>Washington (Platts)–16Mar2011/506 pm EDT/2106 GMT
While some meetings on natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale have drawn raucous crowds and occasionally celebrities over the past 12 months, a Tuesday session held by the University of Maryland Extension Service attracted an audience of farmers and retired coal miners more interested in protecting their land and water through lease restrictions and capitalizing on mineral wealth they never expected.
While documentarian Josh Fox, director of the Academy Award-nominated film “Gasland” appeared in Western Maryland in February at a separate event, Tuesday’s extension educators talked with a more prosaic crowd of over 100 at the Pleasant Valley Community Center south of the town of Oakland in Garrett County, Maryland.
With a third of the crowd wearing the beards and bonnets that marked them as Amish, the atmosphere was entirely different from earlier presentations on gas leases and shale drilling on small college campuses and theaters in Maryland’s two westernmost counties, University of Maryland Extension educator Mikal Zimmerman said.
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