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" Hello, am I speaking with Lisa Anne Chase, daughter of David Ross Chase, granddaughter of Anna McKinley Chase?&amp;quot; asked the stranger on the other end of the line. I hadn&amp;#039;t heard my grandmother&amp;#039;s name in many years. She died when I was a kid. But even now it was jarring to hear her called &amp;quot;Anna&amp;quot;\u2014she went emphatically by Anne as an adult; she thought Anna made her sound like a hick. Even though her father lost all his money in the early 1900s and she was fobbed off, Cinderella-like, on her grandparents in Pennsylvania; even though she (inexplicably) married my grandfather, a farm boy with one year of high school who started out counting boxcars for Republic Steel and worked his way up to a middle-class life in Cleveland; she was still a Daughter of the American Revolution, a cousin of President William McKinley, and hell on wheels for anyone who threatened that narrative. When I admitted to being Anna&amp;#039;s granddaughter, the man, named Keith, told me that he worked for a Texas-based oil and gas company and that he had &amp;quot;some very good news&amp;quot; for me: He was about to make me $125,000 richer\u2014and that didn&amp;#039;t even include the monthly royalties I&amp;#039;d be collecting for years to come. I was among Anna&amp;#039;s heirs to the &amp;quot;mineral rights&amp;quot; of some acreage in Pennsylvania. Others owned the land, but we owned the natural gas buried underneath. &amp;quot;Is this part of the Marcellus?&amp;quot; I asked Keith with some dread. Why, indeed it was. The Marcellus Formation is an underground reserve thought to hold between 84 trillion and 141 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, the mother lode of which stretches from Ohio to New York. While geologists and oil and gas companies have known about the Marcellus for decades, it was always considered too difficult and expensive to free the gas from the shale in which it resides. But because of recent technological advances in hydraulic fracturing, or &amp;quot;fracking,&amp;quot; as the process of drilling into the gas-embedded shale is called, there&amp;#039;s now a frack rush that rivals the California gold rush. My mineral rights are in Bradford County, a so-called Marcellus sweet spot with the most wells\u20141,044 as of this writing\u2014and the best-producing ones of any county in the state. What shocked me more than getting that call last July, more than learning that mad, mean Grammy was suddenly my benefactress, was how swiftly that night I accepted (in my mind) the money, and how swiftly (in my mind) I&amp;#039;d spent it\u2026on a planned kitchen renovation, on my son&amp;#039;s college fund, on a Stella McCartney dress from Net-a-Porter. I&amp;#039;m a green girl, the last person who&amp;#039;s supposed to be susceptible to pocketing a fracking windfall. I compost, recycle, and help run the school garden. I volunteer on my local environment committee. To make our house in suburban Larchmont, 18 miles up I-95 from Manhattan, more energy efficient, I spent a small fortune switching to LED lightbulbs that will probably outlive me. Last year I donated to New York Public Interest Research Group and Riverkeeper, which are working to halt fracking in New York, one of the final Marcellus battlegrounds. I&amp;#039;m against our addiction to hydrocarbons! I agreed completely with The New Yorker&amp;#039;s Elizabeth Kolbert, who wrote about the euphoria over cheap Marcellus gas: &amp;quot;In the coming decades, ever-improving technologies will almost certainly make new sources of hydrocarbons accessible. At some point, either we will outgrow our infatuation or we will burn our way to a very dark place.&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;m against fracking! But only sometimes, it seems. Which makes me the worst kind of environmentalist: a situational one. A couple months after the $125,000 call from Keith, our deal fell apart. The price of natural gas had plummeted to $2.50 per BTU\u2014four years ago, before the frack rush, it was at $12 per BTU\u2014and the oil company that wanted to buy our rights backed out. Outwardly I was relieved. Secretly I was disappointed. Then, a couple months later, a guy named Travis called. His oil company wanted our rights now, for terms not quite so good, but the offer was still too significant to ignore. I rationalized: I&amp;#039;ll use the money to buy\u2026a green product! A super-energy-efficient, superexpensive Liebherr refrigerator. I&amp;#039;ll donate some of it to environmental groups. I&amp;#039;ll put the rest in the college fund. Weren&amp;#039;t those