There are few terms I dislike more then “landowner”. This word got a lot of play in New York during the debate over fracking.

“Landowner” in it’s most general meaning is a farmer, a person owning a hunting camp or home in a rural area or other person to who owns land. But for many anti-natural gas activists, landowner was used to describe a greedy individual who wanted to profit and domination over their personally owned natural resources. Many in the anti-natural gas community use the term landowner as negatively as one might use “slaveholder” today.

I would argue that no farmer who works the land, and no hunter who hunts their land is doing it in domination of their land. You can’t stomp into the woods and shoot a deer, you can’t carelessly throw seed in the air and hope it to grow. Natural resources have to be carefully managed and sustainability harvested for generations to come. You can’t exploit the land without limitation and expect to keep it going on. You have to carefully understand the woods and field, observe what is going on, understand the consequences of your action.

Sitting in the woods with a shotgun watching the wildlife can teach you much. You can’t just jump into the woods, you have to prepare and think about your surroundings. You have to understand the science, the risks and rewards. You have to have a deeper connection to the land, you’re more then just a “landowner” out to exploit the land.

Pennsylvania often calls people who lease their natural resources, “farmers”. And indeed many if not most of them are. Even though not every landowner cultivates a field with a tractor or milks and feeds cows and hogs, most landowners are “farming” their land for wildlife to hunt, wood to chop or harvest, and natural resources to sustain themselves.