By Julia Spicher Kasdorf, with Photographs by Steven Rubin
1. p.iv
Illuminated drilling rig operated by Swepi, an affiliate of Royal Dutch Shell, along McKissick Road in Delmar Township near Wellsboro, Tioga County, Pennsylvania. August 15, 2015
I make my living teaching poetry writing at Penn State, a university that not long ago built a hundred-million-dollar hockey rink that bears the name of a multi-billionaire. The donor, Terrance Pegula, grew up in Carbondale, a tiny town in the anthracite coal region near Scranton, Pennsylvania, and majored in petroleum and natural gas engineering at Penn State. A portion of his wealth came from buying natural gas rights in Pennsylvania, New York, and the Rocky Mountains, and then selling them at great profit to Royal Dutch Shell for the horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing method commonly called “fracking.”
Before the Knox Mine Disaster of 1959, when a series of interconnected galleries under the Susquehanna River collapsed and flooded, effectively ending coal mining in that area, nine out of ten mining engineers working in the anthracite region were trained at Penn State.
To make it plain, my efforts as a poet and teacher of writing are supported by a salary directly connected to extractive industries that are known to cause environmental and public health threats. In the course of writing the poems that eventually accompanied Steven Rubin’s photographs in our book, Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields, I could no longer fail to see that my own work is contingent, dependent, and tainted. The wealth that funds higher education, the arts, and scholarly research must come from somewhere, and in Pennsylvania especially, it often comes largely from extractive industries and related manufacturing, such as steel production.
Similarly, the main campus of Chatham University, the institution which publishes this journal, for all its commitments to sustainability and the memory of Rachel Carson, sits on the estate of Andrew Mellon, a banker and industrialist whose family held primary shares in Gulf Oil, now Chevron, a carbon fuel company which claims on its web site to “hold” approximately 428,000 acres of land in the Marcellus Shale formation, beneath Pennsylvania, West Virginia and eastern Ohio. “Hold” is a strange term in this usage, reminiscent of the phrase “to have and to hold,” from the old wedding vows, which meant a life-long commitment to care. In this case, the word means that Chevron has leased the rights to resources that lie beneath land that is owned and inhabited by other people.
The arrangement in which ownership of minerals beneath the earth can be severed from ownership of the land’s surface is called a “split estate,” which functions as a kind of divorce forced upon acres of earth. In most states, the right to extract invisible riches, such as coal, oil or natural gas, takes precedence over to the right to farm or enjoy the surface, and owners of mineral rights may buy and sell those rights unbeknownst to the land owners, who are often left with no choice but to reach an agreement with the extractive agent, even when the means of extraction can be destructive to their own property. In addition to its vast “holdings” in our area, Chevron is partly responsible for the devastation of oil fields in the Niger Delta. The frackers have shown me that whatever I may regard as local or particular to my home has global implications, and yet it’s often difficult to see what’s under my own feet.
In 2010, when Penn State announced that the largest private gift in the University's history would help to build a new ice arena and establish an NCAA Division I men's hockey program on our campus, I didn’t know what fracking involved. Never mind that, one year before, a 48-inch natural gas transmission pipeline had been buried under a farmer’s field and beneath a cut in the forest that covers a ridge less than two miles from my hometown of Bellefonte. A year or two later, trucks were driving non-stop from the spring located at the center of our town up to Snow Shoe, less than 20 miles away, where gas wells were being fracked on the Allegheny Plateau. What we call our “Big Spring” serves as the only source of drinking water for our town of 6,000 people, and the borough council had sold that water for use in the fracking process. Even then, I didn’t really know what to make of shale gas development (fracking), which the local newspaper seemed to praise in vague terms. This is how imminent, and yet invisible, fracking can be for those of us who are not living within close range of the well pads.
How many of us will that be in the years to come? An estimated 17.6 million Americans live within one mile of an active oil or gas well, according to a 2017 study published in Environmental Health Perspectives, a peer-reviewed journal published by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. When unconventional drilling for gas was first introduced, we were promised that it would be a clean burning “bridge fuel” to sustainable energy sources, but now—15 years since the first well was fracked in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale—energy companies are building facilities along the Ohio River to convert the abundant fracked gas and its byproducts into petrochemicals for plastics production. (See the recent report on the topic posted on fracktracker.org.)
