Andrew Cullen/Reuters
A federal compromise announced Tuesday will allow fracking in George Washington National Forest, the largest national forest in the eastern U.S., but make most of its woods off-limits to drilling. Energy boosters and environmentalists alike welcomed the decision, which was highly anticipated because about half of the forest sits atop the Marcellus shale formation, a vast underground deposit of natural gas that runs from upstate New York to West Virginia and yields more than $10 billion in gas a year. The federal management plan reverses an outright ban on hydraulic fracturing that the U.S. Forest Service had proposed in 2011 for the 1.1 million-acre forest, which includes the headwaters of the James and Potomac rivers. Those rivers feed the Chesapeake Bay, which is the focus of a multibillion-dollar, multistate restoration directed by the Environmental Protection Agency.