by Tod Westlake

If you haven’t been to Shadowland Theatre in Ellenville for a while, you might not recognize it. In the past few years the theater has taken on a major capital project that has turned its faded façade and interior into a theater venue that would be the envy of any community. And with the theater’s new season in full swing, you couldn’t pick a better time to reacquaint yourself with the place.

“A little over two years ago we set out to raise one-million dollars for, essentially, what has become a four-phase project,” says Shadowland’s artistic director Brendan Burke. “The first one was to build actor housing. We achieved that a couple of years back.”

Shadowland then turned toward fixing up the theater itself, which Burke says was broken down into two main phases.

“First, we did the front half of the building, so a new façade, a new roof, the marquee, offices, and the lobby. We finished that up last summer. We also added 22 seats in the theater.”

This past winter, the group took on the renovation of the rest of the building, which consisted of the main auditorium, the main roof of the building, the walls other than the front wall, and the backstage area, which includes green rooms and dressing rooms.

“We also rebuilt the entire stage,” says Burke. “And we revamped the sound system and the lighting.” Burke says that, at first, this endeavor didn’t have the large scope into which it eventually grew, but once the theater got started on the first project, it seemed like a good idea to just keep going.

“Originally I don’t think our plans were to do that much to this building,” Burke says. “But we did. We did it all. And we completed the project on the Tuesday before we opened for the season.”

Folks will also be interested to know that, from now on, the theater will be able to operate in the winter months, as it now has a state-of-the-art HVAC system. In prior years, the building would be temporarily mothballed.

“We’ll be thinking about what kind of programming we want to fit in there [during the winter] that will suit our mission,” Burke says. “A good part of it will be family oriented with our kids’ shows, and the kids’ classes and their performances. But it also offers us the opportunity to do some one-night stands with musical acts and things like that.”

The theater also recently acquired the storefront situated on the corner across from Cohen’s Bakery on Market Street that will eventually be turned into a 99-seat ancillary theater.

“It’s currently serving as our rehearsal space and our classroom space,” Burke says.

The board of directors for the theater, according to Burke, had formulated a 15-year plan as to where it wanted the theater to go over the next decade-plus, and that one of the constant conundrums it faced was a lack of rehearsal space when the stage is in use.

“If we have a show onstage, where do we have the kids’ classes?” Burke says. “So we looked around at the various places in the village, and this seemed like a really dynamic spot.”

With big picture-windows, the rehearsal space will have the effect of inviting the public to check out what is going on in the interior. Burke says that he especially wanted to thank Hal Brill for donating it to the theater.

“Hal Brill is a big supporter of the theater, and he was interested in having the space used, so he donated it to us,” Burke says. “We now have all the plans [for the second theater] sketched out, but we won’t be able to start that construction until we pay off the construction of the main building.”

As for this season of performances, Burke says that it’s off to a terrific start. The season’s opening play, "The Outgoing Tide," recently finished up its run, with terrific reviews. Next up is "Love/Sick," a romantic comedy written and directed by Tony Award-nominated auteur John Cariani, whose earlier play, "Almost Maine," has become one of the most-performed plays in the country. Then, beginning on July 12, Burke himself will direct the farce "Boeing, Boeing." For details on performances at Shadowland, call 845-647-5511 or visit shadowlandtheatre.org. Either way, be sure to stop by and check out Shadowland’s transformation the next time you’re in Ellenville.

“Aesthetically, the space is really remarkable when you walk in right now,” Burke says. “It’s a big transition that respects the Art Deco history of the theater, but also moves the Art Deco forward with a more industrial feel. It’s really a beautiful space.”

Wheat has been grown and domesticated ever since our species has been growing and domesticating. It’s such an ancient and ubiquitous staple that it’s mentioned 39 times in the Old Testament of the Bible. And in the early 20th century, wheat was still being grown and milled in the Northeast.

“There used to be mills all around the Hudson Valley region,” says Community Grain Project founder Don Lewis of Dutchess County. “But that part of the food system collapsed long ago, before big growers started modifying wheat strains for higher yield and longer shelf life. This is an extreme climate for cereal grains, and when the Erie Canal opened, farmers began moving to the Ohio Valley, where there was better soil. Mills went with them, and the ones around here were abandoned.” Later in the 20th century, selective breeding by farmers produced wheat designed to maximize profit.

