Public Culture

P H OTO - ESS AY

Fracking Communities

Colin Jerolmack and Nina Berman

On a picture-perfect September morning in 2013 in the

northern Pennsylvania hamlet of Trout Run, Cindy Bower noticed something
unusual as she peered out the sunroom windows at the placid pond located a
stones throw from her rustic home: the tranquility was ruptured by the stac-
cato tapping of one of her stained-glass sun catchers against the window. They
have never done this before in the fourteen years that we have had a house here,
she reported. I had to take one of them down, and I may have to remove more
because the vibration is unsettling. Something is definitely shaking the earth,
Bower concluded, and it is new.1 Though she could only speculate on the source
(Is it mini earthquakes?), Bower was certain it had something to do with the
drilling and hydraulic fracturing of nearby gas wells. Within a quarter mile of her
house, along a winding tar and chip (unpaved) road called Sugar Camp, earth-
movers leveled the side of a mountain to build a well pad, two massive drilling
rigs manned by dozens of workers operated around the clock, pipeline rights-of-
way scarred a forested tract of state game land, tractor trailer caravans routinely
snarled traffic and caused the road to buckle, and a fifty-foot plume of fire shot
out of a flare stack for days. While the Bowers put a covenant on their property
to enshrine its Arcadian character, and though the gas company placed mesh net-
ting along the perimeter of part of their yard in an attempt to prevent the trucks
exiting their neighbors well pad from driving on it, Bower was powerless to stop

Text by Colin Jerolmack; photographs by Nina Berman. Direct correspondence to Colin Jerol-
mack, 295 Lafayette St., Floor 4, New York, NY 10012; e-mail: [email protected]. Jerolmack
thanks Eric Klinenberg and an anonymous reviewer at Public Culture, participants in Northwestern
Universitys Culture Workshop, Nina Berman, Ralph Kisberg, Jooyoung Lee, Alexandra Murphy,
and Iddo Tavory for comments.
1. All names in this article are real and used with permission. The stories and quotations pre-
sented herein were gathered from in-person interviews and direct observations carried out between
2011 and 2013.

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Public Culture the noise, the light pollution, and the smells of industry from trespassing on her
property. She felt under siege in a place they built to be their refuge and talked
about escaping to upstate New York.
Whether or not the rattling of her sun catcher against the windowpane really
was caused by shale gas extraction, it is important to understand Bowers under
lying state of anxiety and uncertainty because it hints at how the process collo-
quially known as fracking can disrupt and transform everyday life in the rural
communities situated on the front lines of Americas energy revolution (Gold
2014).2 Though fracking may help reduce carbon emissions and provide a shot in
the arm for small towns struggling to find a place in the postindustrial economy,
it imposes an industrial infrastructure onto agrarian and woodland communities
(McGraw 2012). Many residents are ambivalent about whether the net balance of
the changes wrought is positive or negative. But our investigations in more than
two dozen municipalities across three northern Pennsylvania counties (Lycoming,
Bradford, and Susquehanna) make clear that choices by individual landowners
to lease and develop their property produce spillover effects that harm their
neighbors quality of life and degrade communally shared resources like forests
and roads.
Many of the predominantly rural communities where fracking takes place have
weathered prior boom-and-bust cycles and socioecological disruptions from other
extractive industries (e.g., coal and timber). Moreover, this essay is hardly the first
to document the environmental and community impacts of fracking (see, e.g.,
Perry 2012; Wilber 2012). Yet there is something distinct about how fracking
reshapes the rhythms of community life and peoples relationship to the land that
has received scant attention. To access the gas, energy firms must lease the min-
eral rights, sometimes for thousands of dollars per acre, from landowners, who are
also entitled to royalties if gas is extracted from under their land. Companies rou-
tinely operate right in lessors backyards. In this way, fracking is more intimate,
more dependent on personal approval (rather than, say, local governments), and
potentially offers more direct financial benefits than many other environmentally
risky land uses (e.g., a landfill or coal mining).3 In regions like Appalachian Penn-

2. Some industry proponents reject the word fracking; others apply it only to the specific pro-
cess of injecting high volumes of pressurized water, sand, and chemicals into a drilled well. We
use fracking as it is used in everyday conversation: to refer to the entire process of preparing a well
pad, drilling and cementing a gas well, fracking, and removing the briny flowback and produced
water (wastewater).
3. New York is the only state where municipal bans on fracking have been determined to be legal,
though the 2014 state supreme court decision became irrelevant after Governor Andrew Cuomo
instituted a statewide ban.

