CITIZEN POWER ALLIANCE

Contrary to some popular opinion, Marcellus Shale gas drilling isn't inevitable in New York state.

That's the message of Residents Opposed to Unsafe Shale-gas Extraction (ROUSE), an organization started last spring to connect neighbors and landowners in Tompkins County who don't want to lease their land to gas drilling companies, fearing over-industrialization and pollution of the county.

If the state allows hydraulic fracturing for Marcellus gas to proceed and landowners sign leases, Bill Podulka, an organizer of the group and a landowner in the Town of Caroline, imagines Tompkins County becoming a place where farms are replaced by parking lots filled with tractor-trailers, where gas wells dot the landscape, and where drilling accidents spoil underground aquifers, ruining the wells of rural residents.

Podulka said he and other members of ROUSE are attempting to educate the "silent majority" of residents that drilling is not a foregone conclusion.

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