Eliza Griswold will tell you what happens when they’re not. Scratch that: Eliza Griswold will show you what happens when they’re not. Her sensitive and judicious new book, “Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America,” is neither an outraged sermon delivered from a populist soapbox nor a pinched, professorial lecture. Griswold, a journalist and a poet, paid close attention to a community in southwestern Pennsylvania over the course of seven years to convey its confounding experience with hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a process that injects water and chemicals deep into the ground in order to shake loose deposits of natural gas.
Considering the animus and hardship described in this book, the title sounds almost cruelly ironic, but it comes from the land itself. Amity and Prosperity are the names of two towns in Pennsylvania’s Washington County, where “the history of energy extraction is etched into Appalachian hollows.” The people there are no strangers to industry, including its boons and disasters. Coal, steel and now natural gas: To suggest that the county’s residents have just been bamboozled by greedy industry sounds to them like the bleating of condescending elites and, for a number of locals, simply untrue. Some families have suffered while others have thrived. What Griswold depicts is a community, like the earth, cracked open.
Griswold arrived on the scene in 2011, a little more than halfway through the decade of the gas rush, when technological advances made fracking cheaper — economically speaking, that is. The ecological costs have proved to be quite dear. (continues)
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