2.p. 54
Michael Badges-Canning, a climate activist and retired school teacher (right), with Chad Santee and Penni Laine, concerned mother and neighbor of Summit Elementary School, where a nearby drilling rig is seen a short distance from the school's playgrounds and lawn. The well is the Kozik Brothers well and is operated by XTO Energy in Summit Township, Butler County, Pennsylvania. July 2, 2015
Beautiful Confusion
As the introduction to Shale Play states, my interest in this all began with a shock of confusion as I rode on the back of my husband’s motorcycle up Route 15 toward Ithaca early in the summer of 2012. On the side of a ridge north of Williamsport I saw things I couldn’t identify: a helicopter overhead dangling a red box from a cable, a deep ditch running up a swath of cleared timber lined with white pipes, white men in hard hats milling around a bunch of white pick-up trucks.
What in the world!?
As someone with deep roots in Pennsylvania’s Ridge and Valley farm country, who also grew up in the steel and coal region in Westmoreland County, I have usually been able to name and come up with some sort of explanation for whatever I’ve encountered in the Pennsylvania landscape. Yet, here where things that did not fit into my knowledge of agriculture or industry. I felt not just confused, but disoriented. Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term “solastalgia” in 2005 to name a feeling of displacement even though a person is at home. She feels unsettled, weirdly homeless, because her environment is no longer familiar to her due to dramatic changes caused by climate disturbance such as coastal flooding, or extreme extraction, like mountaintop removal coal mining. Confusion, even narrative collapse, began this project, as it often does for writers, who, in the unforgettable words of Joan Didion, must “tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
“What in the world?” I asked the waitresses in Fry Brothers Turkey Ranch, the diner located across the highway from the torn-up ridge. The women explained that those activities are related to shale gas, and that the disturbance was mostly welcome around there. At least they hadn’t had to lay anyone off at the diner the previous winter. So, without my realizing it then, thus began my work of listening to anyone who would talk with me about fracking. It seemed important to remain curious, searching and learning, to refrain from passing judgement for as long as possible. As soon as I chose a position, I knew my mind might narrow, become less empathetic, apt to ignore or dismiss information, experiences, or points of view that did not support my beliefs, reducing complexity.
This attitude is not like many I observed around the highly polarized issue. When I told people I was trying to write poems as an investigation into the impacts of fracking, they often immediately asked, “Are you for it or against it?” They also sometimes said, “Poems?”
I had a hard time convincing anyone that I was not interested in “taking a stand” in that simple binary, instead of trying to understand the complex factors that contributed to peoples’ choices, and uncovering the community memories and individual histories that shaped their experiences. It seemed to me that in order to get any information, I needed to go to the places and see what was going on, and to speak to the people who occupied as many positions in relation to the changes as possible. What I’m saying is that as useful as it can be, social media did not discover the struggle for social justice. And “standing with” a cause may mean little without actually going there and standing on that ground with those people.
One of the early poems in the project, gleaned from on-line restaurant reviews of Fry Brothers Turkey Ranch, juxtaposes my conversations with waitresses in the restaurant against polarized thumbs-up or thumbs-down reviews of the place posted on Yelp and Urban Spoon. When I read that poem to audiences, people laugh because they recognize the flattened-out types in the strangers’ voices. For instance, there’s the city-slicker who was “disturbed by the taxidermy” which was “noticeably dusty” even as he panned the place, searching for Wi-Fi service, noting that the waitstaff seemed wary of him.
If he had asked questions of the waitresses instead of sitting at his booth composing a clever, critical on-line performance, might his view of the place have changed?
Maybe it’s a reach, but in retrospect, it seems that uncertainty and confusion compelled me to learn more, to read industry web sites as well as activists’ Facebook pages and government documents. Curiosity sent me out into the world to talk with workers, landowners, and bystanders, and to attend lectures by engineers and geologists on my own campus. When I started the project, I could find only a handful of non-fiction books published on the topic, and it was exciting to learn anything I could learn, in many different dictions. Perhaps I can say that my ignorance cast me in a frame of mind that is not unlike Keats’s “negative capability”—a quality he famously described, in a letter of 1817, as the ability to accept “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
Uncertainty may be a luxury of the artist, an undervalued social and aesthetic virtue in an age defined by abundant information and urgent, emphatic political opinions.