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sylvania where it is common for land to be passed down through generations and Fracking
where property rights are sacrosanct (Perry 2012), when landmen fanned out Communities
across back roads seeking to convince landowners to lease their properties, many
potential lessors took for granted that the decision to allow shale gas development
on their premises (or not) was strictly a personal matter. There were no public
town hall debates or referenda about whether the community should allow drill-
ing, and while every natural gas installation requires a bureaucratic assessment of
its particular impact on the environment and public safety, it is in the aggregate
that personal land-use decisions can produce consequences that have an impact
on almost everyoneeven if they do not host natural gas infrastructure on their
property or receive lease bonuses or royalties.
While the jury is still out on whether shale gas extraction can mitigate climate
change or revive rust belt America, it seems that fracking has initiated a tragedy
of the commons in historically communal locales: lessors keep all the money
earned for themselves, while any negative impacts (e.g., traffic or water contami-
nation) are shared, which incentivizes everyone to lease. Although Garrett Hardin
(1968) claimed that private property counteracts atavism and resource depletion by
internalizing costs, in this case exercising ones right to do what one will on ones
own land undermined the potential of others to enjoy that same right and eroded
common-pool resources. This social dynamic also weakened long-standing com-
munity norms of sovereignty and reciprocity and left some residents with a pro-
found sense of alienation from their property, neighbors, and place. Because state
and federal governments have leased public land for drilling, fracking entails our
collective alienation from large portions of the literal commons as well.

The Gas Boom, Climate Change, and the Fracking Controversy

Shale gas has quickly become one of Americas most important, and lucrative,
energy sources. While it has long been known that vast reserves of natural gas (and
oil) lay locked in layers of shale a mile or more underground, most of it remained
inaccessible until this century, when the process of hydraulic fracturing
also known as frackingwas combined with horizontal drilling. It is hard to
overstate the profound economic, sociopolitical, and environmental impacts
wrought by this technological innovation.
President Barack Obama announced in his 2012 State of the Union speech that
the United States has enough natural gas to supply domestic energy needs for one
hundred years and support more than six hundred thousand jobs by the end of this
decade. In just ten years, the United States has gone from anxious handwringing

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Public Culture over peak oil to preparing for becoming an oil and gas exporter (Dernbach and
May 2015). In just twenty more years, the dream of energy independence could
finally become a reality (Anderson 2014). Moreover, fracking is generally credited
with helping the US economy rebound from the Great Recession, lowering fuel
prices at the pump, and reducing millions of consumers electricity and heating
bills (Gold 2014; however, a glut of oil and gas has depressed prices so much
that the industry and the locales dependent on it are now experiencing a serious
economic downturn, including over seventy-five thousand layoffs in the past year
[Helman 2015]).
The president and many others (including, controversially, the Environmental
Defense Fund) also frame fracking as a tool in the fight against climate change
since natural gas combustion emits about half as many pounds of carbon dioxide
(CO2) per million Btu of energy as coal does (Energy Information Administra-
tion 2014). Cheap and abundant supplies of natural gas are incentivizing energy
companies to switch from coal-to gas-fired power plants and have emboldened
the White House to enact the stricter air emissions standards that are slowly but
steadily shuttering coal plants. Indeed, between 2007just before the shale gas
boom beganand 2012, the United States experienced a 12 percent reduction in
CO2 emissions (Gold 2014: 265); studies estimate that between 35% and 50% of
the difference between peak and present power sector emissions may be due to
shale gas price effects (Broderick and Anderson 2012: 2).
The ostensible environmental benefits of natural gas become murkier, how-
ever, if the calculus is expanded beyond an accounting of domestic CO2 emissions.
Global coal consumption continues to grow, and the meteoric rise of fracking in
the United States was accompanied by a sizable increase in coal exports, suggest-
ing that the shale gas boom may be offshoring some coal combustion rather than
displacing all of it (Broderick and Anderson 2012). Furthermore, because methane
(the primary component of natural gas) is a greenhouse gas whose potency is more
than twenty times that of CO2 over a hundred-year period, even a relatively small
rate of methane leakage (i.e., 3 percent) from the production and distribution of
shale gas could offset or even reverse the entire apparent greenhouse gas benefit
of fuel switching from coal to natural gas (Dernbach and May 2015: 12). Some
experts say that leakage rates are currently above that threshold (Brandt et al. 2014).
Of course, the most well-known environmental controversy surrounding frack-
ing pertains to its potential to contaminate peoples drinking water (see Darrah et
al. 2014; Vengosh et al. 2014). Because of the 2010 documentary Gasland, which
played a central role in shaping the public discourse surrounding fracking and in
fomenting antifracking mobilization (Vasi et al. 2015), when people think about