When Lewis began working with wheat over a dozen years ago at Wild Hive Farms in Clinton Corners, he very nearly had to reinvent the process. “There were no resources and there was no one to teach me; I made a lot of poor flour in the beginning,” he recalls. “And there was no consumer base. Local grain was basically a lost part of the food system.”

The wheat produced by agribusiness doesn’t just lack food value—an issue the industry attempts to remedy by “enriching” flours, breads and pasta with chemical vitamins—it can actually do harm. The 2011 book Wheat Belly by cardiologist William Davis implicates wheat gluten in a host of ills: obesity, arthritis, asthma, and even mental and emotional issues.

But while Davis advocates complete “wheatlessness”, even he admits that modern wheat is the biggest offender. “It’s the product of 40 years of genetics research aimed at increasing yield-per-acre,” he notes on the Wheat Belly website. “The genetic distance modern wheat has drifted exceeds the difference between chimpanzees and humans.”

The 1% of people who suffer from celiac disease must indeed avoid anything wheat-related. But many others who experience lesser ill effects from eating standard wheat may find that the kind of strains Lewis is working with—ancient cultivars such as spelt, emmer, barley and rye, stone ground to retain the germ and bran—produce products they are able to enjoy without ill effects. “I have customers who are gluten-intolerant who can eat my products,” Lewis says. “Especially fresh. All protein gets rancid as it gets old—fresh-milled flour causes many people fewer issues.”

The milling process is an extremely important part of creating healthy grain products. “Mechanized roller mills are much faster than milling with stones,” says Lewis, who nevertheless manages to mill 120 tons of grain a year these days. “But when you roller mill you completely lose both the germ and the bran, which contain the amino acids and minerals. Supermarket bread that’s advertised as ‘stone ground’ comes from running flour that has already been roller milled through stone mills—you still end up with something with no nutrient density and no flavor.”

In restoring density and flavor to the local diet, Lewis found an ally in Eli Rogosa, the woman behind the Heritage Grain Conservancy (growseed.org). For the past two decades, Rogosa has been journeying to the Middle East and Europe, gathering up ancient strains to protect them from extinction. “I maintain hundreds and hundreds of samples from all over the world, and the ones I sell are chosen as the healthiest grains and most likely to thrive,” she says. “I started doing this first because I am originally from the Fertile Crescent and I got fascinated. I am as much an anthropologist of wheat as anything, although I also have a bakery.” The varieties Rogosa collects are the landrace cultivars—strains that have evolved to suit various growing conditions spontaneously, rather than being selectively bred by humans to suit our purposes.

Rogosa’s work is supported by the European Union, Israel, and the USDA; collaborating with the University of Massachusetts Research Farm, she’s been able to experiment with a range of heritage grains. “Modern wheat contributes to the increase in gluten sensitivity. Einkorn is actually not genetically related to [modern] wheat; it doesn’t cause gluten allergic reactions. It’s safe, ancient gluten. I have a problem eating gluten, but I can eat ancient wheat just fine.”

“Since I began, there has been an enormous increase in interest,” Rogosa observes with satisfaction. Lewis agrees: “Demand is tremendous—the main thing is to get growers to start growing again, and there are hundreds of acres potentially being added this year,” he says. “Consumer awareness is at a completely different level than it was fifteen years ago. I started the Wild Hive Bakery knowing that I had to get this wheat into people’s stomachs. I closed it because my energy needs to be going into the Community Grain Project. It’s really coming to fruition, but it needs to keep getting bigger and wider, with more outlets.”

Interest is spreading: on the website of the Northeast Organic Farming Association’s New York website are announcements of upcoming workshops entitled “Producing Heirloom Wheat for the Personal Homestead” and “Diversifying Your Farm with Value-Added Grains.” Rogosa says that growers in Vermont and Massachusetts and at Cornell University have begun working with heritage wheat. But it’s not quite as simple as growing your own tomatoes: the hand-harvesting process involves stages like threshing that are labor-intensive and no longer a part of common knowledge, and then there’s the necessity of having a nearby mill that will grind your crop into flour.

