Empire State Strikes Out

The debate over drilling for natural gas, which has been coined “fracking” by both opponents and supporters, has a new frontier. No, it is not Nebraska or other Midwestern locales, but in upstate New York.

In the backdrop of the lush green forests of Vestal, New York, a working-class family is struggling to make ends meet.  The husband works for a Pennsylvania gas company while the wife works as a local legislator and holds two additional jobs. Their taxes have recently doubled, and, if they had not fought the tax hike, would have quadrupled. In another part of the area, a family works to maintain their family’s mushroom farm, the last of its kind in the region. A farmer has shut down his family farm and is looking for jobs in Pennsylvania. A local mayor is upset that most of his residents are out of jobs and look for employment in Pennsylvania, while a Pennsylvania newspaper editor lauds the economic progress that fracking brought to his community.

This is the backdrop of the fracking debate. Fracking is a bitter and divisive subject in the rural townships of upstate New York. It has led to contentious debates in these small rural towns between the retired rich summer-goers and the struggling year-round residents of how to preserve their preferred pace of life and community. The anti-frackers contend that they do not want the kind of business that fracking eventually brings and the possible environmental ramifications. Those in favor of fracking feel that it is another way to supplement their income and help support their families. By being able to sell their mineral rights as leases to natural gas companies, they will be able to receive substantial boosts to their incomes and have the right to renew or not renew the lease at the end of the contract. In terms put by the narrator, the anti-frackers have made it an issue of “not in your backyard” instead of “not in my backyard,” callously downgrading  individual property rights in favor of a so-called collective good. In Pennsylvania, their southern neighbors have no such problems.

A dairy farmer is able to keep his farm and buy the necessary equipment and upkeep by leasing a part of his farmland to a natural gas company, which does not happen in upstate New York. Two locals were able to get a job on-site to frack, and one was able to pay off a substantial portion of his $40,000 college student loan because of his new steady paycheck.

Then why do environmentalists and some New Yorkers still oppose lifting the natural gas, or fracking, moratorium? It’s no longer a battle of individual property rights, but someone telling you what to do with your property. Instead of helping Americans build and keep their businesses, those against fracking have driven Americans away from their way of life of self-reliance and individualism. So did they build their business? Yes. But can they keep it with all these “not in your backyard” regulations? No. The debate continues, but the economics are clear: fracking creates jobs where there are none or little, but it is stifled by environmentalists and retirees who are resistant to such an exercise of individual property rights.

Is this the America that we have built over the centuries? These upstate New Yorkers would sadly beg to differ.

Spencer Irvine is a research assistant at Accuracy in Academia.

If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail contact@academia.org.