The bottom layer of fracking – the price paid for development
Source: Scholar Reading
WeChat platform editor: Zhou Yue
The low-level family living in the Rust Belt in the United States, shortly after signing the "Devil's Treaty" with the natural gas company, found that the air was filled with an unknown chemical odor, the water flowing from the tap was black, the livestock and pets died mysteriously, and mysterious diseases began to torment children... In a long and desperate predicament, they are not seen, behind America's prosperity.
Until it was written into a book by the top New Yorker contributors, "The Bottom of Fracking.". As soon as the book was published, it won the Pulitzer Prize, was selected as GQ's 50 Best Literary Journalism Books of the 21st Century, and was warmly recommended by more than 20 media outlets such as The New York Times, The Times, and The Washington Post, becoming a "classic in the field of non-fiction". In a sense, this is a dilemma that each of us ordinary people may encounter – the combined power of capital and power. When that moment comes, how can we rebuild our lives in the rubble?
This article is a book review of "The Bottom of Fracking," originally titled "What Happened When Fracking Came to Town," originally published in the New York Times Book Review, by JoAnn Wypijewski, translated by Song Mai.
Author: [U.S.] Eliza Grieswold
Translator: Zeng Xiaochu
New Classic Amber | Wenhui Press, 2022-1
Eliza Griswold's feature-length work, The Bottom of Fracturing, tells the story of the impact of fracking on the town of Harmony in southwestern Pennsylvania. I made a note in the margins of page 51: "Why do people hate government?" ”
At that time, the protagonist's son, Harry Heini, suffered from mouth ulcers, severe abdominal pain, nausea, swollen lymph nodes and dizziness. He collapsed in a recliner and had missed a year and a half of junior high school classes. His dog was dead. The neighbors' dogs also died. The tap water was black and smelly, and the air was filled with a foul smell. A quarter-mile from his home, workers in chemical suits are dumping 819 pounds of carcinogen into a wastewater pool in an gas well to control the bacterial outbreak.
Waste pool
Harry's mother, Stacey Henney, suffered from headaches, rashes and fatigue, and his sister Page had stomach pains and nosebleeds. Neighbors also got sick, and one of them, Beth Walls, froze a dead puppy in a freezer as evidence of potential. She has been complaining to the state Department of Environmental Protection for several months, where an official said hydrogen sulfide in the local air is naturally produced. The gas well belongs to the Mountain Resources Company, and a company representative told Stacey to boil the water and drink it. Harry's condition was eventually diagnosed: arsenic poisoning. Taking sick leave at home will only make his condition worse. Toxins were constantly accumulating in his body.
It was then that Griswold wrote, "Gov. Ed Lendl, a Democrat, slashed the Department of Environmental's $217,515,000 budget by 27 percent, one of the biggest cuts in history." The governor also lowered the Department of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources' $113,369,000 budget by 19 percentage points. The department is primarily responsible for the conservation of state parks and forests. To fill the budget gap, he also leased oil and gas rights on publicly owned land. The state leased a total of 138,866 acres of land in three transactions, raising $413 million. This marked the beginning of the largest public asset sell-off in Pennsylvania's recent history. ”
Like governors, like neighbors living on The Natural Gas-Rich Marcellus Shale in Appalachia, and like the federal government and thousands of people throughout rural America, Stacy and Beth leased out gas extraction rights to their land. The two ladies believed that this mundane thing must be safe, and the driller's offer was tempting. This is part of the tragedy. No matter how grand their dreams (farmers want land royalties to make them millionaires), or how tiny (Stacey wants $8,000 to build a barn), or how abstract (consumers want clean, cheap natural gas), almost everyone counts on this wonderful deal. Grieswald had to calculate the cost.
According to her, the fracking method is aptly named and full of violence. It can damage roads, break tranquility, and affect social relations, in addition to fracking a well means using about 4 million gallons of water, mixing it with chemicals (some of which are secret), and then forcibly injecting the mixture, along with about 3 million pounds of clay particles or silica sand, into the well, which passes through shale a mile or two horizontally. Cracks appear in the shale. While bringing natural gas, it can also lead to bedrock fractures, depletion of freshwater supplies, and toxic waste.
Some of the fracturing fluid returned to the surface, bringing bacteria, heavy metals and other harmful substances, and there was no solution to this. Parts remain underground, where they bind to methane and may be transferred to aquifers, streams and private wells. Imagine this process growing exponentially. Stacy has five wells on 8 acres, 1146 wells in Washington County, 7788 in Pennsylvania, and more than 300,000 in the United States of America.
Fracturing mining sites
Politicians still claim it to be clean. In the early 2000s, Congress exempted fracturing projects from the provisions of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Safe Drinking Water Act. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, Oba President Ma touted it as an economic and environmental win-win. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton promoted it to the world. After retiring in 2011, Governor Rendell became a paid advisor to a private equity firm investing in fracturing technology. His former deputy chief of staff and another deputy, the head of the environmental department, and other former regulators, have joined the oil and gas companies.
The boom in fracking projects has impeded the possibility of more public welfare and suppressed an honest assessment of its costs. In 2012, the Obama administration's Environmental Protection Agency announced that brown, rancid water flowing from the taps of people in the Dimok area of Pennsylvania posed no danger. In 2016, a U.S. CENTERS agency used the same sample test to declare dimok's water harmful to health. Every EPA agent who had promised aid to Stacey Henny in person disappeared; one of them even became the head of environmental affairs at Chesapeake Energy.
