I’m one of the lucky ones. My wife and I looked for a small piece of pretty land on which to build a house and happened on a gorgeous big one, with fields, hills and a constellation of vernal ponds full of spring

peepers, which dry up each fall. It was 1978 and the price was so low as to be an embarrassment now. We built our home, walked our own private trails, and skied our woods and those of the surrounding hunting clubs. We planned our house to not be too big or difficult when we aged. We purchased our

land with a gas lease on it, and accepted the few dollars a year for five years, never believing there was gas. So when a landman knocked in 2005 offering another few dollars, we said “yes,” never expecting this time

to be any different. The pitch was the same, “We come in and drill, then leave you with a surface pipe connected to a small pipeline.” We had heard stories of equipment storage yards, and made the lucky request that the contract forbid all surface activity. We may get some money, maybe a lot of money,

when and if they drill horizontally under our land, but we will never have to see a well and its surrounding pad activity. Our nearest border is over 1000 feet away over a small rise and through dense woods.

We grew into a deep love for our land and decided it needed protection against real estate development, so we began to talk to the Northcentral Pennsylvania Conservancy about a conservation easement on the

ponds and surrounding woods. Then came the Marcellus Shale, and everything is turning upside down. All of the surrounding woods have been leased for drilling, as has over 80% of all the private land in Lycoming

County. We are only five miles from the transcontinental pipeline, and along it is an area which already has a network of wells on one mile spacing. Our first local well is being drilled as I write, exactly one mile

away. We can expect to have the same one mile grid of well pads around us. So will much of the county. Although we can’t see the well itself, we can hear the faint noise of machinery, especially when they pull pipes up and when the air is still. The vehicles that drive by are no longer just our neighbors’, but the heavy trucks, for now, are using other routes. It all feels like an invasion of privacy and solitude. I know my neighbors, and in my work I talk with dozens of local residents, mostly people who have spent their lives here. It took only a few conversations to realize how my personal dismay at these changes in our personal environment irritated other people who saw them as positive. Several were both puzzled and angry at my fervently expressed wish that it were not happening. Two neighbors whose homes are near the pad even built a small shelter so that they could watch the “show,” and yes, I’ve enjoyed it too. But why did they not insist in their contracts that any well be farther from their homes? Another neighbor needs the

money to pay his mortgage. An outdoors loving friend says he’ll take the money and buy an equally beautiful home somewhere else. Even owners of small home lots temper their dismay with the prospect of a few thousand dollars of royalty money. People complain about road damage but have trust

that the companies involved will make good. The few business people who stand to gain are delighted, and may fear that negative words and actions of people like me might lead to less development. There’s a general spirit of pride around, in that our community does have valuable resources and is being

noticed by the outside world. The myth, though, of small capped wells, reclaimed drilling pads and quiet pipelines, believed by almost everyone today, is almost certainly false. A five-acre pad is not small. It

is cleared with giant earth movers, then leveled with dozens of trucks of gravel so as to support heavy machinery. Yes, the big drill comes in for only a few weeks and the well is capped, but the plans are to drill multiple wells on each pad, so the cycle is repeated multiple times. Then each well is “fracked”

and most likely fracked again on an interval of 6-24 months. A pad of ten wells fracked biannually would yield a fracking every two months, with the associated one hundred or so truckloads of water and the noise of ten or more diesel-electric pump units each time for several weeks. Each well pad is therefore

a major, busy, industrial site, and there will be one per square mile everywhere. In my conversations people are astonished to realize this. I suspect there will be many rich but unhappy landowners before too long.

The purpose of our conservation easement is still to preserve the land, which now feels so much more important. The threat is no longer excessive residential development, but industrial activity which will discourage home building. My wife and I are living on what might be one of the few undrilled

pieces of forest near the small towns in our area, the only places people could come for a walk in the woods, a picnic in a field, or to sit by a frog pond. We will do what we can to preserve it. In my conversations I’ve found two other landowners with attitudes like mine and with leasing contracts which

forbid drilling, and I am referring them to the conservancy as well. In my vision of the future, almost everyone will live in towns, the countryside will be largely industrial, and only a few isolated private tracts near towns will retain their primitive beauty and relative solitude.