The Land Man - July 18, 2009
The Land Man
(This piece was written/performed by a local radio host.)
He came to town and called everyone around here, all the neighbors. He had great offers
and was very polite. Hundreds of dollars per acre. Some people got even more. The ones who got
the most were the farmers, the people who had been struggling for years, trying everything to
make a profit. One year, all the farm talk was all about dairy, and people added cows to their
herds, and then found the price of milk dropping like a...well dropping like the price of milk.
Then there was the rage for growing oats. Oats were going to be the new heart-healthy food, and
we saw the lovely fields of oats proliferate, the heads turning from pale green to blond at the end
of July. But, of course, there were too many oats, the price dropped. Fooled again!
Lately there has been the big craze for more corn. They were going to build ethanol plants
all over the place, and would fuel our cars with ethanol. Corn was what was needed. So all the
farms planted corn, every field, hedgerow to hedgerow. Corn prices were quoted at the highest
ever heard of around here, higher even than when they were going to sell tons of corn to Russia
to bail out the communist dictatorship, which couldn't even feed its own people. Back then, the
corn was sold to Russia at a spectacular price per ton, but all the money was made by the big
corporations that dealt in corn as middlemen. The farmers got screwed.
This time, they planted the corn and the prices were through the roof. But when harvest
time came, there was too much corn. Prices dropped like the price of milk. Plans for ethanol were
scrapped. It was a loser. Turns out it takes almost more energy to grow corn and make ethanol
than to just use the energy in cars and tractors. So the farmers ducked their heads, looked at the
sky, and wondered how they could save the land.
Finally, this guy came to town. Well, it was a bunch of guys. Called themselves land men.
They had good news for the people, especially the farmers. Studies had shown there was lots of
energy on the land. Actually, under the land, way under. There are layers of shale beneath the
ancient Appalachians. They are the layers of an ancient sea, far older than people, older than
hairy mammoths, far older, even, than the dinosaurs. But when the wide and calm sea lay west of
the lofty predecessors of our mountains, time and the passing years laid down layer upon layer of
mud. Prehistoric sea animals were trapped and died in the mud layers. Ancient plants also
dropped to the sea bottom and got trapped in the layering mud. The sea dried up and became
liquid again, layer after layer. More layers, more rock piled on what was there. The trapped
animals and plants were crushed far beneath the new earth's surface, and their decay turned into
simpler organic compounds, stuck in layer after layer, several thousand feet below what we now
know as "our" world.
Somewhere, north of here, the layers, which are tilted beneath the surface, come to the
surface in the vicinity of Marcellus, just west of Syracuse. At least that was where the shale was
identified. But far down, it held the trapped animal and plant material, decayed into simpler
organic compounds, stuff like methane gas. But the gas is truly trapped. Even if you drilled into
it, it wouldn't do more than bubble a little. Unlike the gas and oil wells you've seen in the movies,
there wasn't a whole big bubble of gas or oil to come to the surface when a drill went into it.
Nope. But these new guys had a new idea. A few scientists had looked at the layers and thought
that they trapped a huge amount of gas, if you could get it out. And they said you could get it out.
All you had to do was pump down fluids under pressure, dissolve some of the gunk holding the layers together, and then use the liquid pressure to force the freed gas up to the surface. Even
better, now they knew how to drill down, down, down, and then turn the drilling bit sideways
and drill further and further horizontally letting out even more gas when the put in the pressure.
It would be a bonanza. Lots of energy, practically free. Well, not really free. You couldn't drill just
anywhere, because people owned the land. They would have to be paid. You needed expensive
drill rigs, needed special drilling muds, needed millions of gallons of water to pressurize the wells,
needed special chemicals (secret chemicals) to help free the trapped gas, needed hundreds of
trucks to carry the water and the chemicals and the compressors and the generators to run the
compressors and the motors and everything else. But that would all come later.
Meanwhile, this guy, this land man, came to all the people who owned the land and
offered money. Good money. Better than dairying. Better than oats, way better than corn. Money
for nothing, but to sign a simple contract. It wouldn't hurt the land. Just put in a well, or two. (Or
ten, or twenty, or a thousand?) Here, he said. Sign here and we give you good cash money.
