Your heart has to go out to the dairy farmers of upstate New York. They work long hours to bring staples of the American diet to your table every morning -- and yet it's just getting harder and harder for dairy farmers to make ends meet. While Wall Street may be booming, just a few hours to its northwest the economy remains in a shambles. Many residents of upstate New York's Southern Tier worry that they'll be forced to sell farms that have been in their family for generations. But New York's popular Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, thinks there's a way out for some of his struggling citizens: Drilling deep for natural gas underneath their picturesque rolling hillsides. As the wave of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, from shale beds pushes its way north -- after already sowing controversy and causing environmental harm in neighboring Pennsylvania -- a coalition of activists has fought hard to stop the same thing from happening in New York. The administration of Cuomo, who took office last year, has sent mixed signals on whether he might join Vermont as the second state in the Northeast to outlaw fracking. Instead, his aides leaked word this week to the New ...
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