Thanks to Lewis and his Community Grain Project, the growers of the Hudson Valley have the milling piece of the puzzle in place. And food-aware chefs and consumers have taken notice. Celebrity chef Mario Batali uses Wild Hive products extensively at his Eataly NYC artisanal Italian food and wine marketplace, and at Bread Alone in Boiceville, Sharon Burns-Leader uses Wild Hive flour to create a spelt bread described as “sweet, earthy and good for customers with digestive issues.” Hudson Valley outlets for Wild Hive’s flours include Mother Earth’s Storehouse in Saugerties; Woodstock Meats and Sunfrost Farms in Woodstock; Adams Fairacre Farms in Lake Katrine and Poughkeepsie; New Paltz Health and Nutrition Center and Taliaferro Farms in New Paltz; Red Hook Natural Foods; Rhinebeck Health Foods; the Beacon Natural Market; and Nature’s Pantry in Fishkill.

As spring unfolds into summer and we’re all looking for recreational opportunities, stay tuned for more exciting events at walkway.org.

Local radio continues to inspire and push new boundaries.

by Anne Pyburn Craig

Radio, early in its second century of existence, still has room for rebels. Ever since the early 1920s, when broadcasting began, the power of an individual being able to broadcast over the airwaves has been changing our world; even with the development of television and Internet, radio remains unique in that all a listener needs is a simple, inexpensive device and a couple of batteries (or a hand crank) to access information and entertainment.

This democratic, near-universal access on the receiving end has allowed radio some interesting moments. Franklin Delano Roosevelt began using radio to forge a direct connection to the citizenry while he was still governor of New York, reaching over the heads of the opposition and straight to the people. In 1938, thousands of minds were blown when a dramatic broadcast of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds was mistaken for a news bulletin announcing an actual Martian invasion. Drama and comedy, live and on the air, created a cultural common denominator and frame of reference on a scale never before seen—by the time television arrived on the scene, 82 percent of Americans were listening to the radio.

As educational director of the Poughkeepsie-based Children’s Media Project, Mary Ellen Iatropoulos is helping to nurture the next generation of communicators. As a Vassar College grad, she found herself uniquely positioned to give them a voice in the community.

“As a Vassar student, I managed WVKR, the college radio station,” she says. “When I came to CMP, I stayed in touch with people there—and I remembered that they didn’t have any youth programming.” WVKR (91.3 FM) extends an open invitation to members of the community to propose programming, and when Iatropoulos approached them about an audio version of CMP’s high-energy, high-quality DROP TV format, she found ample enthusiasm.

“This May will be the fifth birthday of our Radio Uprising show,” she says, “and I continue to be amazed by what our youth producers come up with. We talk about space exploration, the future, uses of Twitter and Facebook—we run the gamut from controversial to tame.

“Radio is my personal favorite medium. It has the immediacy of TV without the need to always be at your most dolled up and polished—you can be in sweats in the studio and still deliver a moving, effective show. Getting in front of the camera can be nerve-wracking; the mike, not so much. It’s very freeing. People come out of their comfort zones in ways many of them couldn’t on TV.”

Even after video ended its golden age of dominance, radio has continued to cast a potent spell. DJs like Wolfman Jack and Cousin Brucie provided a lot of people with their first exposure to mind-expanding music. Personalities like Imus and Howard Stern became cultural icons. Right wing talk radio shows stroke the egos and stoke the xenophobic fears of like-minded dittoheads. Millions tune in to Christian stations to feel educated and guided in their spiritual journeys. Radio has bred scandals and reached behind enemy lines in wartime.

And it remains a powerful tool, for propaganda or enlightenment. Unlike visual media, we can listen to the radio while driving or working at other tasks, which may give its messages a certain stealth access to semi-conscious levels of thought and certainly broadens its reach. Iatropoulos believes that when young people become involved in media production, they’re empowered by a much deeper understanding of the constant barrage of messages coming at them.

“Young people are constantly being targeted as consumers of media,” she says, “but we don’t validate them much as producers. They have an enormous amount to add to the conversation. And in order to navigate life, it’s important for them to understand how media is created and how it affects people.”

Radio Uprising’s weekly hour-long show offers a refreshing antidote to the kind of agenda-driven echo chambers that the mainstream media breeds. The kids are honest, fresh, and unafraid.

