I've been thinking

Hello out there. I've been keeping my thoughts inside my own head for the past week. Thus, no new posts here.


I've been reading and thinking about some of HUGE issues, like WATER and ENERGY, and those can get pretty overwhelming. You don't know how much you don't know until you start researching something.

We tend to take for granted that our water will always be there when we turn on the tap or flush the toilet. Yesterday morning our power went out for a short time, and it brought home the fact that, in this household, we require electricity to pump our water out of  the ground. We don't have a Plan B in case the grid fritzes out like it did in the summer of 2003.

Furthermore, I learned that the city of Jamestown gets their public water supply from two underground wells. Not that this is a huge big deal, but having lived for most of my life on Lake Erie, and now on Chautauqua Lake (and still in the shadow of the Great Lakes), I grew up with an assumption that "water comes from lakes."  And closely behind that one, an assumption that "civilizations grow near water."  What's to think about?

How about energy?  Are there any other ways we can rape and pillage the earth to extract non-renewable fossil resources to fuel our short-sighted lifestyles? Ta-da! Marcellus Shale is the rock formation that extends throughout the Appalachian Basin and contains huge, largely untapped natural gas reserves. Ah, but how to recover this resource from the rock?  Hydraulic fracturing technology, aka "fracking," involves drilling a wellbore deep into the rock and then pumping in fluids at a rate that causes fracturing to extend the crack deeper into the formation.  This is not a new technology, but its use in the Marcellus formation raises a whole host of health and environmental issues, ranging from the amount of surface water needed for the operation to the contamination of the air, soil, and ground water (drinking water) due to the toxic chemicals used in the process and the toxic waste materials produced by it.

Not that everyone worries about little things like that.

Which brings me to another issue. A wind farm in Chautauqua county seems like a no brainer to me.  Granted, I am a newbie here, dancing as fast as I can to get up to speed on all the local who, what, why, when, and where. We have the wind, there seems to be plenty of land available, why is money being wasted on development plans for a new coal-fired power plant in Jamestown when that is so last century?  Are elected officials required to lack vision?