A Pennsylvania family destroyed by fracking

Before reading this book, I paid very little attention to fracking, the process of forcing water and chemicals into cracks deep within the earth to release natural gas. Fracking did not touch me: my tap water was fine in Nashville, and in church I didn’t sit next to anyone who was dealing with a nearby waste pond or fracking compressor station. Although conversations about the ex­traction process often focus on Appa­lachia, the area of the country in which I was raised, I’d have needed to traverse a few degrees of separation to find a person whose life has been altered by fracking. Eliza Griswold has found three such people in the Haney family of Amity, Pennsylvania.

After publishing an acclaimed book of contemporary poems from women in Afghanistan, Griswold decided to turn her attention to “how we tell stories about systemic failings here in the United States.” Specifically, she wanted to explore what she calls the “re­source curse” in which destitute people live on land that is valuable for what can be extracted from it. “I wanted to tell a story about people who were paying—and getting paid—for America’s energy,” she writes, “and to look at how that experience fed not only poverty but also a deeper sense of alienation.”

Griswold frames this particular fracturing as ultimately spiritual in nature. In an introductory note, she uses an epigraph that makes her stance clear: “The Appalachian problem doesn’t seem to me to be political, economic, or social. I believe it is a spiritual problem and its name is greed” (from Our Appalachia: An Oral History, edited by Laurel Shackel­­ford and Bill Weinberg).