The ongoing disgusting events in the Gulf of Mexico this spring will only serve to intensify the debate on fossil fuel production and energy independence, as energy related crises will. This round, as we all know, we are in it up to our eyeballs right here at home. It’s not much of a debate here; it’s a rout. This place you have chosen to live in has been in filtrated, co-opted, plotted out on paper, and is well on its way to being completely divvied up on the ground. It has already been determined by our current free enterprise system, the powers that be, the remnants of the representative democratic process and our courts that the resource will be exploited, that the environment we love, but communally only control a low percentage of, will be developed, altered, imposed upon with hardly an objection, let alone any kind of opportunity for a look at a comprehensive plan, which of course does not exist. When the Secretary of our Commonwealth’s Department of Environmental Protection and the Secretary of our Department of Conservation and Natural Resources both tell us, via no less than the Williamsport Sun Gazette (April 20, front page) that we here in PA have been “had” by the oil and gas industry, that we’re being laughed at in Texas, you’d think it might give some of us a clue that there is a lot more to this invasion than our task forces, industry funded economists and other industry PR shaped groups have delved into. The lesson we should be re-learning from the tragic events of this spring: the oil and gas industry is not to be trusted. I thought we got that in the 1970s, between the windfall profits that came out of the Arab oil embargo, the sweaters and lectures of Jimmy Carter, and the cartoonish dirty dealings of J.R. Ewing, Bobby and Cliff Barnes on Dallas. Jobs—yes, there will be some for Pennsylvanians; mostly tough, dirty, exhausting jobs. Royalty riches will get here eventually for a small percentage of us, entrepreneurial opportunities and the assorted trickle downs for those with such an inclination. Great, go get 'em. But all via an industry that practices the arts of public relations, lobbying, obfuscation, omission, whining, poor-mouthing, tax avoidance and spectacular environmental degradation far better than any other on the entire planet. They are masters at all of it, and so far our Commonwealth has been played like a Stradivarius while goobering and gomering over many disgracefully poor leasing and whittled away royalty agreements as well as industry- financed hyped-up job projections. We gave away most of the store before we even knew what hit us. So what are we to do, we concerned citizen who have our lives here pretty much the way we want them; careers or jobs we like, a way of life that stands out for its sociability, affordability, accessibility to nature, stunning natural beauty, wildlife, incredible water resources and all the real necessities of society? Or those of us who entered into leasing agreements and now are getting cold feet or, at best, seller’s remorse? We might start by looking up from our work, our studies and our endless amusements and pondering the old bumper sticker slogan: “IF YOU ARE NOT OUTRAGED, YOU ARE NOT PAYING ATTENTION.” Is it really acceptable that, as a 2007 Penn State Cooperative Extension study concluded, an estimated eight percent of water wells experience mild to severe impacts from nearby natural gas drilling? Acceptable in a state that has the second highest number of private water wells in the nation? Is it acceptable when we hear -- not officially yet -- of contaminated wells being hushed up in nearby counties and now of a similar situation in the eastern part of our own? When we learn from professional engineers and hydrologists, like Temple University’s Professor Michel Boufadel, how well contamination can spread in an aquifer and avoid detection for a decade or longer, affecting more and more neighboring wells eventually? Is it acceptable when we learn through a DEP press release in the last week of May of “the illegal disposal of several thousands of gallons of an unknown material late on May 20 or early on May 21 near the Deer Crossing Inn, located just off State Route 14 in McIntyre Township, Lycoming County”? DEP North-central Regional Director Nels Taber said: “There is no question that the material was deliberately discharged from a tanker truck with a hose into a privately owned field... . The brown, gravy-like material was dumped within 250 feet of the Deer Crossing Inn’s drinking water well and even closer to Lycoming Creek.” Is it acceptable when more and more of us are hearing rumors and stories of other incidents and abuses involving illegal dumping and water intake, as well as dangerously overweight trucks operated by exhausted drivers? We know that due to rig availability alone, gas development will take a long time to reach its full impact here, but just how long will that be? When a knowledgeable (and intoxicated) industry player was asked a few weeks ago, ”When will you all be done with us?”, he answered, “We’ll never be done.” And we are beginning to get that. It’s not just the Marcellus Shale that is in play here; there are a couple of other fossil fuel bearing formations looming under us still. The courts have decreed that all it takes is proof of any gas in a unit and it’s tied up until there’s enough capital to get to it. And increasingly, it is becoming apparent that such capital -- and the vast majority of the wealth generated by it’s employment here -- will be coming from and heading back to the largest multinational and often significantly foreign owned or foreign based corporations in the world. Corporations our legislators, like our own corporate lawyer turned State Senator Gene Yaw, don’t have the desire presently to tax via a standard severance tax, for fear either of the logically untenable conclusion that we might scare away the “infant” industry