Symbol of PA gas drilling opposition succumbs to offer of money
www.mcall.com/news/local/carpenter/mc-pc-marcellus-gas-drilling-opposition-20121124,0,5968177.column
Paul Carpenter
November 24, 2012
You have to give Denise Dennis some credit. She did not come cheap. The price tag she put on her virtue is about the same as the amount Gov. Tom Corbett took to sell his soul — or Pennsylvania’s soul, that is — to the gas drilling robber barons of Texas.
Because of her family legacy, however, some might feel Dennis should not have compromised her integrity at any price.
A Philadelphia Inquirer story, published in Friday’s edition of The Morning Call, said that Dennis, as recently as 2010, was a prominent opponent of the gas drilling boom sweeping across Pennsylvania’s portion of the gas-bearing Marcellus Shale formation.
“The process for extracting natural gas from shale is as dirty as coal mining,” she was quoted as saying at a meeting of Philadelphia City Council.
(That city is concerned about drilling because the robber barons want to add the Delaware River watershed to the vast areas already ravaged by hydraulic fracturing, often called fracking, which forces millions of gallons of chemical-laced water deep underground at each well. The putrid concoction breaks up rocks so they release gas, and much of it often returns to the surface to threaten streams.)
Dennis, who lives in Philadelphia, is a descendant of a key figure in the state’s history. She is the great-great-great-great-granddaughter of Prince Perkins, a Revolutionary War veteran who was among the settlers of what is now Susquehanna County in northeastern Pennsylvania.
Her family, the story said, owns a 153-acre farm in that county just five miles from Dimock, a town made famous when residents complained about their well water being contaminated by the Cabot Oil and Gas outfit from Texas.
Corbett’s state regulators said Cabot was not to blame, but a documentary film showed how the residents could ignite the water coming out of their faucets. Lawsuits were filed but Cabot and the residents reached a settlement, leaving much of the rest of the state in legal limbo.
Friday’s story said Dennis previously hurled a “dramatic denunciation” of gas drilling, equating it to the tobacco industry, but her “fervor has subsided in the past two years,” thanks to Cabot’s “salesmanship.”
This month, it was reported, she signed a lease to let Cabot drill for gas under her family’s famous farm. “I decided to stop demonizing the industry,” she said. Details for the new deal were not available, but the story said that in 2010 she was offered $800,000 plus royalties on extracted gas.
(Corbett gave the gas robber barons everything they wanted after they gave him around $1 million in so-called “political campaign contributions.”)
“Yes, I was vehement,” Dennis was quoted as saying when her opposition to drilling was based on principle, “but where did that get me?” It certainly did not get her anything like $800,000.
As the story observed, the family farm in question was pioneered by Prince Perkins, a free black soldier from Connecticut who fought in the American Revolution and moved to Pennsylvania in 1793.
On past occasions, I have written about some of the contributions of those black soldiers, often ignored by history teachers.
After a 2006 visit to Yorktown, Va., where Lord Cornwallis was forced to surrender to the ragtag but gallant forces of Gen. George Washington in 1781, I wrote about the final skirmish of that final battle.
With Alexander Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette in command, the last two redoubts (small fortifications) were stormed by Americans in some of the most heroic actions in American history. In the final clash, at Redoubt 10, the soldiers who overcame entrenched British defenders in hand-to-hand combat mainly were black.
They were freed slaves in the 1st Rhode Island Regiment, right next door to Perkins’ Connecticut. Until that visit to Yorktown, I never knew the final clash of the Revolutionary War was won by blacks.
Later, I wrote about the valor and sacrifice of the American Revolution’s soldiers at Valley Forge through the awful winter of 1777-78. Until I made my most recent visit to that site in 2010, I never knew those soldiers included four regiments that consisted, predominantly, of black soldiers from Connecticut and Rhode Island.
After I saw Friday’s story, I went looking on the Internet (I could not reach anybody at the Susquehanna County Historical Society or at the public library in Montrose) and found all sorts of references to Perkins.
Not only was he a soldier in the Revolution, I learned, but he was among those who were willing to suffer and to sacrifice everything at Valley Forge.
Therefore, the farm Perkins and his family established in Susquehanna County, long before the atrocity of slavery ended in America, has been nominated for the National Register of Historic Places.
And now his great-great-great-great-granddaughter apparently has decided to let the Texas gas drillers defile it with their foul fracking fluids — for $800,000 plus royalties on the gas.
I admit $800,000 may be irresistible to somebody who does not enjoy Corbett’s wealth, but I find it very sad that there is no one in Pennsylvania who can stand in the way of what the robber barons want.
paul.carpenter@mcall.com 610-820-6176
Interesting – and I get grief and I got zero dollars.
Hello? Comparing Denise Dennis, in her struggle to do what she thinks is best to preserve her family’s historic land, to Governor Corbett, who apparently has accepted something more in the neighborhood of $3.5 million from gas drillers, and who is in the business of selling out the entire state, is absurd. Governor Corbett has power and control — something that Denise Dennis, a woman with a unique African American heritage and a unique situation, has almost infinitely less of.
