In the Town of Rosendale, residents have been greeted — on this, the forty-first annual Earth Day — with a decades-old problem that began when a company that dyed clothing spilled some chemicals. Auto repair shops and gas stations followed at the same location. Now the NY State Department of Environmental Conservation has designated it a Class 2 hazardous waste site, complete with plumes of toxins leeching through the soil towards the neighbors. Anyone living close to a site contaminated with toxic chemicals is familiar with the problems that arise. Pollutants can contaminate the water in your well, the soil of your garden, even the air in your home, often which you no longer can sell. There's nothing new about this. There are 28 other similarly classified hazardous waste sites in Ulster County, afflicting for years those unlucky enough to live near them.

One of the problem contaminants in Rosendale is benzene, a sweet-smelling carcinogenic solvent that has long been vital in the production of drugs, plastics, dyes and synthetic rubber. There is no debate over whether this is a dangerous pollutant: millions have been spent over many years cleaning up this and chemicals like it all around the country. With that knowledge and experience, one would think we should try to avoid introducing benzene into the environment. Think again.

About 25 miles, give or take, west of Rosendale is the eastern edge of a geologic formation known as the Marcellus Shale, a vast expanse of rock underlying much of Central New York and Northern Pennsylvania, that may hold as much as 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. A reserve this large could supply the Unites States for ten to twenty years, according to some estimates. In fact, many see the Marcellus Shale as a lifeline that could help break our addiction to foreign oil.

Unfortunately, extracting the gas involves a process known as "hydraulic fracturing," where the underlying bedrock is cracked in order to release the gas. The cracking is accomplished by drilling a deep well and injecting a chemical-laden slurry of sand and water into it at extremely high pressure. Hydraulic fracturing requires as much as a million gallons of water per well to be pumped into the ground, and to make the whole thing work the water must be doctored with a host of necessary chemicals, one of which is, you guessed it, benzene.

You think we would have learned by now. In Rosendale we have to figure out how to prevent the ruin of a patch of ground and clean up a benzene-laden toxic mess. A few miles away we are poised to merrily start pumping many tons of the stuff into the earth, with little thought of the potential nightmarish consequences.

Thus we've come full circle. We want that gas, because it offers an economic boost to a state and region that could really use one. But we want a clean environment too, as an Earth Day and a Superfund classification process seem to attest. To those who are forced to drink and breathe toxins, the choice is pretty clear. Clean it up and don't dump any more. But to those who stand to make some money, a deadly contaminant suddenly seems not so contaminating any more.