Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America

by Eliza Griswold

Overview

Winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction

In Amity and Prosperity, the prizewinning poet and journalist Eliza Griswold tells the story of the energy boom’s impact on a small town at the edge of Appalachia and one woman’s transformation from a struggling single parent to an unlikely activist.

Stacey Haney is a local nurse working hard to raise two kids and keep up her small farm when the fracking boom comes to her hometown of Amity, Pennsylvania. Intrigued by reports of lucrative natural gas leases in her neighbors’ mailboxes, she strikes a deal with a Texas-based energy company. Soon trucks begin rumbling past her small farm, a fenced-off drill site rises on an adjacent hilltop, and domestic animals and pets start to die. When mysterious sicknesses begin to afflict her children, she appeals to the company for help. Its representatives insist that nothing is wrong.

Alarmed by her children’s illnesses, Haney joins with neighbors and a committed husband-and-wife legal team to investigate what’s really in the water and air. Against local opposition, Haney and her allies doggedly pursue their case in court and begin to expose the damage that’s being done to the land her family has lived on for centuries. Soon a community that has long been suspicious of outsiders faces wrenching new questions about who is responsible for their fate, and for redressing it: The faceless corporations that are poisoning the land? The environmentalists who fail to see their economic distress? A federal government that is mandated to protect but fails on the job? Drawing on seven years of immersive reporting, Griswold reveals what happens when an imperiled town faces a crisis of values, and a family wagers everything on an improbable quest for justice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250215079
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	06/04/2019
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	289,124
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Eliza Griswold is the author of The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam, which won the 2011 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize. Her translations of Afghan women’s folk poems, I Am the Beggar of the World, was awarded the 2015 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She has held fellowships from the New America Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and Harvard University, and in 2010
the American Academy in Rome awarded her the Rome Prize for her poems. Currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University, she lives in New York with her husband and son.

Table of Contents

Maps xiv

A Note 3

Prologue 7

Part I Hoopies

1 Fair 2010 11

2 When the Boom Began 18

3 The Mess Next Door 29

4 Arsenip 37

5 Airborne 46

6 Hoopies 55

7 "One Head & One Heart, & Live in True Friendship & Amity as One People" 62

8 Doubters 68

9 Hang 'Em High 78

10 Blood and Urine 85

11 Airport 97

Part II Burden of Proof

12 "Mr. and Mrs. Atticus Finch" 105

13 Mutual Distrust 123

14 Buzz 131

15 Missing Pages 136

16 Rainbow Water 142

17 "Dear Mr. President" 148

18 Insurgents 155

19 Burden of Proof 159

20 Policing the State 165

21 What Money Does 174

22 Ruin is the Destination toward Which All Men Rush 193

23 Remote People 200

24 Ignorant Motherfuckers 208

25 A Special Agent 219

26 Full Metal Jacket 225

Part III The Right to Clean Air and Pure Water

27 The Right to Clean Air and Pure Water 235

28 Dreams 243

29 Closing Down the Ponds 248

30 Chasing Ghosts 259

31 "The Junkyard Plaintiff" 266

32 Diva 270

33 Fair 2016 278

Epilogue: White Hats 289

Postscript 301

A Note on Sources 307

Notes 309

Acknowledgments 317

Reading Group Guide

1. Washington County was particularly vulnerable to the fracking industry because of poverty. What is at the heart of that poverty? Why isn’t it possible for the area to provide a good livelihood in America anymore?

2. In chapter 2, “When the Boom Began,” Stacey signs a contract with Range Resources granting her the lowest possible royalty rate allowed by law (12.5%), minus a variety of Range expenses. If you had been in her situation, would you have signed the contract?

3. How are Harley’s physical health and emotional health intertwined? What accounts for the differences between the way he and his sister, Paige, experience their symptoms?

4. Chapter 19, “Policing the State,” describes the history of ACT 13, the Pennsylvania law that quashed local governments’ ability to regulate oil and gas operators. The law also required physicians to sign non-disclosure agreements in order to learn which chemicals had sickened their patients. As you read about the ensuing legal battle, culminating in key provisions of ACT 13 being declared unconstitutional, where did you place the blame for Stacey’s situation? Are voters the solution or the problem?

5. How does Pappy’s family history affect Stacey? What does the history of the region (particularly William Penn’s “holy experiment” and the eventual brutality between Native Americans and Scots Irish immigrants) teach us about the current power struggles between industry, government, and rebels?

6. Hang ‘em High meetings were attended by an odd combination of Pennsylvanians who were united in the fight against Range Resources but disagreed about how and why. How did Stacey cope with the political contradictions in her community? Why would a conservationist reject environmentalists? Why aren’t scientists more politically empowered?

