Book Reviews

Amity and Prosperity, an ethnography written by Eliza Griswold, is an intimate case study of the life and legal battle of Stacey Haney, a single mother of two living in Southwestern Pennsylvania. Having thought her prayers had been answered when Range Resources arrived in her small town, she leased acres of farmland in order to collect royalties while they drilled into the gas-rich earth. Unfortunately, what she instead received was toxicity, contamination, fear, and isolation. Instead of an easy, victimless extraction, this process of hydraulic fracturing, also commonly known as fracking, is where a slurry of chemicals, water, and sand are injected into the earth at high pressures in order to decimate the ground below. By doing this, trapped gas is released through these fractures, and are then extracted by companies such as Range Resources in order to harvest its energy and exploit its power. While Griswold explores the multitude of dimensions fracking entails and how it has negatively impacted land sovereignty, community, and health, the book is truly compelling in regard to how corporations both openly and insidiously strategize in order to gain trust, maintain prominence, and skirt responsibility. This struggle is what defines the text, and it is a frustrating conundrum the reader is immediately acquainted with.

Opening with the county fair, the audience is thrust into an atmospheric summer day swarmed with corporations striving to appear “neighborly”, bidding on animals, giving out water bottles, cushions, and multiple other memorabilia (Griswold, 2018, 16). This is an arguably effective setup, bettered by Griswold’s use of a casual, deeply descriptive composition that dances between personal and factual anecdotes used to insert the reader into the mindset of those attending. This stylistic voice remains steady throughout the book as this friendly guise is shed, and the professional mask soon begins to slip when problems begin to arise for those that leased land. Griswold then takes the audience through the legal, emotional, and at times physical (at one point Beth even gets shot at) journey Stacey must take after she leases property herself. This corporate deception never goes away, but just changes form. It is an infuriating process to witness as a reader- to watch the lies so glaringly multiply, from Range Employee Laura Rusmisel denying the company’s use of ethylene glycol, to the redacted pages presented in the courtroom in relation to water testing at Yeager farm (Griswold, 2018, 51).  The way these strategies change to fit their agenda is the driving force of much conflict, and eventual resolution, that fortifies this text.

Companies such as Range Resources apply corporate strategies that undermine, deliberately deceive, and subtly manipulate the people that have what they want most- gas trapped in their land. While many citizens in the United States do not own the mineral rights to their land, fracking companies must first have a point of extraction or a drill site. With this, comes the need for infrastructure to handle the truckloads of materials and workers, as well as infrastructure for large storage tanks, pipelines and waste ponds, to maintain an operational well site. Land becomes integral in this process. Unfortunately, small town citizens like Stacey Haney and Beth Voyles, lack the corporate knowledge and the wherewithal to gain proper legal representation and consultation before such agreements are made. This is exemplified by one of the first duplicitous interactions Stacey had with Range Resources. A safe water provision in the leasing agreement was assured to Stacey by one of Range’s leasing agents, yet when the time came to sign, they “didn’t think they could review legal documents at 4:30 p.m. if the office closed at 5:00” (Griswold 2018, 27). Rushed and feeling pressured to sign in fear that Range Resources would buy the surrounding land rather than theirs, they signed. As soon as the project started, thick clouds of dust started covering their homes from the construction trucks. Soon after that, Harley, Stacey’s son, became ill with a bizarre chronic illness. Later, they found the water safety provisions to be absent. In the span of 30 minutes, the Haneys and Voyles had signed off the rights to their land, and consequently safe drinking water, in almost complete ignorance. Stacey’s hot water tank, kitchen faucet, and dishwasher, all ran black with sludge (Griswold, 2018). As her farm animals began dropping like flies, a correlation was made between the family’s illnesses and the fracking wells. It was later confirmed that the local sludge pond was septic, poisoning the world around it. On top of that, the foundation of their home cracked, cars were damaged, and grime filled their throats (Griswold, 2018).