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Fracking
Communities

Figure 1 Jodie Simons and Jason Lamphere of Monroeton, PA, demonstrate how their tap water
ignites due to high concentrations of methane. Photograph by Nina Berman

the risks of fracking they likely envision flaming faucets (fig. 1). Although the
Environmental Protection Agencys latest assessment (EPA 2015) of the impact
of shale gas extraction on water resources did not find evidence of widespread,
systemic impacts on drinking water, it does conclude that in certain cases
drinking water has been contaminated by methane migration via the produc-
tion [gas] well and by surface spills of hydraulic fracturing fluid and produced
water (wastewater). It also notes that the discharge of treated wastewater has
increased contaminant concentrations in receiving surface waters (ibid.).4

4. There are also contentious debates over potential health impacts from fracking. Although no
peer-review study has established a causal link between fracking and disease, all phases of hydro-
carbon gas production involve complex mixtures of chemical[s], many with significant toxicity
(Bamberger and Oswald 2012: 52), and Cuomo cited significant health risks as the reason for his ban
on fracking in New York (Hill 2014). Perhaps counterintuitively, the proposed culprit in most reports
of health impacts is air pollution, resulting from gas wells, compressor stations (which serve as nodes
for area wells that pressurize the gas), and diesel engines venting volatile organic compounds
including known toxins such as benzene and formaldehydeinto the atmosphere next to residences,
communal gathering places, and parks (Hill 2014).

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Public Culture Individual Choices, Collective Consequences, and the Tragedy of the Commons

It is difficult to know how many cases of well water contamination from shale
gas extraction exist because in most cases where oil and gas companies offer
a settlement to landowners affected (in exchange for being indemnified), they
require them to sign a nondisclosure agreement (Phillips 2012). Our own research
in northern Pennsylvania has chronicled over a dozen families cases in which
high levels of methane found in their water wells either were determined by the
Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) to be caused by the drilling of a
nearby gas well or resulted in a cash settlement.
Considering that more than 15 million Americans in eleven states live within
one mile of a fracked well and that there are almost eight thousand active gas
wells in Pennsylvania alone (Hill 2014), water well contamination appears to be a
relatively rare event. However, when it does occur it completely upends lives and
reveals how personal land-use decisions can create environmental impacts that
extend beyond the lessors fence posts and infringe on neighbors property rights.
Most lessors understood that there were some risks when they signed. How-
ever, small landowners often reported that one reason they felt secure leasing was
because they knew their property was not large enough for energy companies to
install a gas well or other infrastructure on itat most, a horizontal lateral would
be drilled a mile or more below the surface. But what they seemed unable to
anticipate, let alone control, was that gas wells on neighbors properties that were
thousands of feet away could visit harm upon their water supply. The situation of
Cassie Spencer, formerly of Paradise Road in Wyalusing, is a case in point.5 After
two gas wells were drilled over a half mile away, she reported that her and her two
neighbors water wells became infused with explosive concentrations of methane.
Her tap water fizzed like soda. Chesapeake, the gas company that operated the
two gas wellswhich the DEP cited for multiple violations6provided Spen-
cers family with bottled water and placed a vent over their water well but denied
responsibility. Once the Spencers and their neighbors sued Chesapeake, the water
deliveries ceased. Spencer reported bathing herself and her five-year-old daughter
with the door open because, with no bathroom windows, she was afraid the house
could blow up, and a methane monitor had to be installed in the basement to warn
if the buildup of gas in their home reached explosive levels. Moreover, because

5. For more on this case, see Berman 2011.

6. Violations include failure to properly control or dispose of industrial or residual waste to
prevent pollution of the waters of the Commonwealth and site conditions [that] present a potential
for pollution of the waters (StateImpact 2015b).