“Right after the assassination of Osama Bin Laden,” Iatropoulos recalls, “we had two young men on the air who had diametrically opposing views. One perceived it as the day freedom won, a glorious day for American ideals. Another student believed no government should assassinate anyone.” This is, of course, the exact sort of territory that provokes acrimonious swearing fits from so-called “adults” from sea to shining sea, all over airwaves and Internet alike—but the kids, says Iatropoulos, took it to another level. “We debated what it means to be patriotic. Nobody was judged. And why not let youth debate? They get shut down a lot. We need to let them learn civil discourse. We live in a society that rewards win/lose conversation, zingers, and one-liners—we get conditioned to go for the joke instead of the deep thoughtful comment. That kills intellectual discussion, which involves mental muscles that need to be exercised. Raising questions, talking about subjects without judgment—that’s how you do that, and it had better not become a lost art.”

Despite the consolidation and homogeneity of the airwaves—Clear Channel owns 850 broadcast stations, Cumulus Media about 525—radio remains a refuge for independent voices. Satellite and Internet radio allow almost infinite variety, but the terrestrial variety—the kind that still requires only the most basic equipment for access—would be in grave danger of fading into a wasteland of syndicated sameness if it weren’t for the passion of local heroes who keep it real.

The Hudson Valley is blessed with several good independent stations that have found commercial success without knuckling under to control by corporate conglomerates. WDST (100.1) and WKZE (98.1) are both locally owned and dearly loved. Then there are the listener-supported community gems: WJFF in Sullivan County (90.5), besides rebroadcasting public radio content, fills 50 percent of its time slots with locally produced individual content. Kingston Community Radio takes over the WGHQ (920 AM) airwaves five mornings a week for local guest hosts and call-in sessions during which local political and other officials and personalities can connect directly with listeners in their homes, cars and workplaces.

And they do. Research shows that despite our ever-increasing menu of media options, over 75 percent of people listen to the radio at least a little every day, and over 90 percent at least once a week. The first video on MTV, Video Killed the Radio Star, has turned out to be more fantasy than prophecy.

When reporter Gary Lycan of the Orange County Registerasked radio personality Tim Conway Jr. about radio’s relevance, he had a quick and impressive answer. "Radio broke the name Christopher Dorner, carried live interviews from crippled cruise ship Triumph, and bested TV in reporting the asteroid that hit Russia…The Today Show even gave KFI credit for being the first media outlet to talk to the Big Bear resident that was carjacked by Christopher Dorner."

Meanwhile, at WVKR, kids rule their Thursday afternoon time slot, opening with a pulse-quickening theme created by Delswan Madden in collaboration with the Turn It Up youth radio—a joint project of CMP and Mill Street Loft. And they’re getting educated by the experience in all sorts of ways.

“We have a few songs we play just to get a breather,” says Iatropoulos, “but it’s really hard for the kids to find music that’s not owned or subsidized by a major label, and the rules are strict—there’s no playing Katie Perry or Kanye West. The same major companies control Lady Gaga and P Diddy—it’s an illusion of choice that these corporations go to lengths to create. So the Radio Uprising youth learn to seek out more organic, local, underground stuff. First they’re dumbfounded, then they’re pissed—and motivated.”

The evolving story of a countywide bike and rail trail plan.

by Tod Westlake

A movement toward a more sustainable way of living will mean that we need to come up with sustainable forms of recreation. In the coming decades, the rise in fuel prices will likely mean that air travel will once again become a bit more of a luxury, and that people will look for attractive and fun ways to have fun in their own backyards. Now take a step back and think of all that Ulster County has to offer when it comes to outdoor recreation. Depending upon the time of year, there is an endless variety of outdoor activities that are available in this area.

One of the things that will help glue this concept together on a countywide basis is a comprehensive system of bike and rail trails. And there's no doubt that Ulster County is off to a very good start. With approximately 30 miles of rail trails throughout mostly the southern portion of the county, and other more rugged trails further to the north, you don't have to travel far if you want to get out in the sunshine and enjoy a safe place to ride.

Even more encouraging is the fact that these trails could, in the coming years, become a single contiguous system that will allow folks to access most parts of the county. You could get on your bike in Poughkeepsie or Highland, enjoy a ride through New Paltz, and then up to Kingston for some lunch. An even more ambitious vision would see cyclists in Manhattan be able to ride from the city all the way into the Catskills.