or, at other times, because of a philosophical reaction to the possibility of the revenue only going into the state’s general fund during this budget crisis period. In the meantime, unlike in all the other major gas producing states, the industry is not taxed for extraction when more than 50% of a well’s lifetime production, industry graphs say, is gone in the first year. How outrageous is that? Anyone remember the cartoonist Rube Goldberg? Comical, cockamamie drawings of highly complex devices and processes for challenging tasks like removing the cotton from a bottle of aspirin. Someday, when our beautiful region has been scraped, poked, siphoned, flushed, connected and compressed, flared and vented to maximum profitability, that’s what early-21st-century slick water hydraulic fracturing might just look like to a world where the most valuable commodity, most everyone agrees, will be clean, fresh water -- like a process that might have been cooked up by Rube’s evil twin brother, Halliburton Goldberg. The horrors visited upon and the unconscionable treatment afforded those citizens whom Gasland filmmaker Josh Fox met with on his PA and cross-county odyssey must not be allowed to continue. It is unacceptable that the abuses seen in Gasland will occur here to our families, friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens; to the land and water resources we love. If we unite and stay vocal, demanding, and vigilant, if more and more concerned voices are not afraid to speak up and get us all to the truth, perhaps we will be lucky, and eventually it will be the more subtle issues of this development we will be able to focus on and strive to avoid, like long-term health consequences and the environmental degradation that comes with the industrialization that gas development brings. It’s not just about a beautiful, off-the-path, healthy place to live, work and play in now; it’s about the future too. Do we care about our legacy as temporary stewards of this place we love? After all, we’re all culpable; a legacy won’t keep us warm in the winter, won’t run our TVs, cell phones, cars, or computers, keep the lights on, or give us something hot to cook and wash with. Ideally, there would be a real debate about all this before property rights were ceded in a “rush.” Too late for that, but at the very least, don’t we deserve the truth about the genie that’s been let out of the bottle around here? The industry tells us they are still in the “exploration” phase. They don’t know how many wells they’ll need, how many well pads, compressor stations, and gathering pipelines, how much water, energy, and chemicals it will take to produce the volume of gas to meet the demand it will help create. What other type of development is allowed to proceed in such an overall free-for-all manner? Sure, wells are permitted one by one, as are pad sites, water withdrawals, pipelines, etc., but where is the overall comprehensive plan we deserve? What we know is that a gas rush is not called a “play” for no reason, and that we will continue to be played as long as we don’t wise up. As more information begins to emerge, we get a picture of a future the vast majority of us may not want at all, despite all the assurances the relatively small time, good guy, wanting-to-do-the-right- thing LLC’s or even corporate operators we are getting to know around here assure us and our representatives. Those pads capable of draining units? No one said they’d be square with a pad in the middle. Yes, the pad is in the middle, but it’s beginning to dawn on us that it’s in the middle of a rectangle, a skinny rectangle. How does that bode for the future of your land or our common environment? No matter how great a lease you had written, do you really think it will stop the huge multinational, titanically-capitalized producers, as they move in and take over, from eventually exploiting the resource to its fullest economically viable potential? The only fly in the ointment is that without a technological breakthrough, it can’t be done without the Commonwealth’s water. Your water. If the industry doesn’t figure out something better, maybe someday we will figure it out— that we, the citizenry, still hold the trump card to this whole thing. Right now we hear about golf course and power plant water usage comparisons; we are told how gas industry demand pales beside it. Have you seen a golf course or power plant yet that actually removes such a huge percentage of the water it uses so permanently from the water cycle we learned about in elementary school? The gas industry’s genius system now takes the most important resource there is -- fresh water -- trashes it, and stashes most of it a mile below ground, never to bother us again. According to the industry. Let’s hope so. Actually, that is still a matter of scientific debate. We are now told, via a USGS survey done in Tioga County, that methane gas can migrate from even below the Marcellus to the surface. Will the toxic soup of fracing fluids combined with the leaching it causes of dangerous naturally occurring elements possibly reach our water resources too? Sometime in the upcoming months, the Responsible Drilling Alliance will bring a couple of highly credentialed scientists and engineers with real industry experience to town to share their knowledge and begin to give us a better idea of what may be coming our way. What they will have to say won’t be in as easily digestible a form as an award-winning documentary, but there will be a chance for real dialogue and important information for those who want at least to attempt to participate in planning for the future here, instead of just having it dictated to us. Keep an eye out for it. Ralph Kisberg is a co-founder and Treasurer of the Responsible Drilling Alliance: www.responsibledrillingalliance.org The opinions in this piece are his alone and do not necessarily reflect those of the RDA.