Farmers had signed before. Landowners had signed before. Governments had signed
before. It was good money, up front. Quickly, people noticed a lot of farmers had finally bought a
new tractor, or seeder or rock picker or even a weed sprayer. Some farmers could finally afford to
have their house painted, or put up that new pole building they had needed. And nothing else
happened. Well, maybe there was a whiff of sulfur from the nice man. And why did he always
wear that hat? What was he covering up?
But he said it was a great bonanza for the whole region. Hadn't it been that way in
Wyoming — until the wild, fresh creeks where the deer and the antelope and the cattle drank
turned to salt. And wasn't it that way in West Virginia, when the grading machines, as big as a
house, began pushing the tops of the mountains into the creeks, until they ran rank and muddy.
And hadn't it been quiet in Ohio until the great shovels the size of apartment houses came along
and began stripping off the "overburden". Overburden means the fields green in spring and
summer, ripening to gold in fall, snow-covered in winter, fields that were home to meadowlarks
and bobolinks, deer and groundhogs and possums and raccoons, not to mention worms and
crickets and snakes and a thousand other things. Overburden was the world we all live in and
depend on. Instead, they shoved it off and took out the coal by the thousand thousand tons.
They did the same thing in northeast Wyoming, and also in New Mexico and Arizona.
Took off the overburden, and stripped out the coal to power the power plants. They sent trains of
the coal to generate electricity in Georgia and Alabama, in Massachusetts and New York, even on
Cayuga Lake, where the white plume of the power plant was like some great boat, eternally
sailing up the long finger of water.
In some places, nobody really seemed to own the land that was used. The peoples who
had been there before anyone ever dreamed of a power plant or a railroad or a truck the size of a
house didn't think any one really owned land anyway. In northern Alberta, they scooped out
huge pits all over the vast northern lands, and used steam and energy and vast power to get the
heavy oil out of the ancient sands, the tar sands. And left a landscape like the moon, only it was
here on earth. And on the north coast of Alaska, they drilled down into the shallow northern sea,
and pulled out more oil and gas. And ran a pipe for a thousand miles to the sea, and loaded their treasure into tankers and sent it south to feed the cars and the trucks and the SUVs and the lawn
mowers and weed whackers and leaf blowers.
Meanwhile, we don't have to see all this. We don't have to live next to the power plant
(well, most of us don't), and we don't have to have the muddy creeks running through our back
yard (well, most of us don't). We don't have to have nasty chemicals seeping up onto our
manicured lawns, at least not if we live in Greenwich or Mamaroneck or Short Hills.
But time went on and the drilling began. And like the nice man said, they were careful,
but there wasn't just one well. There were lots of wells. And the drilling went on day and night,
for a long time. And they needed water, which came from our rivers and aquifers. Some peoples'
wells went dry. Others found strange liquids bubbling up in their side yard. Some of even began
having small earthquakes. And sometimes the air smelled a lot like sulfur. And like diesel truck
exhaust. And the noise kept on. And we wished for the corn to come again, but there were mud
roads and drilling pads and mud and cracking pavement on our country roads. And some said
that the strange secret chemicals were getting into our Finger Lakes, or even the mountain
reservoirs that feed the big cities. We never expected to get rich but we did expect to have a
beautiful, green and healthy place where we could live in peace and tranquility.
But lots of us signed with that nice man. And some things went wrong. And some things
went exactly as others had predicted, but nobody was paying attention. And the money was
pretty good, but it wasn't free. There's always a charge. No free lunch, as they say. But can you put
a price on the whole of the place where you live? Ask the people who live around the decaying
steel mills, or the auto manufacturing plants, or the oil wells in Texas and California, or the
chemical plants in New Jersey or Louisiana. No, somebody has to pay, but it's not really the folks
who are making money off the products of ancient oceans. Somebody has to pay for the way we
keep living. We made a deal and signed the paper. But who did we sign with?