"That's the ten-thousand foot view, isn't it?" said Richard Travers, chairman of the Rondout Valley Rail Trail Initiative as well as the head of the Rondout Valley Business Association (RVBA). "You start in Battery Park in Manhattan, you ride up through Westchester, up into Dutchess County, you cross the Walkway Over the Hudson, and then you reach the trails here in Ulster County."

One of the recent steps in this direction, according to Travers, occurred several years ago when municipalities in the Rondout Valley began to recognize that they had a mutual interest in seeing a healthy and vibrant rail trail along the path of the old O&W Railroad right-of-way.

"Back in 2009, the town boards of Marbletown, Rochester, Rosendale, Wawarsing, and the Village of Ellenville agreed to join with the RVBA in creating a municipal agreement,” said Travers, “the purpose of which is to see a contiguous rail trail from the northern part of the valley, which is Marbletown, to the southern part of the valley, which is Ellenville. There would also be a connector on Route 213 to the eastern part of the Rondout Valley, which is of course Rosendale."

Travers, along with the municipal officials who backed the agreement, believe strongly that the trail can do a lot when it comes to attracting tourist dollars, and that there will be a number of associated businesses that could be created, thereby adding jobs to a local economy that has taken more than its fair share of hits in recent years.

"We want to create this contiguous trail in order to stimulate the economy of the Rondout Valley," Travers said. "It's as simple as that."

There are also a number of spots where spurs, or secondary trails, could link up with points west. For example, there has been some discussion in recent years of linking Minnewaska State Park Preserve with the Vernooy Kill State Forest (aka, the Lundy Estate) on the west side of Route 209.

"These secondary trails, while important, aren't as important to the local economy as the main rail trail," Travers added. "The main trail will pass through the hamlet of Accord and the hamlet of Kerhonkson, and it is the most likely vehicle for improving the economies of those two hamlets."

Travers sees an even bigger upside for the valley if the current plans to revitalize the Nevele Grande Resort come to fruition.

"Think about the rail trail's effect on these communities in conjunction with the return of the Nevele," Travers said. "The Nevele has two-and-a-half miles of rail trail on it already, and that would extend into Ellenville."

Travers says that there are plenty of adventurous types who would happily ride their bikes from the Nevele into the northern part of the county—assuming that there's a way for them to do so.

"There are people who take the train as far as they can up into the Hudson Valley, and then they bike all over the place," Travers noted. "So, there's no question that rail trails are a fantastic form of entertainment and that they attract visitors. It could be the single most important item to help stimulate the local economy."

Over on the other side of the Shawangunk Ridge, the Wallkill Valley Land Trust (WVLT) has been actively involved for the past several decades with the creation and preservation of the rail trail through Gardiner and New Paltz.

"We do conservation easements and land protection agreements in southern Ulster County," said WVLT Executive Director Christine DeBoer. "We were able to do a series of events to purchase the rail bed for the Wallkill Valley Rail Trail, which is about 12.2 miles in [the towns of] Gardiner and New Paltz."

DeBoer says that the trust, after purchasing the rail bed, placed what is known as a "conservation easement" on it, and then turned the property over to the Town of Gardiner. Conservation easements are legally enforceable agreements between an owner (often a land trust) and government that clearly delineate that the property is to be preserved. These agreements also stipulate that the property is to be inspected on a regular basis, thereby ensuring that there is no encroachment by unwelcome development or other problems.

"Because of the conservation easement, there's a legal obligation we have...to inspect the property every year," DeBoer said. "I always joke around that we make sure that a skinny Walmart doesn't pop up on the rail trail. And that's our obligation forever."

The day-to-day management of the trail itself is actually handled by the Wallkill Valley Rail Trail Association, a group that the WVLT helped to develop.

"That organization maintains the rail trail," DeBoer said. "They work with the town or village to do mowing and things like that."

A big move for the WVLT also came in 2009, when they partnered with the Open Space Institute (OSI) to purchase another 11.5 miles of the Wallkill Valley rail bed, according to DeBoer.

"This goes through the Town of Rosendale, through the Town of Ulster, and all the way to the Kingston city line along Route 32," DeBoer said. "The exciting part is that, except for a few tiny sections that we're working on, it's contiguous."

