Features Patrick Sullivan Two natural gas drilling operations underway in Kalkaska County

Something is happening in the remote reaches of Kalkaska County that could have big implications for Northern Michigan.

If two Encana Corp. natural gas wells prove productive and profitable, they could be among the first of scores of deep shale fracking wells across the region.

Letters

Fracking dangerous

T. Boone Pickens and Big Oil and Coal are working overtime and spending millions of dollars on advertising to convince us that natural gas is the best thing to happen to Michigan since fudge. But if unconventional slick-water fracturing (fracking) is so great, why does it need all the exemptions from law? Fracking is exempt from...

Features Patrick Sullivan Two members of Don’t Frack Michigan – including one who was a board member and in charge of the group’s website – resigned in protest after other members of the group endorsed House Bills 5151 and 5150, legislation that among other things calls for a moratorium while the state conducts studies about the natural gas drilling process.

Letters

Services beyond abortion

Thanks to Claire Scerbak for her perspective on utilizing tax payer money for education and family services. I have utilized services at Planned Parenthood and all the services I have benefitted from included education and family services.

My spouse and I received our HIV education in order to get our marriage license there. I got my reproductive health care, including birth control and care and follow up when I was diagnosed with precancerous lesions...

Letters

Evil liberal media

Hey there, y’all, I am here visiting beautiful Northern Michigan from Oklahoma. I picked up a copy of your paper and enjoyed it very much. I got a chuckle out of and felt a need to respond to Bob Lovik’s letter (“Setting things straight,” 8/6). Perhaps I can help “set him straight.”

Thanks to the uninformed, fear-mongering liberal media, this new and threatening process called fracking is the latest and greatest threat to our environment. News flash, fracking has been around for DECADES. Feel free to consult U-M or MSU professors of geology or petroleum engineering to confirm.

Procuring energy in any of its many forms can pose some environmental threats. For example, the thousands of birds, many of which are endangered species, killed by the giant windmills that generate electricity.

There is little evidence to support that fracking is some kind of environmental threat waiting to happen. I don’t glow in the dark, my son is perfectly normal, my water doesn’t spontaneously combust...

Letters

Irony & Oklahoma

A lady from Oklahoma sent in a pronatural gas/fracking response letter in your August 13th issue. I wonder, do they have something called irony in Oklahoma?

I ask this because it makes perfect sense that someone from a dry, flat, hot, nearly treeless place like Oklahoma would want to vacation in a land of verdant forests, rolling hills and immense stretches of clean water like our Michigan. The irony comes in when she lectures us on how wonderful natural gas drilling/fracking is, and that those of us who are rightly terrified of it are “unenlightened.”

Lady, the only way we can keep this area a vacation/everyday living paradise is to stop fracking cold...

Letters

Calling all women...

Women have struggled for the right to vote in 1920, for equal pay for equal work, equity in upper management jobs, the resources to care for their families, fairness in health insurance coverage, and the right to make our health care choices.

Today, with the problems confronting our nation: jobs, debt, education, wars, shrinking middle class, etc., the Republican Party has focused its priority on restricting, devaluing and disrespecting our health care choices and rights as women.

The GOP platform bans abortion in the case of incest or rape. VP candidate Paul Ryan sponsored the “personhood” amendment which would ban in-vitro fertilization and some birth control.

Romney/Ryan both support plans to prohibit all Planned Parenthood funding, such as cancer screenings or birth control...

Features Patrick Sullivan Some environmentalists are alarmed after it was learned that thousands of gallons of flowback wastewater from two high-volume, deep-shale hydraulic fracking wells in Kalkaska County was sprayed on roads throughout the region to control dust.

Features Patrick Sullivan

Residents of Mayfield Township near Kingsley got creative a few years ago when they learned of a proposal to inject liquid industrial waste into a disposal well located in a field near the corner of of M-37 and M-113.

The township enacted an ordinance to require a special use permit for the disposal of industrial waste and amid public opposition, the owner of the well, Team Solutions of Kalkaska, backed off plans to dispose liquid waste from the shuttered Glen’s Landfill at the site.