Inside Climate News: Q/A: Eliza Griswold Reflects On Her Book - A Deep Dive Into Fracking In Southwest PA And How Extractive Industries ‘Gut’ Communities

By David Shribman, Former Editor Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

This article first appeared on Inside Climate News on August 21, 2022--

Extractive industries, she says, “gut” communities. But at least in Pennsylvania, “we're talking about individuals and communities making decisions…and that is a good model for the rest of the country.”

With all eyes on Pennsylvania this election season as progressive Democrats square off with Donald Trump-endorsed Republicans in races for governor and the U.S. Senate, the issue of fracking is far from dominating debate.

The Republicans, like their patron, the former president, can’t get enough of fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, in which water and chemicals are injected into cracks in the Marcellus Shale to force out massive quantities of natural gas, while the Democrats walk a fine line between jobs and the environment and say as little about fracking as they can get away with. 

Pennsylvania is second only to Texas in natural gas production. 

But for voters interested in understanding the state’s fracking boom, there is no more telling source on either the environmental costs of fracking, or the nuanced politics of natural gas extraction than Eliza Griswold’s 2018 book, “Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America.” 

In awarding “Amity and Prosperity” the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, the Pulitzer Board’s citation called the book “a classic American story, grippingly told, of an Appalachian family struggling to retain its middle class status in the shadow of destruction wreaked by corporate fracking.”

Griswold, whose previous book, “The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam,” won the J. Anthony Lukas Prize, spent seven years reporting on the story of Stacey Haney, a single mother in Washington County, Pennsylvania. 

Haney would reluctantly come to allege in a civil lawsuit that a fracker had sickened her and her two children, polluted her water, destroyed her farm and poisoned her neighbors’ farm animals. 

“Five years into my reporting, just over 60 percent of voters in Washington County cast their ballots for Donald Trump,” Griswold writes in the book of the 2016 election. “Reporters flooded rural America to profile the Trump voter, an enterprise that risked reducing sophisticated points of view to sound bites and missing the larger story of a complex American landscape. This is the story of those Americans who’ve wrestled with the price their communities have long paid so the rest of us can plug in our phones.”

Last week, I interviewed Griswold about what she discovered in following the lives of Haney and her children and reporting on litigation that spanned five years, produced thousands of pages of records and resulted in a settlement that was far from a Hollywood ending. 

Click Here to read the full interview.

NewsClip:

-- Post-Gazette: Drilling Down Into PA’s Fracking Legacy With Eliza Griswold

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[Posted: August 21, 2022]  PA Environment Digest