This project also required me to remain in uncertainty and in confusion when it came to form. The entire time I worked on the dramatic monologues, found poems, erasures, and lyrical narratives, I felt as if I wasn’t quite writing poetry. Or, I was writing flat poems that acted badly and refused to conform to proper lyric lineation. And yet, I came to appreciate the freedom of working in a kind of resigned acceptance of imperfection, a space that ultimately became generative. Like any tradesperson, I was forced to submit to the limits of time and the materials (or found language) at hand, and as long as I was learning and making, I did not feel the deep despair the project finally evoked. The grief only came later, at one of the first readings, when I looked up to see a woman weeping while I read her story as represented in her own voice in the book.
Real Material
Unlike any other poetry collection I’ve shared before, this one demands that I arrive at readings with a PowerPoint presentation so I can show the audience what fracking involves: how the workers drill down about a mile until the bit hits a shale formation of carbon-rich sedimentary rock—and they know they’ve hit it because it contains radioactive isotopes. Then they drill out in any direction for two miles or more. The drilling stage involves a noisy rig that grinds around the clock, with a tall tower that is brilliantly illuminated at night. This rig is what most people imagine, if they imagine anything at all, upon hearing the word “fracking.”
3.p. 65
Drilling rig at an Inflection Energy well pad site along Yeagle Road in Eldred Township, Lycoming County, Pennsylvania. The horizontal drilling extends under nearby Rider Park, an 867-acre tract of land where a sign at the park’s entrance proclaims “an area preserved for people to enjoy nature.” November 15, 2014
In fact, fracking is the process of exploding the drilled bore hole by forcing, at great pressure, between 4 and 8 million gallons of water, along with silica sand and chemicals, such as biocides and lubricants which have been shown to cause earthquakes, in order to crack the rock and release the gas or oil. Fracking involves many trucks, rectangular containers that look like boxcars, and empoundments to hold the fluids. About one-third of the salty, chemical-laced, heavy metal-studded water, or “flow back,” is recovered from the fracking process, and companies are often challenged to figure out what to do with quantities of a liquid that cannot be easily treated and returned to the ecosystem; some of it is reused for other frack jobs, some is injected into spent wells, some is “treated” and released into waterways.
4.p. 14
The view from a neighbor’s backyard – a fracking operation at the Inflection Energy well site on Yeagle Road in Eldred, Lycoming County, Pennsylvania. September 18, 2016
Drilling, hydraulic fracturing, and pipeline construction are activities that require highly skilled workers who perform complex, specialized industrial processes in places that are often remote—on mountaintops in state forests, for instance, or on farmers’ fields in depopulated rural regions. The process disrupts the local environment in dramatic ways, and yet it can be deeply immaterial—in its distance from population centers and also in its methods. Through the wonders of broadband, an engineer in Houston can remotely guide a drill on a mountaintop in Pennsylvania. The process itself is fragmented and conducted by different contractors, so workers are brought in for only one purpose—to weld pipeline, for instance—and then they travel on to other jobs in distant parts of the country. Like mercenary soldiers, they work long hours under dangerous conditions, and rarely have time to learn enough to care about the towns where they grab a meal and some drinks before falling asleep in a trailer or chain motel.
Who benefits from these fragmentations and dislocations? I can only imagine that it must be easier to wreck a community you have no time to know and don’t call your home.
5.p.71
Worker assisting in the pressure test of a new gas pipeline inside Tiadaghton State Forest, Lycoming County, Pennsylvania. April 4, 2014
Fracking is an amazing feat of technology. It requires learning new terms from the disciplines of geology, engineering, forestry, local governance, even road maintenance. This, of course, is a delight to a poet who is always searching for new words! Unlike writing personal lyric poems, in which authority rests on a poet’s ability to gain access to emotional experience, then name and narrate it in her own diction, this project gave me the opportunity to master a new vocabulary. All the while, I had to evaluate information, to fact-check interviews, and make meaning from numerical figures as well as feelings. Consciously working in the sub-genre called “documentary poetry,” I was mindful that “documentation” calls for facts, as in investigative journalism, and yet I also wanted to exploit poetry’s power to express emotional intensity and make meaning of experience.
The more I learned about the language of the industry, the more I recognized how it can conceal, just as landscape architects and engineers are hired to design well pads positioned to be out of sight from passing motorists. For instance, I observed an example of opaque language in use at a Zoning Hearing Board meeting that took place in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, on December 13, 2017. The issue at hand was an appeal by Chevron Appalachia for a zoning permit to build five one-million-gallon tanks, open to the air, to store frack water in an agricultural area. The facility, which received approval from the board that day, will operate for 5 to 10 years and receive fluids from trucks arriving around the clock. What struck me as I listened to the testimony of an older man who raises cattle on farmland adjacent to the proposed facility, as he worried aloud about how the light and noise and possible leaks of toxic fluid would affect his animals, is that the lawyer representing Chevron never once used the word “fracking.” The term he used for the process that would produce millions of gallons of fluid contaminated with heavy metals, radioactive isotopes, and biocides, and which would be stored in open containers next to the man’s farm was “well completion.”
