Category Archives: Colorado

The author, Verlyn Klinkenborg, brings that same sense of dismay westerners are feeling in the wake of a decade-long natural gas boom in Wyoming and Colorado — in places once thought so remote industrialization wouldn’t matter:

“I’ve seen all of this before in the explosion of coal bed methane development in Wyoming over the past decade. The same arguments have been advanced — energy independence — and the same alternative, a sober national approach to energy conservation, has been ignored.

“It takes a reasonably practiced eye to see the damage coal bed methane development has done. But when the infrastructure for pumping natural gas out of the Catskills has finally been put in place, there will be no mistaking its impact — no missing the gaping holes in the forest canopy, the artificial ponds full of “fracking” fluid, the industrial damage done.

“The estimates of the energy trapped below ground in the Marcellus Shale are indeed staggering. But to get that energy, we will have to give up a good share of the biological integrity of the land that lies above it. To stand in a glade in the Catskills is to realize what a deeply troubling trade-off that is.” Continue reading →