Beyond the walls of corporate offices and property lines of leasees, battles also ensue in courtrooms, town halls, and legal offices. Griswold notes that fracking, especially in Stacey’s case, is political. Former President Barack Obama had promised to further regulate fracking wells, only to change that stance a few years later. Stacey thought of this as a betrayal, and found herself distrusting the government that had (then) promised to help her. The idea of “American energy”was something that delighted many people, so fracking continued at an all time high during the “natural gas boom” (Griswold, 2018). However, government protection sectors, such as the EPA, were doing little to assist those complaining of toxicity and pollution, and instead created policies that only protected the benefits of the privatized companies. As argued by Griswold, “Policy made in Washington, D.C., affected peoples jobs, and their health” (Griswold, 2018). This sense of Patriotism influencing the public reactions to Oil and Gas, as well as the State’s willful complicity in fracking and its inability to ensure justice for those negatively affected, is a central and crucial theme to this text.

The last key theme Griswold touched on that we found fundamental was the overall culture and embeddedness of fracking within the community, and how this complex and nuanced microcosm functions under the stress of an extractive industry. Understanding this culture of neighbors, family, independence, and privacy is crucial to understand how to talk to, approach, and sympathize with townspeople in this region. This culture, however, is also the cause of one of the biggest inspirational arches of the entire story:  Stacey. Stacey has to overcome this shame and rejection, and begins to even publicly speak at activist events, testify in court, write a letter to President Obama, and then eventually win a case against Range Resources in front of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Dec. 19, 2013 (Griswold, 2018, 148). We felt ourselves getting rather excited and cheering her on during multiple points of the story, this also culminating when she spoke in front of 500 people, as the reader can personally witness these events garner more and more interest and Stacey gains more and more confidence in herself (Griswold, 2018, 150). This is one of the great joys and important parts of this book: the humanizing of the impoverished victims, as well as triumphing Stacey’s resourcefulness and intelligence through unconventional means. So often, those that live in poor communities are deemed less worthy of help, or too “backwards” and “stupid” to help themselves. Griswold’s story proves them wrong. Not only does she go into length as to the founded reasons why individuals leased their land to these communities, but when faced with problems most anyone would find insurmountable, there are countless moments of resourcefulness, resilience, and strength. Stacey, a single mom of two children (one of which is arsenic poisoned with a stomach full of ulcers), begins writing down evidence and collecting data completely on her own, a fact that even shocks her future lawyer Kendra. It is something that companies didn’t count on, and something we often forget; those in Washington County are individuals with their own strengths, talents, and beliefs. They are not one dimensional, blank canvases on which to paint agendas. They are human beings with, even if we do not always agree, reasons to stand by what they do. While corporations may prey on their conservatism or closed culture, this book is great at relating to this population from a different, more conservationist angle, and reveals to us personally, a richer understanding of how to sympathize, communicate with, and relate with this community.

Eliza Griswold’s Amity and Prosperity separates itself from much of the critical material related to fracking from the opening page of the book. Griswold does not write this book from an anthropological perspective but rather a journalistic perspective, and in doing so, she delivers a rather emotional and personal tale of turmoil caused by exploitation and hope for a better future. This book is not as much concerned with the chemical aspect of fracking or how it affects humans but instead elects to focus on the fact that it does affect humans. In forcing the reader to wallow in the same dread that a single family feels daily, Griswold attempts to do what every critical author hopes to do: make the reader face the reality of the situation.

