reach summer time temperatures into the 100’s. Then there was the vanishing smallmouth bass population on the Susquehanna, which no one can explain except with vague generalities!

But then, I realized that you can’t really “rant” on any environmental issue in PA right now if you don’t rail upon the Marcellus Shale fracking boom that is currently going on in the state. For those of you who are not in the know, a large geologic formation called the Marcellus Shale lies underneath West Virginia Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York.  Scientists and drillers have known for decades that the shale has held natural gas, but it used to be thought of little economic value because traditional drilling techniques only yielded modest production (however, those older wells are still producing without much decline in production, so “A patient investor might make a profit from these low yield wells with slowly declining production rates”) (Geology.com).

As most of us know, though, industry has little to no time for patience (or sustainability). So when Terry Englander, a geoscience professor at Pennsylvania State University, and Gary Lash, a geology professor at the State University of New York at Fredonia, found that you could extract a lot more gas in a much shorter time with hydraulic fracking and horizontal drilling (new techniques used in Texas to extract natural gas from the Barnett Shale), then the industry pounced on the area like a hungry cat on a mouse (Geology.com).

It is estimated that this formation holds 500 trillion square feet of natural gas (Savethewatertable.com). This kind of production would supply the whole East Coast with enough natural gas for…wait for it…if you can believe it…I’m not making this up: 50 years (Buffalonews.com)! While that seems like a long time, it’s a geologic blink of the eye, and when one considers the potential environmental costs, it’s not worth a dime!

Hydraulic fracking is not all it’s cracked up to be. In the process, “millions of gallons of water brewed with toxic chemicals,” and sand is forced into the well to “frack” the shale, releasing the gas (Buffalonews.com).  This in and of itself is not that bad, considering that the well is lined and sealed with concrete and used fracking water is supposed to be recycled, reused, or refined before being placed back in watersheds.

That would be the ideal situation. But when you consider that with PA’s current economic crisis (8 years of budget dispute included), the Department of Environmental Protection has seen a vast reduction in funding and personnel, so there is less oversight and applications for wells are passing without sufficient review. Consequently, oil and gas companies (from your small, local mom-and-pops to the big boys like Shell and Mobile) have a free ticket to drill for maximum profit.

Maximum profit means minimal environmental protections. First of all, these fracking operations are on the Allegheny Plateau and are drawing water from the headwaters of many streams and rivers that originate up in the mountains. This depletes the flow below and warms the waters, causing stress on aquatic wildlife. Furthermore, fracking water cannot be used indefinitely, and local water treatment plants don’t have the means or the capacity to treat toxic water, so these companies use “holding wells” to store this infected waste. Failure of these wells, spills, blowouts, or seepage through cracks in the seals of the gas wells can let this water into the local ground water, polluting residents’ drinking water. In Colorado, another state that has allowed hydraulic fracting, many have complained that the drilling waste has spoiled their drinking water (Savethewatertable.com).

It has even happened in PA. In Dimock, PA, many personal wells have been contaminated by methane leaking into the ground, and a spill into a local wetland led to a fish kill in the stream further down in the watershed (Buffalonews.com). There also was a blow-out in the central Northern Tier of PA and thousands of gallons of polluted water dumped into the ground (Savethewatertable.com).

So how has this happened? Don’t we have the Clean Water Act? Don’t we have a collective conscience or at least enough knowledge of history to remember the last 100 years where we had allowed the coal industry to run wild and now we’re still cleaning up their Acid Mine Drainage mess?

I guess not. Because we are the only state to have allowed the oil and gas companies free reign to destroy our landscape. In New York, there is a moratorium in place and no new gas wells can be drilled using the fracking technique until either more strict safeguards are in place or a better method is found to extract the gas. West Virginia has allowed drilling but oversees it closely; consequently, only a few hundred wells have been drilled (Buffalonews.com). In PA? 1,500 wells have already been drilled and 3,500 more permits are currently being processed (Savethewatertable.com).

Why do we allow this to happen? Greed. Individually, people who have property over the shale want to get rich quick by leasing their land to the drilling companies and earn royalties for the years to come. It has been a depressed area for many years. And the industry capitalizes on that. As one Washington D.C.-based industry economist said, “Before you put something in place that could dramatically affect this opportunity, think about the poor folks up there."

Listen to the rhetoric: “poor folks.” I barf at that paternalism. Having lived in Lock Haven, PA for 7 years, I was never a “poor folk,” even if money was tough. And I never would consider prostituting out the land just so that I could have it a little bit better. But others don’t care as much, and the industry won’t impose self-regulatory policies because “it believes state oversight is sufficient and worries the new EPA study will lead to new and costly safety and environmental rules that would rob them of decades of profit” (Buffalonews.com). Those rules may cost the industry money, but not having them will cost us generations of clean up.

Yet, no one seems willing to do anything about it. Republican Governor Tom Corbett wants to open up more state lands for drilling, yet he won’t impose a severance tax on gas extraction to help pay for clean-up and oversight. And the Democratic side of the state government isle isn’t proposing much else in the name of the environment. They do want to tax, but they do not support lessening the number of wells allowed to be drilled in PA. They too received campaign funds from the industry.

What’s worse, even if there are no accidents, even if we do everything “right” as far as protecting our watersheds, our forests and farms are going to vanish, replaced by gas well sites. New roads and open space will be clear cut in our woods to make way for the heavy equipment, pipelines, maintenance vehicles. Penn’s Woods will shrink even further. Our ridge tops, which have been held, almost sacredly by the hands of the Bureau of Forestry, Parks, or Game Commission will be trashed to make other people money (because don’t believe the hype, that money will not stay in PA unless it is in the form of a tax). Deforestation will lead to the fracturing of our woods, which will negatively impact wildlife. There will be greater runoff into our creeks, less shade for the headwater streams, increased water temperatures, fish kills, etc., etc., etc.

We live our lives in et ceteras. We blur over what’s truth and try to forget about it. Please write to your local representative and the governor if you live in PA. Ask for a moratorium on hydraulic fracking, or at least more oversight, a severance tax, and no more wells drilled on state lands.