Government can’t do everything for everybody, and it shouldn’t try.

But when government does nothing – and there are those who sometimes appear to believe that it has no rightful place in the lives of citizens – it sets the stage for large-scale calamity like the one that is now taking place in West Virginia.

Some 300,000 residents in nine of West Virginia’s 55 counties lost their access to potable water recently after a chemical used to process coal leaked into the Elk River, which serves as the water supply for those residents. The Elk River also feeds into the Ohio River, which provides water for residents of Cincinnati.

The water treatment plant that sits downstream from the storage facility where the chemical was kept is the largest in the state. Yet, the storage facility hadn’t been visited by state or federal inspectors since 1991, according to the New York Times.

West Virginia’s governor, Earl Ray Tomblin, said state officials were working to make sure such a spill won’t happen again, presumably by having inspectors drop by sometime before the next millennium. The central idea – especially when dealing with a critical resource like water – is to make sure that it doesn’t become contaminated in the first place.

To that end, New Hampshire lawmakers in Concord are hearing testimony Tuesday on a bill that would ban the controversial practice of “fracking” to extract fossil fuels like natural gas from the ground.

The problem isn’t what’s being taken out of the ground, but what gets put into the ground to get the gas out.

Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” is the process of drilling and injecting millions of gallons of fluid – water, sand and chemicals – into the ground under enormous pressure in order to fracture the shale that stores the natural gas. Critics of the process acknowledge that it’s effective and, according to ProPublica.org, it’s used in nine out of every 10 natural gas wells in this country.

Fracking technology has also prompted energy companies to look for gas in places that they never would have bothered to drill using old methods, which makes the practice a concern to environmentalists everywhere. They worry about the fluids that are pumped into the ground contaminating groundwater supplies and that the wastewater created by fracking can also be a pollutant.

The law proposed for New Hampshire would not only prevent the practice of fracking itself – not much of a worry in a state without shale – but would also ban the disposal of the wastewater produced by fracking.

While nothing much may come of the fracking bill, the fact that it is being discussed at all points up the proactive approach that New Hampshire takes on environmental issues, and with good reason.

We all benefit from the New Hampshire natural resources brand – our reputation for having clean air, rivers and lakes and forests that support an abundance of wildlife. That brand attracts visitors to the state by the millions every year, and they accounted for more than $4 billion in direct spending in 2011, according to the state Department of Resources and Economic Development. Tourism is the state’s second-largest industry.

New Hampshire has a long history of aggressive environmental protection, not because it yields economic benefits, but because it’s a principle etched into our cultural bedrock as the right thing to do. Those natural resources we value, we value for their own sakes, even as we recognize that they also pay a dividend in the form of jobs.

While we’d like to believe that what happened on the Elk River could never happen here, we know that it could, realistically.

But we also recognize that it’s a proper role for our government to make such a calamity a remote possibility.

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