Gov. Chris Christie missed the boat on hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” with his misguided conditional veto of the New Jersey Legislature’s bold and forthright Frack Ban Bill. Through a united stand for the people and the environment by the state’s leaders, New Jersey could have been the first state in the nation to put clean drinking water before a dirty method of natural gas drilling. Instead, the governor has replaced a brilliant pro-active policy with a weak one-year moratorium on fracking.

There’s no question that natural gas extraction from shale using hydraulic fracturing is causing irreversible pollution everywhere it is occurring, including neighboring Pennsylvania. Fracking entails injecting millions of gallons of water and chemicals under tremendous pressure into the ground beneath our feet to crack open rock formations, spewing gas and pollutants back to the surface, yielding toxic wastewater and exposing aquifers, surface water and air to the risk of contamination.

Violations of environmental permits by Pennsylvania drillers have skyrocketed to 11 per day this year, from six per day in 2010, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PADEP). PADEP also continues to flag the safety of gas well construction as a problem; an average of eight new wells per month have been cited for casing, cement or leaking gas problems this year. The well casings are supposed to prevent methane and toxic fluids in the gas well bore from leaking into drinking water supplies, but something is going very wrong and the results are shocking. Methane ruins aquifers, can make tap water burst into flames and can fill a home with toxins.

And what is causing the appearance of radiological material in some Pennsylvania homeowners’ wells and poisonous barium in some residents’ blood? Some geologists are connecting the dots and explain that current practices to extract natural gas simply cannot contain the harsh materials and extreme pressures that are used in the process, and they warn that pollution of our aquifers is unavoidable under current drilling and fracking practices.

Now, energy companies want to expand their gas fields into the Delaware River Watershed, which provides drinking water to more than 15 million people, including 3 million in New Jersey. It is the largest and cleanest water supply basin in the mid-Atlantic region. And they may spread drilling into northwest New Jersey’s Utica Shale, so it’s no wonder the Legislature tried to draw a line in the sand to keep them out.

The Times of Trenton editorial “Appropriate move on fracking” (Aug. 31) called the governor’s one-year moratorium “reasonable.” But what is reasonable about it? New Jersey is the most crowded state in the nation. We use every drop of water we have, and then some, to meet our everyday needs. We are already too densely developed to allow an activity that is so dangerously polluting.

New Jersey is still paying the price of the industrial development of the last century, as measured in its highest number of superfund sites in the nation. And, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control, we have the highest rate of breast, prostate, uterus, bladder and several other cancers in the U.S. Many of these are known to have environmental roots. Two areas in New Jersey are listed among the top smoggiest large metropolitan areas in the nation, and four mid-size areas in New Jersey were listed for worst smog pollution. In 2007, 12.2 percent of children in New Jersey were diagnosed with asthma. Add to these health hardships the fiscal burden gas development brings to communities, which must respond by cleaning up and repairing the heavy toll exacted on them by this intense industry. It’s hard to imagine how New Jerseyans can give any more than they already have.

It is acknowledged the power of the Delaware River when it floods; imagine if those floodwaters carried toxic fluids from upstream fracking operations, as well. The high-quality water that now flows from the 89 percent forested Upper Delaware River and its cold water streams is the basis for our drinking water downstream. If that natural recharge region is transformed into an industrial zone, all of us downriver will pay the price of degraded base water flow and higher volumes of polluted runoff — exactly what we don’t need in the flood-damaged Delaware River basin.

While scientific studies need to be carried out over the coming year, they will not yield anything that will change New Jersey’s essential reality. It’s hard to figure out what Gov. Christie is thinking when he suggests that, after a year, New Jersey may actually want to be drilled. Indeed, the only “reasonable” action seems to be what the Legislature, reflecting public will, has already done: Move to ban fracking in New Jersey.

New Jersey is just too full of people and too burdened already to even consider allowing another resource-intense, polluting industry. And that won’t change in the foreseeable future. The no-nonsense approach is to stop fracking before it starts, preventing pollution and protecting human health.