        Griswold largely follows the life of a working-class single mother, in rural Washington County, Pennsylvania, Stacey Haney. She, like many other community members, was promised an opportunity for economic enrichment by allowing Range Resources, a Texas-based fracking company, to set up shop on rural Pennsylvania farmland. Stacey and her neighbors were rushed through a complicated legal agreement, effectively signing over their right to the surface beneath the surface. Much to Stacey’s disappointment, the monetary gain wasn’t up to par with her expectations—what was promised by Range Resources. Stacey shared a powerful anecdote which Griswold expounds on, demonstrating squandered agency of rural peoples by the fracking industry in Washington County:

On December 30, 2008, their lease was ready to sign. That day, the families planned to meet together at Range’s corporate office in Southpointe … which served as headquarters to nearly every major oil and gas player in the region. [Beth and Stacey] were given an appointment for late afternoon … [Beth] didn’t think they could review legal documents at 4:30 p.m. if the office closed at 5:00. When the families arrived, both Stacey and Beth felt they were being rushed through the stack of documents … They’d risked not hiring an attorney to keep their costs low, and now Stacey regretted it” (24).

Stacey did have the foresight to request that if anything got into her well water, Range would be responsible for providing her and her family clean drinking water and restoring its access. But Stacey’s grievances with Range Resources were far from being unearthed at that point, and were far beyond bureaucratic proceedings.

  The first chapter of the book, while also giving the reader some background as to how gas companies tend to operate amongst the populations from which they are attempting to coerce land, places us in a somewhat mundane setting.  The Haney family has brought some of their farm animals to the county fair to be entered into contests (and hopefully sold) and we learn of the children’s excitement at the possibility of their animals taking home top prizes and of the temporary stress relief that this provides them.  In this way, the book is already moving toward making the reader familiar with the family, which works to familiarize ourselves with the real-world consequences of fracking gone wrong.  The chapter ends with this impactful statement regarding the eldest Haney child, Harley Haney, and the toll that fracking had begun to take on his body: “Striding around the fair with ease, he was still a scarecrow, but a happy one.  He clearly felt better, and Stacey hoped that she was watching his illness recede for the last time, returning him to the boy he was before he got sick.”  Griswold is sharing what Stacey Haney had shared with her.  These are Stacey’s inner thoughts, and these few sentences transport us into the shoes of a mother who only wants things to be the way they were before the gas company showed up with their offerings of money and royalties.

While gas companies are quick to deny any negative health effects in the areas around their gas wells, the testimonial evidence is quite overwhelming.  Alluded to earlier, there are dozens, if not hundreds of instances of townspeople addressing their elected officials and pleading for someone to take some responsibility.  This is often met with dismissals by officials who take the companies on their word.  After all, the companies do have the data, right?  It can be somewhat frustrating to see these stories of sickness, such as that of Harley Haney, disregarded due to the words of those who have manipulated citizens into signing suspicious agreements and whose sole goal is to return a profit to their investors.  According to Griswold, Harley Haney’s sickness almost perfectly coincided with the installation of gas pipes near the Haney property.  Occam’s razor suggests the simplest solution is most often the right solution, and Griswold is unwilling to jump through the same intellectual hoops through which the defenders of fracking jump when trying to dismiss someone’s experience as it pertains to the effects of fracking. 

        Although this book is not identified directly as being ethnographic in nature, her in-depth analyses of political economy, and environmental health and justice, can be applied to fracking investigations in other situated contexts, as does any good ethnographic account. Some of the topics explored by Griswold that are specifically relevant to environmental health and justice are as follows: access to clean water, public health and livelihood, community solidarity or divide, epistemology of fracking, and the ability to resist industry’s negative effects through community power and personal agency. Griswold provides a multidimensional perspective involving emphasis on community, regulatory policy, corporate cover-ups and use of proprietary chemicals to obscure the public’s understanding of their personal risk. Range with the DEP as a bedfellow were barring access to accurate and reliable environmental reports, integral in understanding issues of community health affected by fracking. The remediation of the situation proved complicated: Range had direct influence in creating the public narrative surrounding any ‘insurrection’ directed at their drilling. This raised even more questions by Griswold about the manufacturing of doubt by industry, and its receptiveness in affected communities in which public support proved important to mineral rights access for company drilling.

