Paradise Lost as the Great Marcellus Gas Rush Hits Home
Organic farmer Stephen Cleghorn reports
Pittsburgh Post Gazette
10 October 2010
On our 50-acre certified organic farm, located in a small
unincorporated area of Henderson Township in Jefferson County, an area
that has been called Paradise for more than a century, there is a high
point to which we take the dogs. There we like just to be quiet before
the beauty we see all around us. Rolling fields of crops, alternating
green and brown. Our neighbor's cows, gorgeous Jerseys with their big
soulful eyes, framed against their emerald pasture. Our own dairy goats
lazing away a summer's afternoon on the pasture down below us.
And sometimes we go up there at night to admire God's creation as it
envelops us. From that hilltop it is easy to recall the words of the
poet-farmer Wendell Berry:
I am wholly willing to be here
between the bright silent thousands of stars
and the life of the grass pouring out of the ground.
The hill has grown to me like a foot.
Until I lift the earth I cannot move.
Five years ago we had a dream that we could take these 50 acres and
make them our small gift to our neighbors and our world by producing
healthy organic vegetables and fresh goat milk products. We wanted to
do so in a manner that in a small way helps to heal our environment,
our atmospheric commons that has become stressed by an over-reliance on
fossil fuel energy. We joined a growing movement in agriculture to be
small and local on purpose, for our health, for that of our neighbors
and even for our planet.
But in truth, aside from all our ideas about what we set out to do,
that lovely hill played a big part in our deciding to move to this
piece of land rather than another. It would be our little portion of
Paradise.
Now that hill and this farm into which my wife and I have poured our
lives' savings face a mortal threat. We are learning fast the
second-class status of being a land owner -- a "surface rights" owner
-- without mineral rights. The Great Marcellus Gas Rush has come to our
county and may one day make camp on our farm.
We do not want diesel-spewing compressor trucks lined up all in a row
to force water, sand and secret chemicals into the ground 7,000 feet
below us in order to release methane gas from shale. Nor do we want a
pond full of toxic waste water coming up from a well to threaten our
crops or harm our dear goats.
Fortunes are being made below our feet. A neighboring family that
bought our gas rights for $150 in 1995 just realized an $80,000 bonus
for changing their lease to facilitate a mile-square Marcellus Shale
"gas production unit," as it is called. The lease has been sold to a
company capable of putting a 5-to-10 acre industrial site on our
beloved hill.
This family, our neighbors, already has realized a 53,000-percent
return on their investment, but they see greater wealth to come,
perhaps tens of thousands of dollars monthly, when the royalties start
rolling. We see nothing but the threat to our health and the health of
our gentle trusting goats and the loss of our property value.
And we are told there is absolutely nothing we can do about it.
We do not accept that yet. We will fight, you can be sure. But we do
not want it to be that way. We want the peace and tranquility of that
hill.
In Tioga County, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture quarantined
28 cattle after they drank gas-drilling fluids that overflowed from a
pond of drilling waste. It tasted like salty water to them, which they
like. The Agriculture Department required that the young calves be held
out of the food chain for two years for fear that the toxins in the
drilling fluids -- including the heavy metal strontium -- would get
deposited in the calves' bones and find their way into humans who ate
their meat. What about our milk?
On our hill, late at night, it is not the stars but these dark thoughts
we must now consider. In that sense our Paradise is already lost to us,
whatever may happen next.
Stephen Cleghorn and his wife, Lucinda, run Paradise Gardens and Farm
in Reynoldsville http://www.paradisegardensandfarm.com