To the editor:

How fortunate that a spokesman for the local idle rich writes readable pieces for the Journal-World. George Gurley on “fracking” in North Dakota (Dec. 1) is a case in point, although it presents a keen observer’s vision blurred by cataracts of political bias.

His “notes of a hunter” (see Turgenev) are hunky-dory until he opines “the regulatory hand of a government that is hostile to fossil fuels” and “these modern pioneers” are destined to join Kit Carson, Winfield Scott and George Custer as American folk heroes.

The devastation left by our “self-reliant” oil and gas barons on George’s route to the last holdout of a once endless pheasant population is not a price we must pay for economic progress and restoration of the frontier spirit. It rather means that the bosses of today’s roughnecks maintain the momentum of rapacious global mining that leads to earth’s destruction.

George’s description of the “inferno” caused by “garish flames” consuming the upper plains is worthy of Dante’s Inferno. So, too, the destruction of Pompei in AD 79 by molten lava erupting from Vesuvius, if seen from a hunting helicopter, would have been both “appalling and exhilarating.”

Awaiting Gurley’s deft pen is a vivid portrayal of the Flint Hills on fire as seen by a prairie chicken, or North Dakota’s black gold rush from the perspective of a pheasant that I hope he keeps on hunting as long as able. The rest is silence.