 It would be difficult to find a more cut and dry case of a company appearing to landowners with what initially sounds like a dream come true before the deal turns sour (at least from the perspective of those from whom the land was bought).  This has been a constant in the fossil fuel industry since the initial oil boom in 19th century Pennsylvania.  Coal, oil, and natural gas have long been catalysts for the exploitative behavior of the fossil fuel industries whose desired resource is almost always on land owned by private citizens.  The ways in which the Haney family and their neighbors were manipulated into signing unfair contracts is unfortunately par for the course as far as these industries go and one could find myriad stories from citizens attesting to such things.  The difference with the stories of the Haneys is that we know them.  Griswold ensures that we know them, and we cannot help but sympathize with them.  Amity and Prosperity takes the idea of peoples’ lives being sent into chaos by fracking practices and brings it down to earth.  The Haney family could be your neighbors, your relatives or, most impactful of all, you. 

Shale gas extraction (fracking) presents a variety of themes depending on one’s perspective. To natural gas companies in the United States, drilling groups, and the rest of the industry, the scope of fracking is quite narrow, for it primarily features the initial drilling of well pads and the extraction of natural gas from pockets within the Marcellus shale. However, in the eyes of the American homeowner who leases their land to the natural gas companies, the fracking narrative encompasses far more than just drilling and extracting. In addition to these two processes, factors such as water contamination, wildlife disruption, noise and light pollution, and elevated traffic rates become more prominent in the realm of fracking. Colin Jerolmack effectively captures these often-overlooked aspects of fracking in his ethnography, Up to Heaven and Down to Hell. In his account, Jerolmack explores the impacts of fracking on rural communities surrounding Williamsport – the self-proclaimed “energy capital of Pennsylvania,” observing the clash of desire for economic growth, property rights, and struggles towards local governance/regulation. By detailing what drives homeowners to lease potions of their land to natural gas companies and the non-uniform consequences for these communities, it becomes increasingly evident that the homeowners’ “private” choices/actions penetrate far deeper into the public sphere than expected.

        At first glance, the venture of fracking appears quite lucrative and attractive to homeowners looking for a quick sum of money. By signing contracts with fracking companies, homeowners receive royalties that they can invest in home-improvement and use to stimulate local economies (Jerolmack 2021, 67). Appalachia has a long history of extractivist industries. Jerolmack simultaneously acknowledges this as an important influence on initial local opinions, and he does not fall into the simplistic labeling of Appalachian boom and bust stories as an inevitable outcome of an impoverished area. Instead, Jerolmack carefully crafts an ethnography that renders individual choices justified and reasonable, whether it be to buy a new car or send your granddaughter to college. In one instance, George Hagemeyer was able to remodel and upgrade his entire home just by leasing his farmland to a natural gas company. The case of Scott McClain presents a similar success story. Pairing up with Poor Shot Hunting Camp, McClain leased his land to petroleum companies; the gas wells were drilled on the thousand-plus acres owned by Poor Shot while McClain received modest royalties for his five-acre contribution (Jerolmack 2021, 99). Unfortunately, both seemingly profitable ventures proved to have negative, unforeseen consequences for Hagemeyer (the “shaleonnaire”) and McClain. Eventually, Hagemeyer questions his decision to lease, finding his sense of authority undermined by limited access to his own land, security guards stationed in the driveway, and other daily issues that arise from leasing his property to a corporation. Realizing the longevity of these conflicts and pondering how his father would react to the condition of the leased farmland, Hagemeyer is haunted by regret (Jerolmack 2021, 144). As for McClain, the extensive truck traffic to and from the drill sites near his property was too much for the gravel roads adjacent to his home. Eventually, a “culvert under the driveway collapsed,” and “Scott’s chimney collapsed from the reverberations of the big rigs” (Jerolmack 2021, 99). Despite McClain’s requests for the fracking company to find or establish another route to the drilling sites, the traffic persisted, and his homestead was further damaged.

