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NY Times, June 14, 2018
A Community Cracked Open by Fracking
By Jennifer Szalai
Amity and Prosperity:
One Family and the Fracturing of America
By Eliza Griswold
318 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.
Any ideology operating under the seismic pressures of the actual world
will reveal a seam of inconsistency, a line of vulnerability running
through it like a stress fracture. Free-market conservatives, for
instance, have tried to square their support for big business with their
professed fondness for little communities, sometimes by suggesting that
the interests of both are one and the same.
Eliza Griswold will tell you what happens when they’re not. Scratch
that: Eliza Griswold will show you what happens when they’re not. Her
sensitive and judicious new book, “Amity and Prosperity: One Family and
the Fracturing of America,” is neither an outraged sermon delivered from
a populist soapbox nor a pinched, professorial lecture. Griswold, a
journalist and a poet, paid close attention to a community in
southwestern Pennsylvania over the course of seven years to convey its
confounding experience with hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a process
that injects water and chemicals deep into the ground in order to shake
loose deposits of natural gas.
Considering the animus and hardship described in this book, the title
sounds almost cruelly ironic, but it comes from the land itself. Amity
and Prosperity are the names of two towns in Pennsylvania’s Washington
County, where “the history of energy extraction is etched into
Appalachian hollows.” The people there are no strangers to industry,
including its boons and disasters. Coal, steel and now natural gas: To
suggest that the county’s residents have just been bamboozled by greedy
industry sounds to them like the bleating of condescending elites and,
for a number of locals, simply untrue. Some families have suffered while
others have thrived. What Griswold depicts is a community, like the
earth, cracked open.
Griswold arrived on the scene in 2011, a little more than halfway
through the decade of the gas rush, when technological advances made
fracking cheaper — economically speaking, that is. The ecological costs
have proved to be quite dear.
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Natural gas may burn more cleanly than oil or coal, but flushing it out
requires forcing enormous amounts of water and chemicals into the earth
with pressure approaching a shotgun blast. (Oklahoma and Pennsylvania
have had fracking-related earthquakes as a result.) Then there’s the
grim matter of the waste left over, what one candid extraction employee
calls “demon water.” Griswold describes sludge in a waste pond going
septic, releasing an unbearable stench “like an infected wound.”
“It was the kind of fugitive scent that made Stacey feel paranoid and
alone,” Griswold writes of Stacey Haney, a nurse who leased her mineral
rights to Range Resources in 2008. Haney thought the money would help
her and her two children, whom she was raising on her own after a
divorce. Stacey tries to counter the odor with spritzings of Febreze and
a steady supply of potpourri. Parts of “Amity and Prosperity” read as
intimately as a novel, though its insidious, slow-motion ordeal is all
too real.
Image
Eliza Griswold
CreditKathy Ryan
Griswold follows the Haneys over the years as their hope turns to worry
and grinding disillusionment. Stacey’s problems begin with her old
farmhouse, which acquires a blanket of dust and a cracked foundation
after Range’s trucks start barreling up the dirt road nearby. Then the
health problems kick in. Watery eyes and runny noses eventually give way
to headaches and mouth ulcers. Stacey, in a loving relationship but
anxious about cancer risks and fetal deformities, gets her tubes tied.
“After the gas wells,” Stacey says, “we just don’t heal right.”
Most debilitated is her teenage son, Harley, who suffers from stomach
ailments so overwhelming that he becomes a “listless stick figure” and
can no longer attend his regular school. A urine test reveals arsenic
poisoning. Stacey’s hydrologist says her well water is contaminated,
while Range’s experts say otherwise. The company tells Harley his wood
shop class — which he barely attended — might be to blame.
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Griswold chronicles all of this with care, as the Haneys and their
neighbors, the Voyles family, endure mysterious ailments as well as the
brutal demise of their farm animals to sudden seizures and horrific
bleeding. But the graphic parts of this book are in some ways the least
of it. Even more crushing are the humiliations of litigation, as Stacey
and her neighbors try to get help from Pennsylvania’s financially
decimated Department of Environmental Protection. The D.E.P. gives them
such a runaround that they have to petition the courts to force the
state agency to do its job.
Range doesn’t look good in Griswold’s account, but at least the avarice
of a corporation bent on profit maximization isn’t all that surprising;
what’s more astonishing is the failure of the state government to
regulate the company properly, and to protect the people under its
watch. Here, Griswold’s multiple years of reporting convey the slow
crawl of accumulating frustrations that eroded trust in government bit
by bit. All the while, victims like the Haneys fret over the hassle and
cost of obtaining clean water, as Range hands out mini water bottles at
the county fair.
The community itself provides little by way of support or solace, as the
widening gap between the haves and have-nots means that the winners have
all the more to lose. Unsympathetic townspeople doubt Stacey’s claims of
chemical exposure and blame Harley’s illness on his mother’s divorce.
Griswold delineates the hardened resentments forged in Stacey’s county,
which voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump in 2016. “Resource
extraction has long fed a sense of marginalization and disgust,”
Griswold writes, “both with companies that undermine the land and with
the urbanites who flick on lights without considering the miners who
risk their lives to power them.” Fracking only deepened these fissures
and introduced some more. Where coal-miner and steelworker unions used
to provide some sense of solidarity, the ascendancy of mineral rights —
privately owned and unequally distributed — have pitted neighbors
against one another.
And it’s here that the social effects of fracking start to look truly
pernicious, as the environmental fallout and the influx of money
splinter a community, thereby dismantling its willingness and ability to
act in a way that transcends the cynicism of individual interests.
Stacey just wants others to see what she sees, and to feel seen herself.
More than punishment, she hopes for a day when those she holds
responsible for her plight will get a lesson in empathy, even if it has
to come the hard way. “If I had my choice, I wouldn’t send them to
jail,” she says. “I’d send them to my house to live.”
Follow Jennifer Szalai on Twitter: @jenszalai.
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