7. Access to clean water has always been a sign of freedom to Stacey, and her turn to water buffalos represented defeat. Is access to clean water a human right, or is clean water better understood as a commodity that might be bought?

8. The healthcare industry provided Stacey with a middle-class wage and is one of the few steady employers in her region. Yet she struggled to pay for the thousands of dollars in medical tests required for herself and her family. What does that say about the economics of illness in America?

9. Discuss the book’s title. What would it take to bring amity and prosperity to Washington County?

10. Stacey hoped for a settlement, but Harley was opposed to it. Would you have accepted a settlement?

11. What accounts for the tenacity of lawyers like the Smiths (who were willing to pursue cases against Range for years on a shoestring budget) and plaintiffs like Stacey? What keeps them from being easily intimidated or succumbing to despair?

12. Ron Yeager obtained a pre-drill test, but Buzz, Stacey, and the Voyleses didn’t. If you were on a jury, what proof would you need of his water in order to be convinced about the cause of the contamination? If the liner of a drill cuttings pit or a waste pond is shown to be leaking, should that be sufficient evidence that the pit or pond is the source of toxins?

13. As you read about the suffering of Stacey’s animals (including the offspring of Boots and Diva), along with the tragic contamination of springs that flow from the Ten Mile Creek Watershed, how did the book shape your view of the natural world? How much responsibility do we have to protect the planet and its creatures, beyond what’s necessary for our own survival?

14. What did you discover about the way the energy industry weighs risk versus rewards? What would your life look like if humans stopped extracting minerals from the earth?

Editorial Reviews

Winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction
New York Times Book Review Notable Book


"[A] wonderful account, the deserved winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction . . . The virtue of Griswold’s reporting is that, though it’s never sentimental, you understand and sympathize with these men and women." —Bill McKibben, The Times Literary Supplement

"Expertly constructed . . . Griswold — the kind of reporter who can convince a subject to let her reveal the message inside a Valentine card, and who notices what color somebody’s refrigerator is — painstakingly builds the narrative amid its historical and social context . . . Her relentless, measured narration helped me understand my own blind spots — that sadness over ruined views is a kind of class privilege, the outgrowth of a particular stance toward the land. —Erika Howsare, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Amity and Prosperity is at heart a David and Goliath story fit for the movies. It has everything but a happy ending: bucolic setting concealing fortune and danger; poor but proud locals who've endured sequential boom bust cycles of resource extraction . . . tough, reluctant victim-heroes . . . and a courtroom drama, as a tenacious husband-wife legal team takes on the industry and the state . . . [a] valuable, discomforting book" —JoAnn Wypijewski, The New York Times Book Review

"Riveting . . . Page-turner . . . If J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy famously portrayed the Rust Belt ethos of Appalachian transplants into southern Ohio, Amity and Prosperity tells with vivid detail the contours of daily life in Washington and Greene counties . . . Ms. Griswold is an energetic writer, and the characters she writes about are themselves colorful, raw and dogged . . . Amity and Prosperity becomes not only a glimpse into postindustrial small towns and the environmental consequences of fracking, but also a legal thriller worthy of any novel by John Grisham. —Byron Borger, Pittsburg Post-Gazette

“In her new book, Amity and Prosperity, journalist Eliza Griswold provides a deeply human counterpoint to this political fray. She takes on the decidedly fraught issue of energy extraction through a vivid, compassionate portrait of one family living in the long shadow of industry . . . Griswold chronicles these escalating horrors with disarming intimacy.” —Meara Sharma, The Washington Post

"Powerful and deeply humane" —The National Book Review

"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 . . . What Griswold depicts is a community, like the earth, cracked open. . . . Parts of “Amity and Prosperity” read as intimately as a novel, though its insidious, slow-motion ordeal is all too real." —Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times

"Griswold creates a complex, elegantly written portrait of Stacey and a community ambivalent about the industry they hope can bring prosperity." —BBC

“Veteran journalist Eliza Griswold’s . . . Amity and Prosperity is part Erin Brockovich, part Hillbilly Elegy. You’ll be inspired by [Stacey Haney, Beth Voyles and Kendra Smith] who called B.S. on what was happening around them, pointing a finger at both money-hungry businessmen and day-tripping liberals studying them like specimens. Their galvanizing activism is proof that, to help someone, first you have to listen.” —Elisabeth Egan, Glamour

"Griswold offers a compelling portrayal of Stacey Haney and her fight . . . Memorable . . An important addition to the emerging genre of works about fracking and its environmental and human costs. This will find large audiences among concerned citizens and warrants the attention of public officials as well as fans of J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy." —Library Journal (Starred Review)