all righteous ways to spend it? A few months later, that deal too went away. Thus began a yearlong saga of strange men calling the four women in my little nub of the family tree\u2014my sister, my aunt, my stepmother, and me\u2014with ever-declining but still-hard-to-say-no-to offers of cash in return for our leasing the right to frack. It was a fossil-fuel prick tease, and in the yes\u2026no\u2026yes\u2026no process, I became increas\u00ADingly disquieted about my easy virtue. I resolved to unearth the truth about fracking. But it was almost impossible to discover an objective truth, because almost everyone who weighs in on this topic has a dog in the fight. What did become clear was that whatever I chose, I was probably going to cause harm\u2014to the people living on the land in Pennsylvania, to the land itself, or to my family. Hydraulic fracturing is the practice of pumping millions of gallons of pressurized water, sand, and a small but potent cocktail of nasty chemicals into wells drilled horizontally, as deep as 10,000 feet. The powerful injection causes the shale to fracture, creating vertical fissures through which the gas can flow upward. Elected officials in Pennsylvania, which the Marcellus blankets, have more or less gazed into the eyes of the oil and gas companies, rolled onto their backs, and purred, &amp;quot;Drill, baby, drill.&amp;quot; To be fair, their rationale can be partly explained because the recession hit Pennsylvania hard, and according to a state advisory report to Governor Tom Corbett, fracking created 72,000 new jobs between 2009 and 2011. &amp;quot;By 2020,&amp;quot; the report read, &amp;quot;the industry could\u2026generate more than $1.8 billion in state and local tax revenues and support more than 211,000 jobs.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;d be tough for a struggling dairy farmer or the mayor of a depressed town to get a call like those I got and say &amp;quot;No, thanks.&amp;quot; Especially when there are persuasive arguments for freeing up this gas. It burns cleaner than oil and coal, with lower CO2 emissions. Its abundance could lessen our dependence on foreign oil; there&amp;#039;s enough gas in the Marcellus to supply our rapacious American energy needs for between three and six years. The huge supply of shale gas, coupled with an Environmental Protection Agency ruling in March that required new coal plants to almost halve their carbon emissions, has essentially ensured that no coal plants will be built in this country for the next two years. Some alternative-energy experts have argued that natural gas is a fuel to tide us over as we work toward developing solar, wind, and geothermal energy. On NPR one evening I heard an economist say that cheap natural gas flooding the market in the recession could translate into 1.6 million new jobs by 2015. President Obama likes frack gas, and I like President Obama. Fracking&amp;#039;s opponents, on the other hand, contend that the process can pollute the aquifers and rivers near where gas wells are drilled to such an extent that aquatic life dies utterly, drinking water becomes undrinkable, and people develop debilitating headaches and asthma, even cancer. The theory is that the fracking chemicals\u2014among them lead, methanol (antifreeze), hydrogen fluoride (lethal at 1.5 grams), benzene (a human carcinogen), naphthalene (mothballs), and sulfuric acid\u2014leak from the drilling water or are spilled in sloppy mining accidents. There are anecdotal cases of these maladies occurring near fracking sites, and recent studies from Duke University and the Colorado School of Public Health seem to back up these cases. The incredible pressure used in fracking (between 3 million and 8 million gallons of water per well are blasted into the shale formations) and in the disposal of the accompanying fluid may be causing earthquakes. The latest scary finding is that fracking may be releasing radium 226 from uranium deposits that have been safely tucked within the Marcellus for eons; high levels of radioactivity have been found in well wastewater in Pennsylvania. Each of the previous two paragraphs contains exactly the same number of words. I may be a hypocrite, but I&amp;#039;m trying hard not to be a propagandist. In the middle of my dilemma season I saw the film Gasland. The filmmaker&amp;#039;s family, like mine, was offered money to lease, in Dimock, Pennsylvania, leading him, like me, to set off on a voyage of discovery about fracking. The documentary was part of an environmental film festival that I&amp;#039;d helped organize, and it was by far the most popular film in the series\u00AD\u2014more than 100 people packed the small