Fracking: One whale of an environmental story

The story of the day in Athens County — hell, probably of the decade — is fracking, of course, and it's exciting to be on the front lines covering the issue as a journalist.

But it's also stressful, in that so many people are directly impacted by the likely oil and gas boom coming to our area. This is a very difficult story to cover because it's so hyper-divisive, and people whom I know and respect, many of them friends, are falling on either side of the conflict.

The way this is developing, with very personal and immediate impacts on many, many people in our community, separates it from the many other environmental issues that I've covered during my 30-year career.

Environmental stories tend either to be about prospective, future consequences of some sort of government or industrial, power generation or extractive industry proposal, or very localized effects of the same.

Some of the stories I've covered include the impacts of logging on salmon-spawning beds in the Salmon River wilderness of Central Idaho; wolf recovery efforts and wilderness designation conflicts in the same region; the impacts of coal-truck traffic in small towns in southern Ohio; proposed large-scale dam projects in Southwest Colorado; planned development near Anasazi Indian ruins in the same area; tall-stacks power-plant regulations in the Wheeling-Moundsville, W.Va., area; long-wall mining, strip mining and logging proposals here in southeast Ohio; and any number of other environmental issues that seemingly pop up every other month in this very environmentally tuned-in area.

But with most of those issues, the coverage involves reporting on abstract arguments in advance of announced plans that frequently never actually happen. I remember reporting at great length, over a period of two or three years, about a deep-mining proposal for Athens County. It never happened, and all those thousands of words basically went to waste, along with the reams of paperwork that I collected in order to report the story.

Fracking – or more accurately, recently developed horizontal drilling procedures that employ long-used hydraulic fracturing technology to extract massive amounts of oil and gas – is a different ball-game altogether.

Every day, multiple new local angles in this story arise, so many that it's impossible to keep up with all the potential stories. For instance, many, many Athens County property owners this week are signing their properties' oil and gas rights over to drilling companies or their representatives, for millions and millions of dollars. Meanwhile, dozens and maybe hundreds of Athens County property owners are on the fence, facing supposedly immovable deadlines, having to decide between risking the quality and usefulness of their homes, water and land on the one hand, and obtaining and enjoying financial security on the other. Numerous others are dead-set against fracking, and say they won't sign over their mineral rights at any price.

A good reporter could pull a wrenching feature story out of interviewing any one of these people, pro-leasing, anti-leasing and on the fence.

THE OTHER THING THAT MAKES this story so tasty for an environmental journalist is that it works on multiple geographic scales — local, regional, state, national and global – and concerns some of the biggest political issues of the age. It's a colossal environmental story, of course, but also involves seminal issues of foreign policy and economics.

How many other news stories come to mind that at one level involve very real risks to you or your rural neighbor's drinking water and quality of life, at another level involve a potential economic development windfall in our desperately poor region, at another level features an ideological faceoff between the two sides of our nation's bitter political divide; and at still another level, involves foreign policy as it relates to energy independence, global terrorism, and past, present and future Middle East wars?

That's a lot of ground for one environmental story to cover.

Aside from its huge scale and multiple dimensions, the horizontal drilling/hydraulic fracturing story challenges my editor's role to provide balance in news coverage, while exercising leadership on the editorial page. I'll confess I'm struggling with achieving both of those goals with this story, and probably have fallen short on the leadership part.

This is because I'm ambivalent myself about fracking. As I've written before – and received strong criticism for the position – I don't think opponents of fracking have fairly acknowledged the economic benefits of this multi-million-dollar industry dropping mountains of money into our profoundly poor region. I see rote parroting of bromides such as "this is just here-today, gone-tomorrow extractive industry," "they won't hire anyone local," "the money won't stay in the community," and on and on.

This ignores the fact that several years of sustained economic investment into a community is nothing to sneeze at, and that supposedly worthless extractive industries – coal-mining for one – sustained many of our friends and neighbors here in southeast Ohio for many decades. People raised families and supported communities and school districts with their salaries from Southern Ohio Coal's Meigs Division mines. Many still live in the area on the retirement benefits from those coal-mining jobs.

And the fracking-boom jobs will not just be filled by oil-field roughnecks from Texas. Other jobs will appear in oil-field supply outfits, surveying crews, construction contractors, truckers, and any service industry that caters to oil-field and related workers.

As far as money not staying in the community, where do you think each landowner who walks away with a copy of a signed lease and a pile of money is going to spend that dough?

SO, HELL, IF THE ISSUE IS THIS cut and dried, I should be writing impassioned advocacy in behalf of fracking in Athens County, right?

Well, no. The question isn't whether horizontal drilling/hydraulic fracturing has any benefits, but rather whether those benefits outweigh the potential disadvantages. And those negatives, documented in chapter and verse in numerous other communities around the country, lay out a persuasive case that fracking is not worth the benefits.

The question that still needs to be answered to my satisfaction is whether negative experiences that have been reported elsewhere are isolated or scattered, or whether they're inevitable if fracking happens here. Moreover, are they the sort of negatives – ruined water, shattered quality of life, leases with no protections for landowners, etc. – that can be prevented or mitigated by local, state or federal regulations? Or are the regulations so weak and toothless, or the regulators themselves so compromised and/or corrupt, that they won't help protect landowners and communities from the ravages of horizontal drilling and fracking?

It doesn't help any that these outside outfits aggressively buying up oil and gas leases have been less than forthright about their intentions, and often have bulldozed our friends and neighbors into signing questionable leases without giving them time for careful consideration or legal consultation.

Another factor to consider is that while opinion in Athens County seems overwhelmingly in opposition to fracking, the stampede of local property owners signing leases seems to say otherwise. And finally, even if most of our community has lined up against fracking, that local consensus carries about as much weight as the "consensus" that 170 doomed Texans shared at the Alamo. The overwhelming political force in Columbus and to some extent in Washington is all for exploiting the oil and gas boom for everything it's worth.

Part of the reason this story is so fascinating and challenging to cover is that there are no easy answers. Every time I think I have it figured out, some new angle raises its ugly head, and it's time for a reassessment.

So, until I have that part squared away, we'll be concentrating on the news aspects of the story, rather than trying to push you one way or another.