Amity And Prosperity

"America’s answer to its energy needs has always been to dig deeper; the question was how. Over the past several decades, a technological innovation called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has allowed the extraction of the gas embedded in deep rock. Fracking frees fuel from shale by drilling a mile or more straight down into the earth and then out sideways for as much as another two miles." So writes Eliza Griswold in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book Amity and Prosperity, which is about when fracking comes to southwestern Pennsylvania.

Underneath this part of Appalachia is the Marcellus Shale, a huge deposit of natural gas. To get that gas, companies employ a method that may or may not poison the watershed with a laundry list of harmful chemicals. To those who lease their land to the fracking companies, it's a big payday, a way out of a cycle of poverty:  "It would be easy to cast the industrial incursion as a blight upon the bucolic, and to many it was. To others, however, the arrival of fracking was the solution to decades of decline." To those who get sick because of the chemicals, it's a living nightmare.

Griswold focuses on Stacey Haney and her family, and it covers about seven years of their battle with Range Resources, a company that insisted it had nothing to do with the illnesses of Haney's family, particularly of her son Harley. With two other families, the Voyles and the Kiskaddens, Haney files suit against the company, and is represented by the married legal team of Kendra and John Smith, who formerly represented corporations (this seems to be the plot of an upcoming movie, Dark Waters).

Griswold, who is also a poet, brings a literary eye to the situation. She brings alive the region (the title comes from two towns at the center of this), describing things like the fair, where kids brings their goats and pigs, the local restaurant, called Rinky Dinks, and the sense of community, where expensive illnesses can lead to spaghetti dinner fund-raisers. But the issue of fracking divides the community into those who are cashing in and those who are getting sick. Haney, a nurse and single mother, is at first reluctant to make waves, especially since those against her think she's just trying for a payday.

Griswold is certainly on the side of Haney. While the book is not a jeremiad, it certainly lays out the evils of fracking, and how those who support it are just interested in money. It also outlines the failures of government, from the state to the federal level. Those who want to line their pockets disfavor regulation (although, the book points out that Maryland and New York, as well as four Canadian provinces, found the political will to ban the process). Interestingly, the Pennsylvania constitution contains a provision guaranteeing its citizens clean air and water, but this is often paid lip service.

While the book works as a legal thriller--Griswold's descriptions of the Smith's dogged determination to find evidence (without upfront pay) are page-turning, Amity and Prosperity works best as the story of one American family, who face the basic problems of life, but are also burdened with something that no one deserves. Somehow they come through it.