October 2008

By Bill Kunze, Pennsylvania State Director, The Nature Conservancy

From a small plane flying low over Pennsylvania, vast tracts of seemingly unbroken woodland stretch out below like a bumpy Berber carpet, filled with tints of green, red, and orange. Many of the myriad roads that cut through those wooded acres are hidden from above by overlapping canopy, but here and there the scars of human use of the land glare skyward. Strip mines, transmission lines, pipelines, and more all have left their footprints on the landscape.

Now, as the demands for new sources of energy grow louder and more urgent, we’re facing an array of new uses that will bring their own, additional footprints onto the land. In Pennsylvania, where the Marcellus shale is believed to hold trillions of cubic feet of natural gas and our many ridges are buffeted by winds that might drive turbines, we have a large role to play in the next round of energy development.  

Unconstrained energy development is one of the greatest threats the Conservancy has faced in our mission to preserve the diversity of life in Pennsylvania, and across the globe. Fortunately, the Conservancy is strongly positioned to address these complicated, urgent problems.

With our science-based conservation experience and non-confrontational methods, we bring unique skills, resources, perspectives, and solutions to the table as we engage with industry and government to limit the negative impacts of energy development. Our decades of on-the-ground biodiversity conservation experience enable us to suggest locations for wind turbines, gas well sites, and transmission lines that avoid the most important conservation priorities and have the least impact on the long-term health of the lands and waters we all need to survive.

The Conservancy is helping the Pennsylvania Wind and Wildlife Collaborative, a joint effort of wind companies, state agencies, and conservation organizations, in its search for ways to protect critical habitat as new wind farm sites are selected and developed. In order to safeguard conservation priorities across the state, our science team has shared details of highly diverse habitats that protect drinking water, sustain rare species, and connect important migratory paths. By doing so, we have been able to highlight locations that should be spared from the footprint of wind turbines.

The Conservancy is approaching gas exploration with the same science-based approach to protecting the most critical ecosystems.

As state forest sites were being readied for lease to companies eager to explore for the reserves of natural gas trapped in the Marcellus shale below, our years of on-the-ground experience positioned Conservancy teams to delineate and share with state officials those critical areas that sustain Pennsylvania’s amazing wildlife and water sources. We’re helping to balance the search for energy with the need to preserve what makes Pennsylvania a globally important keystone of conservation.

The growing demand for energy will, inevitably, alter the appearance of that unbroken Berber carpet of forest. By bringing our understanding of conservation priorities across the state into the councils of industry and government, we are doing our best to speak for those conservation priorities as decisions are made about energy development.

For more information on the Conservancy’s work on the impact of energy development on nature, read the next issue of Penn’s Woods in November 2008.
 

Nature picture credits (top to bottom, left to right): Photo © George C. Gress/TNC (Fish Damn Run Wild Area, Clinton County); Photo © Ian Britton/FreeFoto.com (wind turbine).