Shelly’s Truthland Experience in Her Own Words
Who am I? My name is Shelly, I have been married to my husband Philip for 30 years. I am a mom to our four children, ages 20 – 25, and a grandma to our beautiful granddaughter. I am a teacher by trade and a dairy farmer by marriage and choice. We currently have four generations living on our place which has been continuously farmed for 122 years. We love our home and want to take care of it for future generations.
When we were told we had natural gas under our farm we felt very blessed. But what about all we heard about fracking and water problems? Then there was the movie Gasland; was what we saw in that film really true? We had to know, it was after all our livelihood and potentially our health at stake.
The science teacher in me had many questions. I owed it to my family to find out just what the truth was. Natural gas was new to our area, but not to our nation. So to get our questions answered, I needed to go where the “experts” were. These people had been dealing with the gas industry and the environment for years.
As I went along questioning the many people I interviewed, it became very evident that concerns regarding fracking and contaminating our drinking water were unfounded. Expert after expert said the process is inherently safe and the statistics show this to be true. I was amazed that even the “environmentalists” stated that natural gas, even if not perfect, is the best energy choice we have at this point and time. It is abundant and here, a domestic energy source that needs to be utilized for our nation’s benefit.
The more people I interviewed, the more relieved I was. That’s not to say that I wasn’t nervous anticipating negative reports from agencies like the PA DEP and EPA, but I wanted to keep an open mind. If the evidence pointed a different direction, I needed to accept that. To my surprise, they agreed. Natural gas is clean, efficient, and cheap. All this made our decision regarding leasing our farm to the gas company a “no brainer”, hands down.
It is my hope that anyone that will take the time to follow this and the movie Truthland in its entirety will draw the same conclusions I have. Open your mind, eyes, and ears, examine the evidence presented and let it speak for itself.
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