The students, which were part of the Susquehanna Valley Summer Writers Institute, spread out around the Marcellus Shale region to listen and tell stories of how the latest resource-extraction boom in the northern Appalachians is transforming communities and cultural landscapes.
Their work took them from country roads in northeastern Pennsylvania to forest paths in the north-central part of the state, from the Haudenosaunee/Iroquois headquarters at Lake Onondaga to government offices in Harrisburg.
Students Emily Anderson MA '11, Rob Duffy '11, David Manthos '11, Lexie Orr '10, and Stephanie Quinn '10 were guided in their work by acclaimed nature writer and Bucknell English Professor Chris Camuto, with Pulitzer-winning University of Maryland Journalism Professor Deborah Nelson, and with Bloomsburg University oral historian and Anthropology emeritus Professor David Minderhout.
Bucknell German and Humanities Professor Katherine Faull, and Geology Professor Carl Kirby, worked with the students on historical-cultural and scientific aspects of their projects. English Professor Alf Siewers, Environmental Studies Professor Amanda Wooden and Nature and Human Communities Coordinator Molly Clay served as co-directors of the Susquehanna Valley Summer Writers Institute.
Bucknell thanked Skip Wieder for helping to provide funding through the Forum for Pennsylvania's Heartland and the Degenstein Foundation.
This pioneering environmental humanities project melds techniques of oral history, environmental journalism, policy analysis, and creative non-fiction writing.
The students sought to answer the Haudenosaunee charge that humans, as ecological beings, need to consider land-use decisions based on the "seventh generation" of life to come, rather than just the "discovery" principle that has guided resource extraction in North America for centuries.
In the process, the students found complex stories of the costs and benefits of Marcellus Shale drilling. The five stories and the related mapping were the first result of a project that is hoped will continue in future years with expanded connections of interviewing, writing, photography and GIS.
Here is a quick summary of each of the articles--
by Stephanie Quinn
For a small but proud remnant of Pennsylvania’s native peoples, the Marcellus Shale boom is (as for many other people) both a potential financial boom and a troubling dilemma—but one that raises within the native community difficult questions about how to define its own traditions of consensus and sacred landscape in a much-changed world.
by Emily Anderson
“In the center of the town there is an attractive park known as ‘The Green’ which was deeded to the county in 1806 by Benjamin Wister Morris, the founder of Wellsboro. This is faced on the west by the Tioga County Courthouse…on the north by the Baptist church, on the east by St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, and on the south by the church of the Seventh Day Adventists”—Elfriede Elisabeth Ruppert, A Historical and Folklore Tour of the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon, 1964.
by Rob Duffy
The Marcellus Shale gas-drilling boom, whatever its benefits and costs, puts unexpected pressure on traditional notions of private property and community in a conservative region of rural America. To see how, take a hike along Carter Road in Dimock Twp. in northeastern Pennsylvania’s scenic Susquehanna County.
by David Manthos
A search for truth by bicycle through Pennsylvania’s northern forestlands in the Marcellus Shale drill zone ends up in the halls of Commonwealth government in Harrisburg. Information in the end proves more elusive—but potentially more valuable–than the gas deposits themselves deep below.
by Lexie Orr
At ground zero in controversy over gas-drilling in Pennsylvania, many residents are happy with their leasing checks but not with a perceived lack of information from public regulators. Poisoned groundwater and the silence of Dimock’s resident (former) congressman frame larger questions about energy policy and the role of information in free markets.
For more information, visit the Stories from the Marcellus Shale.
