The Citizen Recommends: Amity and Prosperity
The Citizen Recommends: Amity and Prosperity
Author Eliza Griswold, whose book tells the story of fracking's impact on rural Pennsylvania, comes to The Free Library tonight
Jun. 12, 2018
The prize-winning poet and journalist Eliza Griswold'southward new book Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America , which releases today, tells a story of America that many of us in metropolises never think almost: The way rural America bears the brunt of our urban free energy consumption, and the frustration, illness and animosity that often ensues.
Fracking—the process of removing natural gas from underground rocks—came to Amity, Pennsylvania, a modest boondocks in the southwest corner of the state as a much-needed answer to poverty and unemployment. That is until resident Stacey Hanley noticed offset that her neighbor's pets began to dice, and then that her ain family members began contracting a strange disease.
Griswold, who spent seven years immersed in Amity, tells the story of Hanley, an unusual activist in the face of injustice, who refused to back down when fracking companies insisted that nothing was wrong. She launched her own investigation that uncovered corporate wrongdoing, and then brought the story into the national spotlight.
Griswold, who will appear at The Free Library this evening, spoke to The Citizen nigh her feel in Amity, the state of rural America and the power of private activism.
Pb : What drew you to this story?
EG : Really, what drew me to the story was the idea of public poverty in America. Every bit y'all tin read in the end of the book, I was in Nigeria when a bridge collapsed there some years ago and it was a couple of weeks after a span in Minneapolis had collapsed––I-35W, that killed xiii people. And I decided to return. Most of my career has been in Africa, or Asia, Iraq, Transitional islamic state of afghanistan. But I decided to come dorsum to the The states and look at some of the problems that we are facing as a nation.
Pb : What about your career and experience away influenced this investigation?
EG : I wrote an article about exactly this issue, something we have, since the xc'south, 
looked at in much of the earth: something called the " resource curse ." Why is it that people who live on land richest in natural resources tend to exist some of the poorest? That's an thought that we don't normally wait at in America. And that applies here in Appalachia in many ways. I wanted to accept a expect at what information technology means on the ground.
Pb : Were you embedded real time with the people of Amity, Pennsylvania while writing this story, or did yous come up back subsequently to report on this story?
EG : I spent seven years doing what is called immersion reporting, which is actually when you lot just spend so much time with people that they forget yous are in that location. And so, it was 37 trips, over seven years, of watching this mystery unfold in these people's lives.
PB: What was the almost shocking thing yous learned during your time in Amity?
EG : Probably, how it is that rural Americans pay for the energy appetites of urban Americans, and nosotros don't even know it. We, who alive in cities, often don't think about what information technology takes to moving picture on our lights but people who alive in rural America pay those costs in very real means every twenty-four hours.
Lead : What about Stacey was different from the other people you met while reporting?
EG : Stacey had no involvement in becoming a affiche child for any kind of cause. She only wanted to know what was wrong with her kids. She wasn't ideologically predisposed; she was not against fracking from the beginning. She didn't have some liberal agenda against fracking that she was hacking away at.
PB : What'southward well-nigh interesting to the states at The Citizen is the idea of regular people becoming engaged. This is a story of a regular person who becomes an activist—what can you tell united states nearly that attribute of engagement?
Rural Americans pay for the free energy appetites of urban Americans, and we don't fifty-fifty know it.
EG : And then Stacey became a denizen hero in Trump's America, right? Her whole family voted for Trump––this is Trump country. And yet, given what she thought of this industry, and how information technology impacted her family and her decision to go out her subcontract, she decided to accept a very risky and unpopular stance.
PB : What practice yous see the ability of the individual?
EG : The ability of the private is all . That'due south really the truth of information technology. I mean, without people like Stacey speaking upwards, having the confidence and the courage to speak upward confronting what was wrong, we would have no idea, showtime hand, what it was like to live in America'south energy field.
PB : Is there some sort of irony in that both Amity and Prosperity are actual towns in Pennsylvania? Does this somehow speak to the state of rural America?
EG : Very much so. This is a book about why rural Americans are then disenfranchised and angry at urban Americans. Much more than then than it is a volume about fracking.
Atomic number 82 : What do you hope people acquire from reading this book?
EG : I hope they will learn that the costs of American energy are very real and they are paid by rural Americans every solar day.
Tuesday, June 12, vii:30 pm, Free, Gratis Library of Philadelphia Parkway Central Library, 1901 Vine Street.
Photo via Fractracker 
Source: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/the-citizen-recommends-amity-and-prosperity/
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