Guess who’s cashing in on fracking? The Amish

[xchrom]

http://grist.org/list/amish-fracking/

?w=470&h=265&crop=1

***SNIP

Those evil Amish! How dare they accept MONEY for their LAND, right? Not so fast, judgypants. Drilling is disrupting their low-key existence and even killing some of the li’l Amlettes, so no wonder they wanna get out:

[Many Amish in eastern Ohio] say the rapid development is encroaching on their pastoral way of life. Already this year, several oil trucks have been involved in fatal collisions with Amish horse-drawn buggies in the region’s narrow and winding roads.


So, many Amish are cashing out to escape the noise as their bucolic landscape of lush green hills becomes dotted with oil storage tanks and rumbles with the buzz of oil rigs.

“If all this traffic and development is crazy here today, what’s it going to be like in three or four years?” Eli Byler, a member of an Amish community in Ohio’s Guernsey County, said at his farmhouse, his 4-year-old grandson bobbing on his knee.

[dipsydoodle]

1. Looks like they're doing it of necessity.

Can't really blame. I'd want to escape too.

[packman]

2. I remember

going through Pennsylvania Amish country a few years back and stopping at a general store. It fulfilled my romantic view of the Amish with its wooden tourist stuff, jars of jams,jelly's, relish and candy. The men clerk were in their black and women in their pastel dresses. And even the cash register was an old hand - cranked on. Ah, the simple life, I thought. Then as I roamed toward the back of the store, an Amish man dressed in the garb opened a door and I glimpsed into the 20th Century going on in the back room-computers (many) with girls and men at their stations, printers, cables, monitors, steel desks - an office that would make any business proud. A customer caught my surprised look and told me that the local Amish had quite a catalog business and were making a fortune on running internet sales and shipping to non-Amish markets across the country.