Please tell me he did not say this

Chris Denton, an attorney who represents large landowner groups looking to make lucrative deals with energy companies, put it this way: "Right now, we have the luxury of being able to have this discussion about what is the best way to regulate the Marcellus. But you don't worry about highfalutin intellectual matters when you are starving. There might be a time when we are in such economic distress, we just have to do it."

The national economic picture is not looking promising, he added: "Remember, we are at war."

I have been struggling with the Marcellus drilling issue. If you are not local, you may not know that our region is on top of a large band of natural gas deep in the earth. But it is not in pockets, where companies might engage in "hit or miss" vertical wells. It is all through a layer of shale that must be fractured apart with water and chemicals, and accessed via vertical and horizontal drilling, which would enable companies to draw it out.

It also means pumping a huge volume of water out of our creeks and rivers, adding toxic chemicals, pumping it into the ground, and pumping it out again, additionally contaminated with radioactivity.

Guess who is sitting on top of that Marcellus Shale? You guessed it. Little ole Wildrun.

I am one of those landowners who really could benefit from the money from natural gas leases, and royalties, should there be any. I barely manage to meet my bills each month, and that wouldn't change much even if I stopped rescuing cats. A lease extension payment last fall enabled me to keep this place. The lease company then sent me a letter saying they weren't going to honor that lease extension to pay me the remainder of what they had offered. Luckily, my lease with that company has now expired. They came to my door asking for me to consider a new lease, but hey, they didn't honor the last one so I'll be damned if I'll sign another with them.

If they HAD honored the first lease extension, right now they would be paying off that agreement and I would be refinancing my farm, paying off my ex-husband, and wouldn't have to make a large mortgage payment. But they didn't.

I'm desperate, but not totally stupid, to sign with them again. Especially now that additional concerns have arisen about Marcellus Shale drilling.

Tonight yet another article appeared in local press. The local coverage recently has been excellent--primarily because local activists jumped into the picture.

I am one of those who feels drilling is inevitable, but that we need safeguards in place during drilling, and we need to examine what we are going to do with all of this water. We also need to examine the fact that landowner's wells WILL be contaminated. It may not be many, but it will happen.

I was pretty disgusted by the patter that came out of the mouth of the landsman who showed up on my doorstep last week trying to get me to re-sign. He insulted the governor and the DEC, compared NY to southern CA, admitted his job provided no health insurance (!!!!!), and then handed me an offer than was worse than the one the company had not honored before.

However, I'm also not impressed with lines from "experts" like "highfalutin intellectual matters" and "Remember, we are at war." I really, really hope those were unfortunately remarks taken out of context.

Since when it talk about looking before you leap, "highfalutin?" And what in hell does the war have to do with this?

All I see are people wanting to make money. Not starving farmers so much as natural gas companies and lawyers. And yes, I want to make money, too. I want to keep my farm. But I don't want to be the one who contaminates my neighbor's well, either.

I don't find that to be a "highfalutin" concern.

I'm awfully tired of listening to men who want to sound like they are good old boys. I'd like my landsmen and the expert lawyers to sound more like they understood those "highfalutin intellectual" concerns and took them seriously.

I was going to join one of those "large landowner's groups" and now I even wonder about them. Are they really about more protections for the land, or just more bonus money and higher royalties?