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Fracking
Figure 2Methane-
laced waterCommunities
from Jodie
Simonss kitchen faucet
in Monroeton, PA.
Photograph by Nina
Berman

they felt unsafe using the methane-laced water for any household purpose (fig.
2), a huge water buffalo storage container had to be installed right next to their
doorway (fig. 3). The estimated value of their house plummeted from $150,000 to
$29,000, and the place that was once their sanctuary became a disaster area that
they sought asylum from. Chesapeake eventually paid damages to the Spencers
and their neighbors and bought their properties ($1.6 million was paid out in total),
but the Spencers moved out with heavy hearts because the home they had left
behind was where they had hoped to reside their whole lives.
It was a similar situation for four families living on Green Valley Road outside
Hughesville. Although no development took place on their small plots of land,
their spigots bubbled with methane after a gas well in their neighbors yard up
the hill was drilled (the DEP concluded that defective cement casing of the gas
well had caused the contamination).7 Forced to purchase bottled water and eat
off of paper plates, these families bore the collateral damage of their neighbors
faulty gas well. Ironically, the water well of the family whose property hosted the
gas well was unaffected. It is important to note that, as with the Spencers, even

7. Copies of DEP reports are available from Jerolmack. To view the violations associated with
this well, see StateImpact 2015a.

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Public Culture if the four families had refused to lease their land, their water still would have
been affected. Indeed, part of their justification for leasing was that they would
shoulder some of the burden of others decisions to lease even if they did not, so
they may as well get some economic benefit. It is precisely this logic that propels
the tragedy of the commons. Even Bower, who placed a conservation easement
on her land and claimed that she was dead against leasing and didnt need the
money, eventually signed a restricted (nonsurface disturbance) lease, explain-
ing that she could not stop the drilling in her area and so should at least get some
recompense for her troubles.
Although water contamination cases dominate the headlines, other less cata-
strophic but far more pervasive spillover effects dominated most residents every-
day concerns. Chief among them was traffic. It takes over one thousand truckloads
Figure 3 Cassie Spencer just to deliver the water needed to frack one well, and a single well pad can host
looking at the water
as many as eighteen to twenty-four gas wells (McKenzie et al. 2012). Thus when
buffalo installed at her
house in Wyalusing, water was being withdrawn from streams and rivers or when a well was being
PA. Photograph by Nina fracked, dozens of big rigs clogged residential streets and idled all day (or night)
Berman in close proximity to farmers fields, houses, and schools (fig. 4). Roads were

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Fracking
Communities

Figure 4 Water trucks lining up at night at a water intake system in Wyalusing, PA.
Photograph by Nina Berman

routinely closed for hours or days to facilitate the safe passage of trucks to and
from shale gas operations; sometimes they were closed indefinitely. More traffic
jams and detours ensued when the trucks left as work crews scrambled to apply
a new layer of asphalt to roads not equipped to handle the volume and weight of
the trucks. Though during permit hearings gas companies commonly provided
an estimate of the amount of truck trips that residents could expect as part of the
development of a particular well pad, there was no mechanism in place to monitor
or regulate the aggregate amount of traffic created by fracking operations. With
multiple operators each running their own truck caravans to service individual
wells, the publics ability to access and enjoy roadsperhaps one of the most
unappreciated common-pool resources when traffic is flowing smoothlywas
diminished.8
While choked roads and detours palpably disrupted the habits of rural living,
they sometimes also conspired with other more insidious spillover effects to pro-

8. To view a video of truck traffic, see Heavy Fraffic 2011.

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Figure 5 Methane flares from shale gas wells in Springville, PA. Photograph by Nina Berman

duce psychosomatic disruptions such as anxiety, loss of agency, and a deep-seated

sense of estrangement from ones surroundings (cf. Perry 2012). For instance, what
Bower said she found most unnerving was being deprived of dark skies and
quiet (fig. 5). A drilling rig from a neighboring property, lit up like a Christmas
tree, towered several stories above her red barn. After the gas well was fracked,
flames from the flare stack created a din so intense that she had to close all of her
windows and sleep with earplugs. The entire valley around her was flooded with
so much light that the stars disappeared. I miss the dark, Bower lamented. Will
it ever look like night again?
Over the past several years, fracking had made Bowers sleepy hamlet of Trout
Runand dozens of other nearby rural settlementsfeel more like a construction
site or an industrial park. The contrasts could be jarring: just around the bend from
pastures, unspoiled forests, and a lake popular with anglers, diesel fumes mingled
with the mist coming off the mountains, a security guard shack and a portable
toilet marked the entrance to a driveway, big rigs squeezed past each other on
hairpin turns, a field served as a makeshift parking lot and storage facility, apple

