Mother Earth, in her own good time, took about twenty thousand years to create the grasslands of the Great Plains. This area covers thousands of square miles across north Texas, western Kansas, southern Colorado, eastern New Mexico and all of the Oklahoma Panhandle. In the annals of our developing planet this was a brilliant solution to a hunk of relatively arid and drought-prone North America. In spite of a history of only a few inches of annual rainfall, this great grassland had developed into a sustainable treeless savanna that supported buffalo, birds and an abundant small animal and insect population.
European settlers of the 1920s and '30s took a mere 20 years to turn the entire area into what has come to be seen as the greatest man-made ecological disaster in our history. It became known as the Dust Bowl of the '20s and '30s, and caused (is still causing) great pain and suffering to the nation. To this day we are still trying to sustain farmland there by the unsustainable practice of sucking up the water from the Ogallala aquifer, now disappearing at an alarming rate.
The history of this event offers us a parallel to today's rush to extract natural gas from our own Marcellus Shale area of New York State. Are we creating another ecological wasteland driven by the greed of Big Money?
The alternative to energy and jobs from fracking is energy and jobs from solar development. Mother Earth likes the calculus: Less carbon (CO2 and especially CH4) in the atmosphere, cleaner and more abundant jobs, energy produced where it is consumed, and prevention of yet another agricultural wasteland. All this in addition to establishing a pattern toward smaller, rather than bigger, megastorms.
It's our beautiful New York state. It's our choice. It's our future.
John Pattison
Troy