Op-Ed Contributor
Destroying Precious Land for Gas
By SEAN LENNON
Published: August 27, 2012
ON the northern tip of Delaware County, N.Y., where
the Catskill Mountains curl up into little kitten hills, and Ouleout Creek
slithers north into the Susquehanna River, there is a farm my parents bought
before I was born. My earliest memories there are of skipping stones with my
father and drinking unpasteurized milk. There are bald eagles
and majestic pines, honeybees and raspberries. My mother even planted a ring of
white birch trees around the property for protection.
A few months ago I was asked by a neighbor near our
farm to attend a town meeting at the local high school.
Some gas companies at the meeting were trying very hard to sell us on a plan to
tear through our wilderness and make room for a new pipeline: infrastructure for
hydraulic fracturing. Most of the residents at the meeting, many of them organic
farmers, were openly defiant. The gas companies didn’t seem to care. They gave
us the feeling that whether we liked it or not, they were going to fracture our
little town.
In the late ’70s, when Manhattanites like Andy Warhol
and Bianca Jagger were turning Montauk and East Hampton into an epicurean
Shangri-La for the Studio 54 crowd, my parents, John
Lennon and Yoko Ono, were looking to become amateur dairy farmers. My first
introduction to a cow was being taught how to milk it by hand. I’ll never forget
the realization that fresh milk could be so much sweeter than what we bought in
grocery stores. Although I was rarely able to persuade my schoolmates to leave
Long Island for what seemed to them an unreasonably rural escapade, I was lucky
enough to experience trout fishing instead of tennis lessons, swimming holes
instead of swimming pools and campfires instead of cable
television.
Though my father died when I was 5, I have always felt
lucky to live on land he loved dearly; land in an area that is now on the verge
of being destroyed. When the gas companies showed up in our backyard, I felt I
needed to do some research. I looked into Pennsylvania, where hundreds of
families have been left with ruined drinking water, toxic fumes in the air,
industrialized landscapes, thousands of trucks and new roads crosshatching the
wilderness, and a devastating and irreversible decline in property value.
Natural gas has been sold as clean energy. But when
the gas comes from fracturing bedrock with about five million gallons of toxic
water per well, the word “clean” takes on a disturbingly Orwellian tone. Don’t
be fooled. Fracking for shale gas is in truth dirty energy. It inevitably leaks
toxic chemicals into the air and water. Industry studies
show that 5 percent of wells can leak immediately, and 60 percent over 30 years.
There is no such thing as pipes and concrete that won’t eventually break down.
It releases a cocktail of chemicals from a menu of more than 600 toxic
substances, climate-changing methane, radium and, of course, uranium.
New York is lucky enough to have some of the best
drinking water in the world. The well water on my family’s farm comes from the
same watersheds that supply all the reservoirs in New York State. That means if
our tap water gets dirty, so does New York City’s.
Gas produced this way is not climate- friendly. Within
the first 20 years, methane escaping from within and around the wells, pipelines
and compressor stations is 105 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon
dioxide. With more than a tiny amount of methane leakage, this gas is as bad as
coal is for the climate; and since over half the wells leak eventually, it is
not a small amount. Even more important, shale gas contains one of the earth’s
largest carbon reserves, many times more than our atmosphere can absorb. Burning
more than a small fraction of it will render the climate unlivable, raise the
price of food and make coastlines unstable for generations.
Mayor Michael
R. Bloomberg, when speaking for “the voices in the sensible center,” seems
to think the New York State Association of County Health Officials, the American
Academy of Pediatrics, the New York State Nurses Association and the Medical
Society of the State of New York, not to mention Dr. Anthony R.
Ingraffea’s studies at Cornell University, are “loud voices at the
extremes.” The mayor’s plan to “make sure that the gas is extracted carefully
and in the right places” is akin to a smoker telling you, “Smoking lighter
cigarettes in the right place at the right time makes it safe to smoke.”
Few people are aware that America’s Natural Gas
Alliance has spent $80 million in a publicity campaign that includes the
services of Hill and Knowlton — the public relations firm that through most of
the ’50s and ’60s told America that tobacco had no verifiable links to cancer.
Natural gas is clean, and cigarettes are healthy — talk about disinformation. To
try to counteract this, my mother and I have started a group called Artists
Against Fracking.
My father could have chosen to live anywhere. I
suspect he chose to live here because being a New Yorker is not about class,
race or even nationality; it’s about loving New York. Even the United States
Geological Survey has said New York’s draft plan fails to protect drinking water
supplies, and has also acknowledged the likely link between hydraulic fracturing
and recent earthquakes in the Midwest. Surely the voice of the “sensible center”
would ask to stop all hydraulic fracturing so that our water, our lives and our
planet could be protected and preserved for generations to come.
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