More state forest drilling? Not conservative!
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I'd like to take Alan Walker camping.
I've never met the gentleman, but he seems like a good candidate for a baptism-by-campfire.
Mine took place last summer along Maine's craggy coast, but my teenage daughter's came a few weeks ago on her first camping trip right here in good ol' P-A.
Very late on a Friday night, as we walked somewhere near Cook Forest State Park, she simply lay down in the middle of the barren road, the better to see the stars. "I didn't know there were so many," she marveled -- and you wouldn't, if you never escaped the city's glare.
But Pennsylvania is renowned in the nation's Northeast for its vast forests and dark night skies, recreational waters and lush trout streams. These are public assets that attract millions of visitors -- cash-spending visitors -- each year.
That's why I'd take Alan Walker, our new secretary of the Department of Community and Economic Development, out camping -- just to make sure he has some idea what's at stake when he suggests, as he did last week, that we aggressively expand Marcellus Shale drilling in our state forests.
And right after that educational camping trip, I'd load a passel of environmental watchdogs into my ancient SUV and take them on a cross-state drive.
First, of course, I'd have to help them remove the frothing lather they worked up while denouncing Mr. Walker's drill-baby-drill approach: "Outrageous," "devastating," "industrial wastelands," "the most irresponsible proposal ... in decades"!
OK, OK -- I'd compromise and let them drive me in their Priuses -- Prii? -- anything to help the suffering. The point is to get them out of the fetal position, off their sustainable bamboo floors and into the actual environment, so they can see how much of the commonwealth is utterly uninhabited and unspoiled. It's way, way more than their histrionics would lead the rest of us to believe.
After these two sides take a deep breath of pristine Penn's Wood air, I'd have to gulp a bit myself in order to say: On this one, for now, the environmentalists are right.
Yep -- that's a bit galling, since the environmentalist position is so often just simplistically anti-energy. They oppose coal, natural gas, oil and nuclear energy. Really, people -- how do you think the bamboo flooring, solar panels and low-flush toilets reach your trendy "green" abodes?
But their opposition to Mr. Walker's expanded drilling is -- how ironic -- actually conservative.
It's "conservative" in one (usually pejorative) sense -- cautious and protective of the status quo -- as opposed to "conservative" in the pro-business, free-market sense that the Corbett administration has so enthusiastically embraced.
First Published August 22, 2011 12:00 am