(This piece was written/performed by a local radio host.)
He came to town and called everyone around here, all the neighbors. He had great offers
and was very polite. Hundreds of dollars per acre. Some people got even more. The ones who got
the most were the farmers, the people who had been struggling for years, trying everything to
make a profit. One year, all the farm talk was all about dairy, and people added cows to their
herds, and then found the price of milk dropping like a...well dropping like the price of milk.
Then there was the rage for growing oats. Oats were going to be the new heart-healthy food, and
we saw the lovely fields of oats proliferate, the heads turning from pale green to blond at the end
of July. But, of course, there were too many oats, the price dropped. Fooled again!
Lately there has been the big craze for more corn. They were going to build ethanol plants
all over the place, and would fuel our cars with ethanol. Corn was what was needed. So all the
farms planted corn, every field, hedgerow to hedgerow. Corn prices were quoted at the highest
ever heard of around here, higher even than when they were going to sell tons of corn to Russia
to bail out the communist dictatorship, which couldn't even feed its own people. Back then, the
corn was sold to Russia at a spectacular price per ton, but all the money was made by the big
corporations that dealt in corn as middlemen. The farmers got screwed.
This time, they planted the corn and the prices were through the roof. But when harvest
time came, there was too much corn. Prices dropped like the price of milk. Plans for ethanol were
scrapped. It was a loser. Turns out it takes almost more energy to grow corn and make ethanol
than to just use the energy in cars and tractors. So the farmers ducked their heads, looked at the
sky, and wondered how they could save the land.
Finally, this guy came to town. Well, it was a bunch of guys. Called themselves land men.
They had good news for the people, especially the farmers. Studies had shown there was lots of
energy on the land. Actually, under the land, way under. There are layers of shale beneath the
ancient Appalachians. They are the layers of an ancient sea, far older than people, older than
hairy mammoths, far older, even, than the dinosaurs. But when the wide and calm sea lay west of
the lofty predecessors of our mountains, time and the passing years laid down layer upon layer of
mud. Prehistoric sea animals were trapped and died in the mud layers. Ancient plants also
dropped to the sea bottom and got trapped in the layering mud. The sea dried up and became
liquid again, layer after layer. More layers, more rock piled on what was there. The trapped
animals and plants were crushed far beneath the new earth's surface, and their decay turned into
simpler organic compounds, stuck in layer after layer, several thousand feet below what we now
know as "our" world.
Somewhere, north of here, the layers, which are tilted beneath the surface, come to the
surface in the vicinity of Marcellus, just west of Syracuse. At least that was where the shale was
identified. But far down, it held the trapped animal and plant material, decayed into simpler
organic compounds, stuff like methane gas. But the gas is truly trapped. Even if you drilled into
it, it wouldn't do more than bubble a little. Unlike the gas and oil wells you've seen in the movies,
there wasn't a whole big bubble of gas or oil to come to the surface when a drill went into it.
Nope. But these new guys had a new idea. A few scientists had looked at the layers and thought
that they trapped a huge amount of gas, if you could get it out. And they said you could get it out.
All you had to do was pump down fluids under pressure, dissolve some of the gunk holding the layers together, and then use the liquid pressure to force the freed gas up to the surface. Even
better, now they knew how to drill down, down, down, and then turn the drilling bit sideways
and drill further and further horizontally letting out even more gas when the put in the pressure.
It would be a bonanza. Lots of energy, practically free. Well, not really free. You couldn't drill just
anywhere, because people owned the land. They would have to be paid. You needed expensive
drill rigs, needed special drilling muds, needed millions of gallons of water to pressurize the wells,
needed special chemicals (secret chemicals) to help free the trapped gas, needed hundreds of
trucks to carry the water and the chemicals and the compressors and the generators to run the
compressors and the motors and everything else. But that would all come later.
Meanwhile, this guy, this land man, came to all the people who owned the land and
offered money. Good money. Better than dairying. Better than oats, way better than corn. Money
for nothing, but to sign a simple contract. It wouldn't hurt the land. Just put in a well, or two. (Or
ten, or twenty, or a thousand?) Here, he said. Sign here and we give you good cash money.
