If there wasn’t anything going on that might hurt the environment, I doubt I’d ever hear a thing about fracking.

I’d just fill up at the pump with cheap gasoline…or heat my hot water with cheap natural gas….and enjoy the fruits of someone else’s labors.  I wouldn’t give it a second thought.

But check out this article featured on the MSN homepage this morning…

…lots of problems….lots of issues.

Now, it’s good to have cheap gas.  It’s GREAT to have cheap gas!  I love to drive around…love to road trip…love to see the world from behind the wheel of my auto-mo-beeel…..but when you can show a picture of a lady with a mason jar of cloudy tap water that resulted from the fracking in her area…well, you have to consider her as being a little more than just “collateral damage”.

image Noah Addis / for NBC News

I’m not an engineer.  I don’t work for the companies doing the fracking.  I don’t make any money from fracking.. so I don’t know a lot about it…just the little bit I read.

The trouble with the process that I see is that because of the technology they use, a lot of the people harmed by fracking don’t see a dime from it either.  Because the companies doing the drilling go deep and then go across, the damage can be far reaching…a lot farther reaching than the location of the original well would have you believe.

There are a tremendous number of guys who, because of fracking and the jobs it provides, are finally making a decent living after scraping by for a lot of years.  Fracking is big business…and it is helping a lot of families who had a hard time before it came around…but I think that it’s hurting a lot of people, too….and it’s the kind of hurt that’s hard to back away from.

We drove through the Dakotas this summer.  My mother grew up in a little town called Starkweather, ND…so I have a little familiarity with those states.  People joke about there not being a lot up there…and I guess there really isn’t a whole lot in some parts of the Dakotas.  It can be kind of bleak.

There are some really great people up there, though…some good lefse and lutefisk eating Scandinavians…and I like them.  Somehow, even though I haven’t lived around them for a long time, they’re my people.

It’d be a shame to see them go down because we like cheap gas and are willing to turn our heads the other way when how we go about getting it causes problems.