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trees were coated with so much dust kicked

up from the truck traffic along an unpaved
road that the fruit was brown, cranes hoisted
steel piping over tree stands, and a humble
farmhouse sat a stones throw (literally) from
a massive above-ground water impoundment
pond and three well pads that alternately
hosted a hulking drilling rig, a flare stack
belching fire and roaring like a jet engine,
and trailer homes for the dozens of workers
who temporarily lived on-site (fig. 6).
The effect was particularly surreal at
night. The drilling rigs were so large and so
brightly illuminated that some said it looked
like Cape Canaveral, and the flare stacks Figure 6 The view from a porch overlooking a drilling rig on a
produced an atmospheric orange and gold neighbors dairy farm in Rome, PA. Photograph by Nina Berman
halo slightly reminiscent of the aurora bore-
alis (fig. 7). I mean, if it were not a pristine
environment being ruined, Bower remarked
of the scene, you could say it is beautiful in
its own eerie way.
Like the traffic, the smells, noise, and
light pollution from fracking do not stop
at the property lines of those who hold or
profit from gas leases. Everyone experiences
a diminished capacity to access peace and
quiet, unbroken vistas, dark skies, unhurried
country roads, and the sounds of nature. As
Hardin (1968: 1248) noted, our regulation
of the pernicious effects of the tragedy of
commons in matters of pleasure such as Figure 7 Flares from natural gas wells light up the night sky in
Franklin Forks, PA. Photograph by Nina Berman
sight- and soundscapes is negligible. Some
residents viewed the degradation of these previously taken- for-
granted rural
goods as a price worth paying for progress, but for others the loss was so dis-
concerting that their surrounds became alien to them and their attachment to
place withered. So, while material spillover effects such as water contamination
sometimes led to the physical displacement of residents from their homes, the
despoiling of less tangible common-pool resources could prompt a psychological

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Public Culture displacement. Bower found herself in a constant state of unease (Its quiet now,
but who knows how long it will last?) and sometimes unable to sleep because of
worry. She also began spending more time at her upstate New York cottage and
was considering abandoning her cherished home even though her property had not
been tangibly affected in any way. Adron and Mary Delarosa (formerly) of Spring-
ville decided to pack up and leave their organic farm because they could not abide
a planned compressor station next door in addition to the four gas wells already
present within a mile of their homestead. For them, fracking did not just degrade
their quality of life; the spillover effects brought about such global changes to their
experience of place and community that it introduced a different way of lifeone
that they wanted no part of.

Fracking as a Way of Life

In writing about Appalachian communities decades ago, Kai Erikson (1976:

86) argued that residents live in an uneasy suspension between the contrary
leanings of self-centeredness and group-centeredness. On the one hand, Appa-
lachians have a fierce respect for individual liberty and are apt to distrust the
government and any other forms of authority that try to impose limitations upon
them. On the other hand, their feelings of attachment and obligation to kin and
community can be so strong that they do not develop a satisfactory self-image
as a single individual (ibid.: 84). Whether or not a distinct Appalachian cul-
ture persists in places like rural Pennsylvania, one certainly sees evidence of the
contrary leanings of self-interest and communalism (which today we are apt to
pair under the label libertarianism): government distrust is rampant, individual
sovereignty is seen as a God-given right, and people often say they just want to
be left alone; yet residents routinely preach self-sacrifice for the collective good
and anchor their lives in the church and other voluntary associations.
The advent of fracking has forced the inherent tension between these self-and
group-oriented proclivities to bubble to the surface in rural Pennsylvania. The
tradition in many of these locales is to live and let live and resolve any disputes
that arise through informal norms of neighborliness rather than through appeals
to legal entitlements (Ellickson 1991: viii). However, the spillover effects of indi-
viduals choice to lease their land (the live in live and let live) can affect their
neighbors and communities quality of life to such a degree that it contravenes
the folkway of letting others live. As a result, both communalism and individual
autonomy / property rights can be infringed by personal land-use decisions.
The stakes of frackingfinancial, environmental, or otherwisecan be so