Farmers had signed before. Landowners had signed before. Governments had signed
before. It was good money, up front. Quickly, people noticed a lot of farmers had finally bought a
new tractor, or seeder or rock picker or even a weed sprayer. Some farmers could finally afford to
have their house painted, or put up that new pole building they had needed. And nothing else
happened. Well, maybe there was a whiff of sulfur from the nice man. And why did he always
wear that hat? What was he covering up?
But he said it was a great bonanza for the whole region. Hadn't it been that way in
Wyoming — until the wild, fresh creeks where the deer and the antelope and the cattle drank
turned to salt. And wasn't it that way in West Virginia, when the grading machines, as big as a
house, began pushing the tops of the mountains into the creeks, until they ran rank and muddy.
And hadn't it been quiet in Ohio until the great shovels the size of apartment houses came along
and began stripping off the "overburden". Overburden means the fields green in spring and
summer, ripening to gold in fall, snow-covered in winter, fields that were home to meadowlarks
and bobolinks, deer and groundhogs and possums and raccoons, not to mention worms and
crickets and snakes and a thousand other things. Overburden was the world we all live in and
depend on. Instead, they shoved it off and took out the coal by the thousand thousand tons.
They did the same thing in northeast Wyoming, and also in New Mexico and Arizona.
Took off the overburden, and stripped out the coal to power the power plants. They sent trains of
the coal to generate electricity in Georgia and Alabama, in Massachusetts and New York, even on
Cayuga Lake, where the white plume of the power plant was like some great boat, eternally
sailing up the long finger of water.
In some places, nobody really seemed to own the land that was used. The peoples who
had been there before anyone ever dreamed of a power plant or a railroad or a truck the size of a
house didn't think any one really owned land anyway. In northern Alberta, they scooped out
huge pits all over the vast northern lands, and used steam and energy and vast power to get the
heavy oil out of the ancient sands, the tar sands. And left a landscape like the moon, only it was
here on earth. And on the north coast of Alaska, they drilled down into the shallow northern sea,
and pulled out more oil and gas. And ran a pipe for a thousand miles to the sea, and loaded their treasure into tankers and sent it south to feed the cars and the trucks and the SUVs and the lawn
mowers and weed whackers and leaf blowers.
Meanwhile, we don't have to see all this. We don't have to live next to the power plant
(well, most of us don't), and we don't have to have the muddy creeks running through our back
yard (well, most of us don't). We don't have to have nasty chemicals seeping up onto our
manicured lawns, at least not if we live in Greenwich or Mamaroneck or Short Hills.
But time went on and the drilling began. And like the nice man said, they were careful,
but there wasn't just one well. There were lots of wells. And the drilling went on day and night,
for a long time. And they needed water, which came from our rivers and aquifers. Some peoples'
wells went dry. Others found strange liquids bubbling up in their side yard. Some of even began
having small earthquakes. And sometimes the air smelled a lot like sulfur. And like diesel truck
exhaust. And the noise kept on. And we wished for the corn to come again, but there were mud
roads and drilling pads and mud and cracking pavement on our country roads. And some said
that the strange secret chemicals were getting into our Finger Lakes, or even the mountain
reservoirs that feed the big cities. We never expected to get rich but we did expect to have a
beautiful, green and healthy place where we could live in peace and tranquility.
But lots of us signed with that nice man. And some things went wrong. And some things
went exactly as others had predicted, but nobody was paying attention. And the money was
pretty good, but it wasn't free. There's always a charge. No free lunch, as they say. But can you put
a price on the whole of the place where you live? Ask the people who live around the decaying
steel mills, or the auto manufacturing plants, or the oil wells in Texas and California, or the
chemical plants in New Jersey or Louisiana. No, somebody has to pay, but it's not really the folks
who are making money off the products of ancient oceans. Somebody has to pay for the way we
keep living. We made a deal and signed the paper. But who did we sign with?