People love to judge. I guess it makes them feel good. I’ve seen harsh judgment of the “selfishness” of every landowner who ever signed a lease. Sure, there are some who are much worse than others, and deserve castigation because they really don’t care what happens to their neighbors’ water, air, and health. But I’ve also talked to people who signed after being shamed and laughed at for even asking if their water could possibly be at risk. I’ve talked to people who signed because they desperately needed to pay their mortgage that month and felt the landman’s offer was a gift from God.
I’m as deeply opposed to fracking, for as many reasons — primarily to protect our health, water, air, land, foodsheds, farms, forests, climate, our economy, our communities’ quality of life, and the fundamental human rights of those who are being most directly poisoned, sickened and sometimes killed by this industry — as anyone you can find. Of course we should do everything possible to educate landowners about the risks and encourage them not to sign. But those who sign anyway can still, actually, be our allies. Most of them care about their water, air, and land just as much as they did the day before they signed. If the Dennis family is to be shamed because they didn’t, in your view, live up to their great historical legacy; if they are castigated for “selling their soul,” and viewed with coldness instead of with empathy, we are hurting them and ourselves and our cause.
In my view, what we stand for — human rights in the present, and a liveable future — is too important and too urgent for that.
it doesn’t serve us to forget who has real power and control. That’s the upper echelon of the industry; the industry lobbyists and PR firms; our federal government — every branch — and our state governments. The press also has real power and should be held accountable for the truths they fail to tell. Big, rich non-profits like the American Lung Association, which has allowed itself to be used as a PR tool for the fracking industry, must be taken to task. NPR has no business allowing ANGA ads, repeating actual falsehoods, on its airwaves The bureaucrats who rubber-stamp decisions they have no business rubber-stamping are also deeply culpable, from the SRBC approving water withdrawals they should never approve, to the EPA and FERC looking the other way when compressor stations and pipelines are approved which will pour toxins, VOCs, greenhouse gases and hazardous air pollutants into the air without even minimal regulation. The situation is shocking.
These large institutions — including PA DEP and PA DOH, which have both been unbelievably culpable in failing to protect the public from fracking’s acute and long-term damage — have power and control. Denise Dennis has power and control over one small, special, vulnerable and historic piece of land. She decided to allow horizontal drilling under it. We don’t know, actually, what’s going on in her head and soul, or what she’s lobbying for in her own time, on her own dime. We don’t know, do we? So why don’t we shut up a little and reserve judgment, and keep our focus on those in power? Please yell at the DOE and Obama (and your Senator and Congressperson) not to approve LNG exports — we have only 3 weeks before that major decision gets made.
Governor Corbett accepted $450,000 from Chesapeake Energy CEO when he was running for Attorney General in 2004. (http://articles.philly.com/2011-06-29/news/29717481_1_corbett-campaign-tom-corbett-marcellus-shale) Then he accepted between $1.3 and 1.6 million from the industry, directly, when running for governor. However, he accepted another $1.5 million from the Republican Governors Association, money that can’t be tracked; it’s likely that was mostly oil and gas money also, funneled so as to be invisible. We’ll never really know just how much money Corbett has accepted, but we know he’s doing the gas industry’s bidding. Denise Dennis, in contrast, still has her own mind and could easily be a fierce ally for some important legislative efforts — to ban open frack pits; to ban venting and flaring in favor of “green completions,” or perhaps to oppose LNG exports, which will induce further fracking frenzy – which is not in the interest of those who live in the shalefields or anyone who cares about water and climate. I remember Denise Dennis as a staunch advocate of closing the Halliburton Loophole and would imagine she may still be.
While my own view is that high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing must be stopped by any nonviolent means available, because the body of evidence already shows it cannot be done “safely” no matter how stringent the regulations, it’s worth hoping that those who live in shale country — and their allies! — fight like hell for important scraps of sanity like the ones I just listed. Because, as Al Appleton and others have convincingly argued, such regulations not only provide immediate and real life-saving protection, they also, if they were ALL put into place and responsibly enforced, would mean the end of fracking. The industry cannot afford, literally, despite no end of verbiage about “best practices,” to “do it right.” Forced to take responsibility for all their “externalities” (no open plastic-lined frack pits anywhere, ever; no venting, no flaring, all leaks sealed, all abandoned and orphaned old wells mapped and completely avoided, no fracking near fault lines, no re-injection of toxic radioactive flowback, no fracking within 7 miles of schools, hospitals, homes, high-value streams, wetlands and wild areas, archeological sites respected, etc.;) they could not afford to frack.
This country has not given much of anything to descendants of enslaved Africans, who died by the millions in stinking slave ships. The entrenched racism in this country has helped ensure the poverty rate of African Americans remains at least double that of whites, for historical reasons. In my opinion, it’s just a little too easy to stand in judgment of someone to whom a proud family history is so very important. The legacy of the Dennis family is worth preserving. Those who are so very pure that they cannot imagine themselves in her place, surrounded by neighbors’ long-since signed leases, discovering she can allow horizontal drilling underneath her land without the surface being disturbed, and giving in — try harder. Please make sure your harshest words and most pointed demands are directed towards those in power, and those with control. We need all the allies we can get, and that includes landowners who have signed leases. The landowners in GASLAND, who were so badly injured by fracking, are seen as heroes. Many of them are using their voices to the best of their ability to help others. Give Denise a chance to be a hero too. You never know!