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high that neighbors and kin now routinely filter everyday interactions through Fracking
legal-rational frameworks. For example, next-door neighbors who either never Communities
knew or never cared about the location of the boundary between their respective
properties began researching deeds at the courthouse to ensure that no one else
wound up with a dime of their rightful lease bonus. In one case, a couple who
lived in a simple mountainside ranch house near Salladasburg had given a nearby
hunting camp permission to construct a gravel access road through their property
because, as they reported, it was the neighborly thing to do. The couple made
the permission permanent through an easement just to ensure that, should they
ever move, the new occupants could not deny access to the hunting camp. But the
couple reconsidered when the camp leased its property for drilling and hundreds
of big rigs and earthmovers began roaring up and down the driveway a mere dozen
feet from their home. Their appeals to the hunting camp to disallow the trucks to
use the access road on the grounds that it damaged their property and was against
the spirit of the easement fell on deaf earscamp members maintained that it was
their legal right to use the driveway any way they saw fit.9 Meanwhile, the couple
had a friend who had inherited, along with her nine siblings, her parents farm out-
side Hughesville, and she incorporated the property as a limited liability company
after leasing it and set up monthly meetings in which someone took minutes and
a lawyer was sometimes present to ensure that decision making and profits were
fairly distributed among the ten of them.
Certainly, there were landowners who reaped a substantial windfall from leas-
ing their property, and the presence of a new industry in rural towns suffering from
decades of population decline and brain drain has fortified some declining busi-
nesses and opened up some new job prospects.10 But by overlaying an industrial
infrastructure based on individual lease agreements onto a rural setting, fracking
is fundamentally altering neighbor and kin relationships, even in communities
like the ones reported on here that were not sharply divided between supporters
and opponents of fracking (cf. Wilber 2012: 165204): ones right to do what one
will with ones property increasingly infringes on others ability to enjoy their
own property or common-pool resources, and norms of neighborliness give way
to legal doctrine. In some instances, residents triedbut largely failedto make

9. The couple signed a nondisclosure agreement with the gas company upon being compensated
for damages to their chimney and the foundation of their house.
10. Whether or not fracking is an economic game changer for communities that host it is debat-
able. Although Pennsylvanias gas boom peaked between 2011 and 2012, the states unemployment
rate remained 7.9 percent (almost identical to the national average), even though the unemployment
rate fell in forty-three states in that time (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2015).

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Public Culture fracking compatible with customary ways of life. For example, it was common for
landowners to collectively bargain as a single unit with gas companies so that all
might be enriched together. Although this did ensure that stakeholders received
commensurate leasing bonuses, only a fraction of lessors in any given unit were
selected to host the natural gas infrastructure that generates continuous royalties;
while their neighbors absorbed the spillover effects of that infrastructure, they did
not share in the proceeds. Interestingly, some residents vexed by these disparities
directed their animus mostly toward their neighbors rather than at gas companies.
Perhaps since fracking is premised on voluntary leasing, these residents blamed
unequal outcomes not on systemic factors but on their peers actions.
Ironically, residents experienced insults to their sovereignty not only from oth-
ers leases but also from their own leases. George Hagemeyer of Trout Run, a
retired custodian, hosted six gas wells on his beloved seventy-seven-acre property
mostly a grass field that he mowed religiouslywhich he inherited from his
father. He reported at the outset that he was thrilled about having leased; how-
ever, over time he experienced a string of unforeseen indignities that challenged
his control over his own backyard. First, the gas company placed a security guard
shack and a portable toilet, along with nine warning signs, at the entrance of his
unadorned gravel driveway. Then big rigs veered onto his grass. After fracking
was completed, the gas company installed a security camera on the well pad and
said he would be arrested if he went on it (Arrested on my own property? I dare
them!). And it began using the pad as a parking lot. Hagemeyer said he learned
about the gas companys plan to install a large radio tower in his yard from his
sister, who happened to be at the township supervisors meeting where the permit
was approved, and he found out by reading a public notice in the Williamsport
Sun-Gazette that the gas company had applied for a permit to withdraw up to 3
million gallons of water per day from his property.11 But the clincher for him was
when a guard reportedly stepped in front of his car with a stop sign one day and
said he could not proceed to his house because they were moving heavy equip-
ment. This land is mine, Hagemeyer seethed, and just because theyve got a
lease doesnt mean they can do anything they want.
But the truth was that Hagemeyers leasewhich had been flipped several
timesallowed the company holding it to do most of those things. Even as Hage-
meyer bought an SUV and started renovating his kitchen with the proceeds, he

