Protecting our public land

A  shale gas development staging area in Pennsylvania's Tiadaghton State Forest

By Paula Piatt

To walk the state forests and state parks in Pennsylvania gives you little indication of what lies beneath. A mile below those headwater streams and wild game habitat, the Marcellus Shale is a prize to be tapped.

But walking the state forest and state parks in Pennsylvania, you also get the sense of Penn’s Woods – those natural, untouched portions of the commonwealth that can’t simply be “rehabilitated” once the damage is done.

With the signing of his executive order on Thursday to protect our state forest and park lands, Pa. Gov. Tom Wolf recognized the value in what sportsmen and women have known all along – Pennsylvania’s 2.2 million acres of state forest and another 283,000 acres of parks, are a prized part of our heritage and need to be protected for future generations.

We applaud the governor for his foresight and the order that will protect the resource.

The executive order, signed by the newly elected governor as a fulfillment of a campaign promise, bans new drilling leases on the state land. It reverses a May 2014 order by then-Governor Tom Corbett that would have opened up state forests and parks to additional leasing.

Wolf signed the order citing a “deep-seated and profound respect” for the state’s parks and forests.

The moratorium, however, doesn’t mean that there won’t be any additional drilling in the state forests and parks. As it stands now, almost half the state forest lands in the Marcellus formation – 700,000 acres – are under some form of lease and today’s executive order will not stop the eventual build-out of wells from those current leases signed in 2008 and 2010. It’s estimated that only about one-third of the potential wells have been drilled, meaning the number of wells could triple before the end of the Marcellus Shale play.

Rest assured that Trout Unlimited is still working in Pennsylvania – and other states throughout the country – to protect coldwater resources and the habitat that surrounds and depends on them.

The moratorium, however, will protect some 800,000 acres of forest not yet under lease from any number of potential impacts – sedimentation and erosion, increased risk of spills, noise and air pollution, and long-term fragmentation of some of the largest tracts and most critical habitat in the state.

With Pennsylvania’s state fish – the native eastern brook trout – struggling to hang on in less than 1 percent of what was its historical home range, it’s important that we protect those areas. Today, Pennsylvania got a little bit closer to doing just that. 

Paula Piatt is TU’s eastern sportsmen organizer, based in Sayre, Pa.