room. This is because New York has placed a temporary moratorium on horizontal fracking while Governor Andrew Cuomo decides whether to allow it and where. At stake is the New York City water supply: 9 million people drink water that flows, unfiltered, from the Catskills and the Delaware River Water Basin. This is a miraculous fact: The water New Yorkers drink\u2014the water I drink\u2014is famously, naturally clean. It&amp;#039;s worth protecting at almost any cost, and that&amp;#039;s why &amp;quot;there&amp;#039;s still a hope that the state will decide not to allow fracking to proceed,&amp;quot; said River\u00ADkeeper staff attorney Mackenzie Schoonmaker. Gasland may have been nominated for an Oscar, but it&amp;#039;s annoying to watch, mostly because it feels like documentarian Joshua Fox couldn&amp;#039;t decide whether he wanted to make The Motorcycle Diaries or Roger &amp;amp;amp; Me. Even environmentalists don&amp;#039;t love it. &amp;quot;An alarming piece that&amp;#039;s fairly self-aggrandizing&amp;quot; is how one characterized it. Still, it was sobering to hear person after person in Wyoming, Texas, Colorado, and Pennsylvania tell stories about how ruthless energy companies poisoned their water, destroyed their health and the value of their homes, ruined their lives. I sat in lovely, prosperous Larchmont, thinking about the people who live on the land to which I own the drilling rights and feeling pretty sleazy. On the spot I vowed: If I take this money, I will give it all to charity. Then came the film&amp;#039;s money shot: A guy turns on his spigot, flicks his lighter, and sets his water on fire. Fox and the people he interviews explain that it&amp;#039;s because of methane leaking from the fracked gas into the water. I was shocked. On the spot I changed my vow: No way could I accept this fracking money. The next day I called a friend, journalist Elizabeth Royte. She&amp;#039;s written two excellent books about the bottled water industry and garbage. I expressed my dismay about the flaming faucet. &amp;quot;Yeah, but did they tell you that those people could light their water on fire before they got fracked?&amp;quot; she asked. The fracking money immediately became destined for custom kitchen cabinets. I asked Elizabeth, who is one of the most rational and green-living people I know, what she&amp;#039;d do if she were me. &amp;quot;It would be nice to maintain your purity and say, &amp;#039;No, I won&amp;#039;t risk tainting water and air.&amp;#039; But I know that in Pennsylvania, if you&amp;#039;re sandwiched between other leasers, companies can frack your property without your permission. It would be more practical to take the company&amp;#039;s money, since they&amp;#039;re going to frack anyway. At least you&amp;#039;ll be compensated somewhat for the risk&amp;quot;\u2014in case the well did wreak some havoc and we were sued\u2014&amp;quot;although it doesn&amp;#039;t feel right to me.&amp;quot; My portion of Anna&amp;#039;s inheritance comes to 16.10013 net acres. Eighty percent of it is in a state forest. Everyone in my family wants to lease. To be honest, the only reason I&amp;#039;m entitled to any inheritance at all is because my stepmother shared it with me. When my father died, my sister and I signed over his debts and assets to her. Last fall, we discovered that this had made her (not my sister and me) and my aunt the legal heirs to Anna&amp;#039;s share. Still, my stepmother told us, &amp;quot;Morally, this money is yours.&amp;quot; Morally, however, is relative: When my father was in a vegetative state for 18 months at the end of his life, she quit her job, cared for him, assumed responsibility for his finances so that we wouldn&amp;#039;t have to. I don&amp;#039;t think I&amp;#039;ve known a more moral person in my life. She continued to support us financially and emotionally for years after he was gone, and now she was again offering to share her money with us. One lawyer I consulted told me that if I decline to sign, &amp;quot;it could be that your refusal to lease may cause the whole deal to collapse.&amp;quot; Because our total inheritance is only about 100 acres, we don&amp;#039;t have much bargaining power in this buyer&amp;#039;s market. Morally, I would feel terrible if I queered my family&amp;#039;s chances for very-much-welcome extra income. I asked an environmentalist (let&amp;#039;s call him\u2026John Muir) who is dealing with the repercussions of fracking all over Pennsylvania and who did not want to be identified: What should I do? &amp;quot;If they drill up to your property line,&amp;quot; he said, &amp;quot;some of your gas is going to flow over [to others&amp;#039;] property, so your holding out probably will not stop them. If the question is, What can you do to minimize the environmental damage, the answer is nothing.