11. Notice is hereby given that on July 8, 2015, Anadarko E&P Onshore LLC has filed a Notice
of Intent . . . with the Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC) seeking approval . . . for the
consumptive use of water for drilling and development of natural gas well(s) on the George E. Hage-
meyer Pad (Williamsport Sun- Gazette 2015).

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lamented: I wish I had never leased. What would my daddy say if he saw the way Fracking
they use his land? Even if hyperbolic (on other occasions Hagemeyer expressed Communities
more enthusiasm for leasing), the essence of Hagemeyers lament was that he had
become alienated from his property; he was no longer king of his humble fiefdom.
What he and other lessors seemingly failed to realize was the extent to which the
guests they invited onto their premises have the run of the placein effect, les-
sors became tenants on their own property.

This Land Is Our Land?

Some recreationists reported a similar loss of liberty and feeling of alienation

from land that once felt like their own upon returning to their favorite hiking
trails and swimming holes after shale gas extraction had commenced in Pennsyl-
vanias state forests and game lands. Since 2008, the governors office has leased
138,866 acres of this truly priceless public asset (DCNR 2015) for shale gas
development, bringing in $413 million in revenue. In all, approximately 700,000
acres of state forest are available for natural gas developmentthough the state
has little say in and draws no rents from 290,000 of those acres because they are
governed by private leases where the commonwealth does not own the subsurface
rights.12 The Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR 2015),
which manages the states 2.2 million acres of forests, has approved 232 well pads
(each capable of hosting up to twenty-four wells) and 1,020 shale gas wells since
2008.
Many portions of public land now managed by the DCNR actually have a
long history of resource extraction. Edwin Drake drilled the first oil well near
Titusville in 1859, around the time that the Williamsport area was known as the
lumber capital of the world. Moreover, subterranean orphan wells and aban-
doned mine shafts are evidence of the states legacy of gas and coal mining. Yet
most mining operations were shuttered decades ago because they were small-scale
and inefficient, and the lumber industry collapsed before the turn of the twentieth
century. Since then, millions of acres of second-growth woodlands have swal-
lowed up almost all traces of this extractive history and have been turned into
protected public commons that collectively represent one of the largest expanses
of wildland in the eastern United States (ibid.).
While the DCNR maintains that it is committed to the environmentally sound

12. Mineral rights trump surface rights in Pennsylvania; thus the surface owner must allow sub-
surface access if someone else holds the mineral rights. This is referred to as severed rights or
split estate.

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Public Culture utilization of forest resources, it is hard to visit state forests under development
like Tiadaghton and not see how shale gas extraction is at odds with the DCNRs
efforts to retain their wild character and . . . biological diversity (ibid.). Tiadagh-
ton is one of eight state parks designated as the Pennsylvania Wilds (2015), which
are promoted as home of the most spectacular, untouched and undisturbed wild
lands east of the Mississippi. However, with over 51,000 of the forests 146,539
acres leased for drilling, it is impossible to drive, walk, hunt, camp, or fish in the
area without encountering industry.
As Jeffrey Prowant, the Tiadaghton district forester, eased his government-
issued SUV onto a forest access road one spring morning in 2013, the bustle of
the highway instantly gave way to a thick canopy of trees and a babbling brook.
But in short order a caravan of water trucks with flashing warning lights forced
Prowant to pull over to the side of the recently widened gravel road because
they were kicking up so much dust. Helicopters buzzed low overhead, deliver-
ing equipment to mountaintop gas workers, and portable toilets and mounds of
gravel occasionally appeared amid the foli-
age. Upon reaching a bend in the road where
a 125-foot-wide grassy pipeline right-of-way
coming down the mountainside intersected
with a four-acre gravel well pad and a twelve-
acre water impoundment pond surrounded
by wire fencing, Prowant pulled over and
remarked: Prior to this, there was nothis
was all forest. It was just unbroken forest.
Pointing to a gravel road clogged with trucks
hauling water and sand, he recalled: There
was no road. There was no pipeline (fig. 8).
After the security guard nodded at him and
lifted the gate that controlled access to the
gravel road, Prowant inched up the mountain.
Pointing to a large well pad with some big
Figure 8Pipeline rigs parked on it, he complained: They dont have any other place to put em. But
right-of-way in were not a parking lot. Were trying to reduce the size of the pad, rehabilitate it, to
Tiadaghton State Forest,
some extent. He continued: My feeling is, if they had to come back in ten years
PA. Photograph by
and do something, and they have a rehabilitated site, we got ten years of value
Nina Berman
for wildlife or some other [ecological] aspect. Yet he had seen no rehabilitation.
Between 2008 and 2012, shale gas extraction in Tiadaghton resulted in over 12
miles of new road construction and 44 miles of road modification (i.e., widening);