"Griswold’s empathetic yet analytical account of Haney’s indefatigable role as advocate for justice is a thorough and thoroughly blood-pressure-raising account of the greed and fraud embedded in the environmentally ruinous natural-gas industry. As honest and unvarnished an account of the human cost of corporate corruption as one will find." —Booklist (Starred Review)

"Compelling and empathetic." —Karen Olsson, Bookforum

"With empathy and diligence, Griswold brings attention to the emotional and financial tolls Haney and her family endured in this revealing portrait of rural America in dire straits." —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

[Griswold's] impressive research notwithstanding, Amity and Prosperity is at heart a David and Goliath story fit for the movies. It has everything but a happy ending: a bucolic setting concealing fortune and danger; poor but proud locals…tough, reluctant victim-heroes; grisly scenes of animal die-off; and courtroom drama…People who've lost their water to fracking, like those who live in impoverished, toxified communities everywhere…are on a continuum that began with the indigenous peoples, the enslaved Africans and the "waste people" ("refuse," as Benjamin Franklin called poor Pennsylvanians), who were forced off the land, into bondage or penury at America's dawn. The nature of oppression changes, but the levers of power that have helped some to prosper while allowing many to sink are hardened in place, and the persistent question, implicit in this valuable, discomforting book, is Who will unstick them?

The New York Times Book Review - JoAnn Wypijewski

[Griswold's] sensitive and judicious new book…is neither an outraged sermon delivered from a populist soapbox nor a pinched, professorial lecture. Griswold…paid close attention to a community in southwestern Pennsylvania over the course of seven years to convey its confounding experience with hydraulic fracturing…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…Parts of Amity and Prosperity read as intimately as a novel, though its insidious, slow-motion ordeal is all too real.

The New York Times - Jennifer Szalai

05/14/2018
Journalist Griswold (The Tenth Parallel) comprehensively examines the circumstances surrounding the lawsuit that Stacey Haney, a nurse and single mother, filed against energy company Range Resources. The book opens with an account of the shale gas boom of the mid-2000s, when fracking (hydraulic fracturing) brought unexpected windfalls to financially distressed towns on the border of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, including Haney’s hometown, Amity, and the neighboring town of Prosperity in rural Pennsylvania. Residents welcomed the money from mineral leases, using it to pay for needed roofs and fences. Haney did, too, until her son, Hartley, was hospitalized for fatigue and tested positive for high levels of arsenic in his blood, which they believed was due to runoff from the fracking on a nearby property. When Haney and her daughter, Paige, got tested, they too were diagnosed with arsenic poisoning. The community reacted to the news and Haney’s subsequent lawsuit with suspicion and animosity, accusing Haney of “acting out of hysteria.” Griswold combines Haney’s perspective with those of her attorneys, John Smith and Kendra Smith, during the years-long legal saga, which was settled for an undisclosed amount in early 2018. With empathy and diligence, Griswold brings attention to the emotional and financial tolls Haney and her family endured in this revealing portrait of rural America in dire straits. (June)

Publishers Weekly

2018-04-11
Griswold (The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam, 2010, etc.) immerses herself with a few Pennsylvania families in rural areas near Pittsburgh to chronicle their life-threatening battles against the fracking industry.To extract natural gas deposits from deep within the ground, giant energy companies employ processes and chemicals that can disseminate dangerous substances into drinking water sources and into the air. The author, an extraordinarily versatile wordsmith as a poet, translator, and journalist, visited a region of Pennsylvania that had become a fracking crossroads. At a meeting of concerned citizens receiving payments for fracking on their land but angry about unforeseen environmental degradation, Griswold met Stacey Haney. A lifelong citizen of Amity—near the nearly depopulated town of Prosperity—Haney, a nurse, has been worried that harmful elements from the fracking process have yielded chronic illnesses in herself and her children. Neither Haney nor most of her neighbors wanted to become social activists (many of them usually vote Republican and support Donald Trump). However, the increasing financial debt of the citizens from both towns, combined with the puzzling chronic ailments, led them to hire a team of lawyers to craft a court challenge or at least force the state's environmental protection agency to halt fracking operations of for-profit corporations. Because no scientific consensus has emerged about the societal benefits versus the public health hazards of fracking, the Haneys, as well as the other plaintiffs, worry that they will never prevail on technical grounds. Surprisingly, several Pennsylvania courts ruled against the fracking industry, but the Haneys and other plaintiffs received little in the way of tangible benefits. As the author inserts herself into the narrative about one-third of the way through, she becomes a character with apparent sympathies for the individual plaintiffs and their hardworking lawyers, but her reporting is, for the most part, evenhanded.A solid addition to the burgeoning literature on the social and health-related effects of fracking.

Kirkus Reviews