Part of this will go through the Williams Lake development, and DeBoer said that the company that plans to build the project sees the rail trail as a welcome addition.

"We're working with them," DeBoer added. "They want the rail trail, and all of their development plans include it."

DeBoer said that an agreement over a rail trail easement through the property would probably happen sometime this year.

The most imposing feature in this newest section is, of course, the railroad trestle in Rosendale.

"We're partnered with OSI to raise $1.1 million to restore the railroad trestle for pedestrian use," DeBoer says.

The trestle, it should be noted, was open for a time, but has now been closed until a number of safety modifications can be put in place, including new railings and new decking.

"We're looking to be able to open the trestle by the end of this year, hopefully earlier," DeBoer said.

As of now, however, the project has raised over $850,000, so things appear to be on track for a dramatic unveiling.

The development of this type of trail system is not without its minor headaches. If you would like to bike from the rail trail in New Paltz to the Walkway Over the Hudson in the Town of Highland, for example, you'll have no choice but to ride your bicycle on surface streets, some of which have inadequate shoulders for bicycle traffic.

Recently, however, the Southern Ulster Alliance—which consists of the Towns of New Paltz, Gardiner, Lloyd, Marlboro and Plattekill—undertook a feasibility study regarding the prospect of linking the two trails.

The 63-page study goes into great detail regarding several measures that would make this possible. For example, creating a "bike boulevard" on Henry Dubois Road, and a bicycle boardwalk that would traverse the wetlands between New Paltz and Highland. And then there's the issue of safely getting bicyclists across the NY State Thruway.

Another major factor in creating a countywide system involves the creation of a rail trail system in the City of Kingston that will act as a sort of nexus for a number of other trails. The Kingston Land Trust has been actively working to create a "network of trails, bike paths, and complete streets that connect rail trails from the Wallkill Valley, Rondout Valley, Catskill Mountains, and Kingston Point to a Midtown Hub along the Broadway Corridor creating more opportunities for residents, families, and visitors to connect with places in the city that are special to them and to interact with nature," according to the group's website.

Ulster County is perfectly situated to become the go-to place when it comes to biking here in the northeast. And with all of these projects converging, it may be time to start thinking about whether a comprehensive master plan for the county as a whole would be a worthwhile endeavor. Many of the pieces are already in place. Now could be a good time to take it to the next level.

Many have come to learn that energy company pronouncements about clean, available natural gas are glib, sugarcoated statements that overlook the major problems associated with hydraulic fracture drilling, a process in which water—laden with dozens of different chemicals and compounds, some of which are toxic—is pumped into the ground at high pressure in order to fracture bedrock. This, in turn, releases natural gas deposits that can then be tapped for the commercial market.

The biggest, and most controversial, of the problems is contaminated groundwater. And when your groundwater is contaminated, you have little choice. You can either set up your own cistern and buy your water commercially, or you can move somewhere else, hoping that someone will now buy your essentially worthless land—and that the fracking companies won't discover a few years down the road that your new spread is yet another hors d’oeuvre for them to gobble up.

Many New York residents, no doubt, will look to the election of our new governor as being, if you'll excuse the pun, a watershed moment when it comes to protecting this vital resource. But Governor Andrew Cuomo has in fact indicated that he intends to lift the statewide moratorium on fracking—with some important caveats. While this might not please those folks who want to see the ban stay in place, a full statewide ban appears to be unlikely at this time.

So, what is Cuomo proposing, exactly? First, the plan would allow fracking on private lands; while at the same time it would ban the practice on state lands, in parks, and in wildlife preserves. It would also ban fracking inside the watersheds of New York City and Syracuse, the former of which encompasses much of the Catskills. Water supplies for smaller cities in New York would also be protected, according to the governor.

Nadia Steinzor, who is the Marcellus Regional Organizer with Earthworks, a nonprofit organization that works to protect communities and the environment from irresponsible mineral and energy extraction, says that the group is focusing on a regulatory framework that would hold the drilling companies to very strict environmental standards.

As of now, Steinzor says Earthworks is concerned that the recently released Supplemental General Environmental Impact Statement (SGEIS) prepared by the NY State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), doesn't look carefully enough at the long-term impacts fracking could have on the state. The SGEIS, according to Steinzor, makes certain assumptions that may not necessarily occur.