Like “the dark Lord,” dreaded enemy of Harry Potter, whose name cannot be spoken, the word “frack” has taken on popular power that Chevron would rather not admit. The dictionary’s standard orthography of a term the industry once spelled “frac”—a shortened form of “fracturing”—has been changed to the unpleasant “frack” by the hand-written and printed signs of protestors.
6. p.13
Frac Lane street sign in Charleston Township in Tioga County, Pennsylvania. A Shell Appalachia well pad with multiple code violations is located at the end of the lane. May 12, 2015
7.p. xxx
Technically, p. xxiv in the book
Protesters during the Stop the Frack Attack march, the first ever national protest against fracking in Washington, DC. During the march, demonstrators delivered jugs of toxic fracking waste water to the headquarters of the American Petroleum Institute and the American Natural Gas Alliance. July 28, 2012
Poetry or Press Release?
One of our most memorable presentations from Shale Play occurred at Cornell University in a beautiful, brick building. The rows of old, bent wood seats in the classroom auditorium nearly filled with students and faculty. Looking out over the audience before the room grew silent, I recognized, seated toward the back, Sandra Steingraber a professor from nearby Ithaca College, whose book about environmental cancer, Living Downstream, has been compared to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and whose activism contributed to the fracking moratorium in New York State. After a few questions from students, she stood, introduced herself, and explained that she had come that day to make people aware of a local citizens’ efforts to halt the conversation of a nearby coal-powered electrical generating station to use natural gas, presumably the fracked gas being drilled just south of the border in Pennsylvania.
“I used to write poetry, too” she said, “but now, with less than 11 years to arrest a planetary climate crisis, I only write press releases!”
The room fell silent, tense. The terms were clear. In light of such peril, why make art out of these stories of economic inequity and rural hardship? She is absolutely right, of course. Climate change has already caused heatwaves and floods that have displaced thousands of people from their homes and decreased the global yield of grain crops. If we keep fossil fuels in the ground and transition to 100% renewables by 2030, we might be able to constrain the temperature increase to a survivable 1.5 degrees C (see 350.org).
All I could think to do in that moment was thank her for her work, which I have long admired, and finally, when she refused to back down, to ask whether she misses writing poetry. She does, and yet. . . .
The memory of that uncomfortable moment remains vivid in my mind, unresolved.
Although Shale Play has gotten some nice notice, it’s too soon to tell whether the book has changed anything when it comes to public attitudes or policy about fracking and fossil fuels. Although it will not have the impact of Silent Spring, I know it has changed me. Less than a decade ago, I would not have felt bound to the places and extractive processes many of us would rather not think much about as we casually start up our cars or plug our cell phones into chargers at bedtime. I would have driven down the highway without noticing the brine trucks I passed just this morning on the way to work, and when I saw a construction job at the side of the road, I would not have wondered who worked there, and who would gain from whatever was being built.
Now I light and heat my home with electricity generated by wind farms in Illinois or Indiana. (In Pennsylvania, fracked gas has been replacing coal and nuclear reactors for electricity generation, so in 2017 only 4.5% of the electricity generated in the state came from renewable sources, according to the U. S. Energy Information Administration, a government source.) I have come to see that almost every decision I make is linked to energy and the survival of our planet.
Confusion and listening, learning and making, sustained my work and even brought joy along the way. As hard as it has been to face the realities of our history and grasp the predictions for our future, I am grateful to have been changed. My simple advice to writers is just get off your screens and get out into the world! (I recognize the irony of publishing this speech in an on-line journal.) Keep your ear to the ground that lies under your own feet, and follow your own curiosity. What you learn from your work will change you, too.
8. p.74
Farmhouse beside a drilling site on Spencer Road on the outskirts of Mansfield, Tioga County, Pennsylvania. November 24, 2014
Julia Spicher Kasdorf grew up in Westmoreland, Pennsylvania. She is Professor of English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University. “Beautiful Confusion and Real Material: What I Learned from Following the Frackers,” was delivered as the keynote speech at the 2019 Summer Community of Writers at Chatham University.
Steven Rubin is Associate Professor of Art, specializing in photography, at Penn State University.