The New York Times opinion section recently featured an impassioned, first-person account of a Pennsylvania landowner's decision to lease his property for natural gas drilling. Author Seamus McGraw explains how he and his neighbors did not make the decision to lease lightly and that many viewed it as either a way to salvage their way of life as farmers or as an opportunity to create a new one.
While some landowners were offered hundreds of thousands of dollars for their mineral rights, others barely made enough to pay their property taxes because they signed deals "before the full potential of the Marcellus was understood." McGraw also writes that environmental risks such as surface spills and groundwater contamination are constant concerns of the fracking process, but that without the influx of financial opportunities, many landowners would have been unable to keep their farms at all.
The valuable takeaway from this piece is that landowners and citizens need to be informed about the fracking process and associated environmental implications, the residents' ability (duty) to influence the development of the industry in their areas, and the value of the natural gas the oil companies are seeking.
Read McGraw's full story here.