&amp;quot; I asked Paul Gallay, president of Riverkeeper, the same question. &amp;quot;Remember There Will Be Blood, the scene where Daniel Day-Lewis tells Paul Dano, &amp;#039;I&amp;#039;ll drink your milk shake even if you don&amp;#039;t give me permission&amp;#039;?&amp;quot; Gallay replied. There it is, that&amp;#039;s a straw, you see? You watching? And my straw reaches acroooooooss the room and starts to drink your milk shake.\u2026 I\u2026drink\u2026your\u2026milk shake! &amp;quot;Well, they can&amp;#039;t do that; they can&amp;#039;t drink your milk shake,&amp;quot; he continued. &amp;quot;They can&amp;#039;t drill under your land. The gas is locked tight in the shale 4,000 feet down. They can&amp;#039;t get it.&amp;quot; Two experts, opposite opinions. I called a third, R. John Dawes, executive director of the Foundation for Pennsylvania Watersheds. He said that actually, his organization is focused on another fracking issue: the access roads. Each well will need roads that can sustain the 200 tractor-trailer trips required to build the drilling pads and massive frack fluid\u2013retaining ponds, and then to truck out those millions of gallons of water. &amp;quot;We secured an international designation for Pennsylvania&amp;#039;s state forests as &amp;#039;sustainable,&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; Dawes said. &amp;quot;Our timber board feet are valuable. All of that is at risk with access roads, and two governors&amp;#039; administrations have continued with the leasing of state forests [to oil and gas companies].&amp;quot; I chose my custom kitchen cabinets because they were made of sustainably harvested maple\u2014from Pennsylvania state forests. I even paid extra for them. A few weeks ago I finally got a contract from the oil company. Bob told us this offer wouldn&amp;#039;t be on the table much longer; the pressure was on to sign. So, what if I donated all the money I&amp;#039;d make to an anti-fracking charity? I dialed John Muir: &amp;quot;If I told you I&amp;#039;d like to sign over to your organization a check for $40,000 earned from a fracking lease, would you take it?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Unless I knew that the person had got that money through illegal means, I&amp;#039;d probably accept the donation,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;Is it so different from a person who has personal wealth from Exxon Mobil stock and then wants to give us money? Exxon probably engaged in practices I don&amp;#039;t approve of. But in most cases I wouldn&amp;#039;t see an individual&amp;#039;s gift to charity as tainted, particularly if it helps support efforts to monitor environmental practices and pressure companies to improve their performance.&amp;quot; Maybe Riverkeeper would like a check for $40,000? &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t think you want their money,&amp;quot; Paul Gallay said in a tone that reminded me of my therapist. &amp;quot;This is an uncontrolled experiment with people&amp;#039;s health and one of the biggest of its kind in recent history. New York is the center of the battle now, Lisa. Are we going to keep making the same mistake?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Okay, Paul, but what good would 16.10013 undrilled acres do when all around, my family will be fracking?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Well, you could stop the drilling on your 16 acres.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;But would you take the money if I offered it to you?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;If you don&amp;#039;t believe in fracking, don&amp;#039;t lease.&amp;quot; I don&amp;#039;t believe in fracking. I don&amp;#039;t believe in hurting my family, either. I&amp;#039;m caught, weighing needs versus wants, loyalty to ideals versus loyalty to people, the short term versus the long view. It&amp;#039;s messy, hard, and real. I understand in ways I never did before why people resent environmentalism and the choices it asks us to make. By the time you read this, I&amp;#039;ll have made my decision. I&amp;#039;m leaning toward leasing my 16 acres and giving away all the money. It&amp;#039;s an imperfect solution to an impossible situation. But so far, I&amp;#039;ve paid for my sustainably harvested maple cabinets the old-fashioned way, with my paycheck. They remain as virgin in my kitchen as the forests I hope they came from. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a14240/natural-gas-fracking-marcellus/>