Recently, landowners' land royalties have fallen, financial media have warned that the boom could be a bubble, and the dial of the system appears to be locked in "drilling." Tom Wolff, a Democrat and current governor of Pennsylvania, recently called for an increase in the Number of Environmental Department supervisors, not to resolve thousands of citizen complaints about fracturing laws, but to expedite the approval of new drilling permits. Some say that D.E.P. is an abbreviation for "Ministry of Energy Production" or "Ministry of Protection" or "Ministry of Conservation."
Based on data from the Public Responsibility Initiative, national public radio's National Impact project, and the public pioneer network, a nonprofit survey website, Grieswold reports on many government failures, where they are negligent, deceitful, and collusive. When I read it, I'll mark it with the abbreviation "WPHG" next to it. People have lost water, house values, livestock and pets, health and hope of redemption. Apparently, by the 2016 election year, they had voted for someone else. Beth Walls voted for Trump and Stacy Henny voted for The Greens' Gilstein.
The lower family of Appalachia
However, the political costs of fracking are not the subject of Grieswold. Although her research is impressive, The Bottom of Fracking is essentially a david-goliath story that fits into a movie. It has it all except a happy ending: the idyllic scenery contains both wealth and crisis; poor but proud locals, who witness several boom-bust cycles of resource extraction in a row (Prosperity is a nearby town ravaged by the Longwall Mining Law); strong but helpless victims - heroes; terrible scenes of animal deaths; and courtroom fight scenes, a tenacious couple forming a legal team against industry and the state, who win an important lawsuit but lose to their opponents who throw money at sabotage. Stacy and Beth had to settle out of court and were silenced. Harry got fit after moving, but also lost his bright future, finished high school on the Internet, and then got a job laying gas pipelines. In this story, the winner is replaced by Goliath.
Emotions carry the story. We remember Harry for his sense of alienation. We remember lawyer Kendra Smith because she had all sorts of toxic substances, she buried her head in research documents, and she was outraged by Mountain Resources' refusal to disclose its secrecy chemicals. We remember her through Stacy's dedication – she takes her children and three jobs seriously, she insists on saving traditions, and she inspires struggle tirelessly.
Source American drama "East Side Nightmare"
Most of the impressions she gives us are angry and afraid. The book's preface records an angry note that she pasted after the thief stole the metal from the abandoned farmhouse. For most of the action, she struggled to be polite. "Don't mess with anyone else," she concluded, "it will only make you more unlucky." ”
But it's getting worse. The Mountain Resources Company ruthlessly erodes the hearts and lives of the people of Harmony Town. The land of the county bazaar was encroached upon, and what Griswald had previously encountered in his previous reporting in Asia and Africa was repeated here. In a crucial light, one has to at least look at a snapshot of what's happening at the national level — fracturing ponds all over the west, earthquakes caused by injected wastewater in Oklahoma almost every day, tens of thousands of people unable to drill near their homes, workers risking their lives, and the question is everywhere: Who's going to protect the water?
Griswold's Stacey, firmly believed in the "American Dream" and the need for "patience", firmly believed that "paying the price for development" and failure "is not her fault". Perhaps Stacy used these phrases (although there is no direct reference to them), but she should have avoided clichés. She was fooled. Her nightmares best express her sense of responsibility and rupture: images of her reversing cars, images of her children trapped or falling, images of her powerlessness to control anything — she wakes up from a dream that is "breathless and afraid of the air." ”
It was only after the abandonment of nearby land that people began to pay attention to the victims and to the historical function of the government rooted in colonization and corporatism. Simply put, it is theft, or rather, regular theft. Those who lost their water to fracking, those who lived in poor, toxic environments everywhere, and the residents of Flint, Michigan, were in a continuum: from natives to black slaves, and then to "waste people" (Benjamin Franklin called "garbage" by poor Pennsylvanians), and the dawn of the United States meant for them being forced to leave the land, enslavement, or poverty. The nature of oppression has changed, but the lever of power remains firm, allowing a few to prosper and many more to sink.
Implicit in this valuable and disturbing book is the question — who will rescue them?
***
"It's a morally complex and well-written story... It's about families, it's about the resources that we all use. It tries to tell us what binds a community to a country and then divides it. The author's dedication and keen compassion shine on every page. ”
—George Parker, author of The Age of Sinking
"If J. D. Vance's "Lamentations of the Countrymen" brilliantly depicts the Rust Belt spirit of the Appalachian migration to southern Ohio, while "The Bottom of Fracking" tells the outlines of everyday life in Washington and Green Counties in vivid detail... "The Bottom of Fracking" is not only a glimpse of the environmental consequences of post-industrial small towns and fracking, but also a legal thriller comparable to John Grisham. ”
—Byron Borg, The Pittsburgh Post
"'The Bottom of Fracking' is essentially a david and goliath story that fits into a movie. Aside from the happy ending, it has it all: hides wealth and dangerous idyllic scenery; poor but proud locals who have experienced a cycle of resource extraction from boom to bust... Tough, reluctant victim heroes... And a juridical drama, a tenacious couple legal team against industry and the state... This is a valuable, disturbing book. ”
—Joan Wepidski, New York Times Book Review
*Disclaimer: This article only represents the personal views of the author and does not represent the position of this official account
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