The following article was published in the Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester, NY) on February 21, 2013. It was written by Joseph Hoff, chairman of Keuka Citizens Against Hydrofracking. Mr. Hoff granted us permission to publish it on New NY 23rd.
As the governor and the state Department of Environmental Conservation ready a decision, the jigsaw pieces of local resistance to hydraulic fracture drilling for natural gas and oil in New York State continue to fall into place. Currently 206 communities are protected (48 of these are in the New York City/Syracuse Watersheds) with another 90 municipalities staging for passage of draft legislation and zoning ordinance. A total of 296 municipalities stand tall under the protective or projected umbrella of a time-out (moratorium) or prohibition (ban and/or restrictive zoning ordinance) against a highly controversial process. Eighteen months ago, there were but 47 communities that had done so.
These communities have…
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Phil Ebersole's Blog 
February 23, 2013 at 10:08 pm |
I worked for an environmental engineering company for a few years and saw scenarios like this play out over and over. It really is truly hard to make decisions like these, the choice between the local economy and the local ecology.
Everyone has to eat, but once you defile your land, many worse things always seem to follow in hindsight. Damage done to the earth simply can’t be undone in many cases, and in others it is prohibitively expensive to deal with.
And in the worse of cases, it makes people chronically ill and riddled with cancer.
So what do the politicians do? What can they do? Kick the can down the road…
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