        While most of this chaos seems easily avoidable, Jerolmack highlights that lack of structured fracking regulation enables individual landowners to enter these “private” contracts with fracking companies while forcing the entire community to suffer the consequences. A core issue of fracking regulation (aside from the Halliburton loophole) is the public/private paradox. The public/private paradox explains how an individual’s actions have consequences for others regardless of how private the actions may seem; for example, the spillover effects experienced by the community when one person chooses to lease their land to fracking companies (Jerolmack 2021, 120). Even further, these issues speak to how the American government perceives the boundary between the public good and citizens’ rights to “do as [they] damn well please” with their private property (Jerolmack 2021, 92). Leasing land to gas companies is often considered a “private matter” since it does not require conversing with neighbors, public referenda, nor input from any third parties; Jerolmack posits that this was no accident and that “it was by industry, and federal and state government, design” (Jerolmack 2021, 120). Regulation issues stem from the narrow scope applied to fracking. Consequently, the lack of institutional regulation places the burden on the public to protect itself from the grossly overpowered and resource-rich natural gas companies. Jerolmack emphasizes that the lack of regulation surrounding the consumption of public, finite resources creates dilemmas that “compel people to prioritize self-interest over community resilience” (Jerolmack 2021, 116). Additionally, the deep-rooted, individualistic, live-and-let-live culture of the rural U.S creates an unfit environment for residents to speak and act on their shared, collective interests as a community. Jerolmack notes that “most folks kept to themselves, neighborly obligations were minimal, and the right of personal sovereignty over one’s land was sacrosanct” (Jerolmack 2021, 92). Under these circumstances, neighbors opt to do what is best for them at the expense of those around them, and the gas companies capitalize on this phenomenon, resulting in the degradation of a shared resource.

        Despite some homeowners’ best efforts to fight back against the drilling of well pads, the decision in states such as Pennsylvania renders their measures futile and ineffective. Jerolmack details one such instance through a series of charged townhall meetings in the town of Old Lycoming, during which community members raised their concerns about the implementation of a new drill site in the town. Representatives of the petroleum company fielded questions about the project before the town’s Board of Supervisors (BOS) could vote to approve or deny the company’s permit. One member of the community, Joe Earnest, invested in a baseline water test to determine if the drilling would impact his water; however, he received “twelve pages of shit [he] don’t understand” (Jerolmack 2021, 165). The inaccessibility and unnecessary complexity of the science surrounding fracking prevents homeowners from making informed decisions. Insufficient governmental oversight and corporate tactics perpetuate this lack of transparency. Companies weaponize the public’s ignorance when residents are misinformed, causing a snowball effect in which companies use incomprehensible jargon that encourages lessors to rush through the terms and conditions and provide a signature. This effective strategy also influences municipal-level decisions like those of the BOS. In the end, the BOS elected to approve the permit, leaving some community members feeling betrayed and sold out (Jerolmack 2021, 173). However, the fate of the permit was predetermined. According to Pennsylvania’s state government, oil and gas regulation are considered statewide concerns, which prevents local municipalities from imposing restrictions beyond those of the state (Jerolmack 2021, 173). Consequently, local governments are stripped of their right to home rule and must abide by state government guidelines. Jerolmack emphasizes that the public-hearing process instills locals with false hope of being able to control the situation. In reality, they are powerless.

        In terms of fracking science and regulation issues, the source resides in the American government. The near-absent governmental regulation of fracking incentivizes landowners to pursue self-interest instead of the common good since what Americans often view as “freedom” is actually an “absence of responsibility” (Jerolmack 2021, 260). Additionally, the public/private paradox renders individuals powerless. The core themes of public vs. private interest extend beyond environmentalism but call into question whether personal interests can function in conjunction with democracy, which inherently empowers the collective. As Garrett Hardin explains, “The individual…benefits ‘from his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, of which he is part, suffers’” (Jerolmack 2021, 125). America constitutes approximately 4% of the world population, yet it consumes nearly a fifth of the world’s energy (Jerolmack 2021, 260). If fracking remains as poorly regulated as it is currently, then the consequences could stretch far beyond the United States, demonstrating the universality of the public/private paradox.

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