"One of the key questions, certainly for us and other organizations, is the depth to which [the DEC] are doing a cumulative effect analysis," Steinzor says. "[This would] look at things like water withdrawal and air-impact analysis. We're also waiting for the socio-economic [impact] study, which hasn't come out yet."

This later report, which is due this month, will also look at what effect the industrialization of landscapes would have. Earthworks, along with several other groups including Riverkeeper and the Natural Resources Defense Council, recently released a statement citing a number of other problems with the SGEIS. These include: no proposed ban on toxic fracking chemicals, failure to classify fracking-water byproduct as hazardous waste, inadequate provisions for drinking water protection, and the fact that some of the provisions would have sunset dates.

Other flaws cited by the groups include inadequate funding for state and regional regulatory bodies, a fragmentary review process, no analysis on the impact of public health, and, perhaps most importantly, the fact that the DEC is proposing to begin the issuance of drilling permits before the formal rulemaking process is complete.

Such caution appears to be warranted, given the negative impacts that have been associated with fracking. If you're not familiar with the horror stories many individual families have experienced, you might start with the Josh Fox film, Gasland, the 2010 documentary that sheds light on the devastation fracking has caused in certain areas.

Dimock Township, Pennsylvania, for example, is one such community depicted in the film. Dimock is situated in northern PA, about 25 miles due south of Binghamton, in the heart of the fracking country. Family after family recount the nightmare of living in a pristine, rural community, only to wake up one morning to find that your water has gone bad to the point where it's no longer useful for anything—you can't shower in it, you can't wash your clothes in it, and you certainly can't drink it.

One of the things you may be able to do with it, however, is to set it on fire. Yes, you read that last sentence correctly. Some of those whose property has fallen victim to the impacts of fracking began to notice that their water had developed an odd aroma, and that it sometimes came out of the tap looking as if it were carbonated. Their water, it turns out, had become contaminated with dissolved natural gas, making it non-potable—and, of course, flammable.

And it doesn't stop there. Fox collected water from fracking sites across the country and had it tested. What he found was alarming. Chemicals such as benzene were present. Given that diesel fuel, which contains benzene, is often employed as a component of the slurry used as a fracking fluid, these homeowners had little difficulty in putting two-and-two together. Millions of gallons of fracking fluid, which can contain hundreds of different chemicals, have been pumped underground, with little in the way of study taking place.

And there are other potential problems with contamination. Fracking causes a certain amount of bedrock to be brought to the surface. Much of this rock comes from miles below ground, thus it can contain high levels of radium, making the slag radioactive. Open pits containing spent fracking fluid are another concern.

And then there are the illnesses people have been reporting. Breathing problems, neurological problems, and a range of other strange and unpleasant maladies have been noted.

The fracking industry is currently exempt from provisions in the Safe Drinking Water Act. In 2005, as part of a major, and very controversial, energy bill pushed by then-Vice President Dick Cheney, the exemption was slipped into this legislation. The devastating effects of this decision are repeated throughout Fox's film

And fighting the industry is often a fruitless battle. Those landowners who refuse to lease their mineral rights are threatened with eminent domain procedures that would force them to cede to company demands, and would be expensive to defend against. And if the neighbors surrounding you decide to allow drilling, your property line won't stop potential problems leaching into your own groundwater.

But defending against the industry's most egregious practices is a necessity if we hope to leave our children aquifers that contain clean, uncontaminated water, as the industry appears completely unconcerned with little else but the bottom line. And a legal fight is brewing that will pit New York state's home-rule law, and local officials, against state authorities intent on granting drilling permits, often with very little, if anything, in the way of public input.

Again, the issue of fracking is here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future. If fracking worries you, the best course of action is to educate yourself, your family, and your friends; and, of course, to organize locally. You can also look to support organizations like Earthworks; or, if you're in favor of an outright ban, you could become involved with Frack Action New York. Riverkeeper is also asking people to write to the DEC and express their misgivings about fracking, and to extend the current public comment period on the SGEIS from 60 to 180 days, as well as to hold public hearings around the state so that residents can express their input.

For more information please visit earthworksaction.org, frackaction.com, and riverkeeper.org.