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Figure 9 Shale gas development in Tiadaghton State Forest. The areas in blue are leased
for drilling; the red lines are gas gathering lines (pipelines); the red dots are well pads.
Map courtesy of DCNR

52 miles (or 144 acres) of gas pipeline right-of-ways (which equals .23 miles of
pipeline for every square mile of forest); and 318 acres cleared for fifty-one well
pads, three compressor stations, and twelve water impoundments (DCNR 2014).
This equals the loss of over 586 acres of core forest (forested areas surrounded
by more forest)a reduction of as much as 10 percent within the leased portion of
the Tiadaghton (fig. 9). This degree of forest fragmentation worried Prowant, and
worries ecologists, because it created over 1,800 acres of edge forests that can
attract invasive species, degrade the ecosystem services provided by core forests,
increase riparian erosion and stream sedimentation, and drive out endangered
plants and animals that only thrive in core forest (ibid.).13
Few would disagree that the wild character of the Tiadaghton has been
impacted (ibid.) by shale gas extraction. Hikers of the Mid-State Trail, which
traverses the entire length of Pennsylvania, now encounter well pads and must

13. Relatedly, the gas industry advocated the controversial Endangered Species Coordination
Act, which would limit the ability of Pennsylvania state agencies to designate endangered species.

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Public Culture look out for gas trucks as they cross wide access roads. Mountaintop vistas of the
meandering Pine Valley Creek are peppered with drilling rigs and the scars of
pipeline clearances and well pads; the sounds of the birds and the rustling of the
leaves are routinely drowned out by the clamoring of fracking operations; pine
scent mingles with the pungent odor of diesel; and so on. But fracking operations
take away more than the sensory experience of the wilderness. In some cases,
they impede Pennsylvanians ability to access their forests. In Tiadaghton, gas
drilling necessitated the long-term closure of two public-access roads, including
one that led to a popular vista. On a shorter-term basis, seventeen roads total-
ing over fifty-seven miles were closed to facilitate shale gas development (ibid.).
While Prowant was adamant that unless theres active drilling or some kind of
active construction gas companies could not impede public access even on well
pads themselves, gas companies routinely policed people who encroached on their
operations. Prowant was himself stopped as he stood in the woods next to a well
pad while Colin Jerolmack took pictures. A security guard shouted: Excuse me!
This is XTO property! You must leave, and you cannot take pictures! When
Prowant replied that it was public property and that she could not stop anyone
from walking in the woods or taking pictures, she demanded identification. It was
only upon realizing that Prowant was the district forester that the guard sheep-
ishly desisted, and she reported that her boss told her to write down the license
plate number of any car that drove past and to disallow passengers from getting
out of their cars.
Portions of the Tiadaghton have in effect become privatized, and an entire
security apparatus has emerged to regulate access to land that is legally part of the
commons and is a place where people have historically gone to escape the hassles
of civilization and the scrutiny of others. Hunters, anglers, picnickers, campers,
cyclists, and snowmobilersanyone who visits their forest for recreationcan
expect to find public-access roads inexplicably (and sometimes illegally) closed,
to be recorded by surveillance cameras in places that are so remote they lack
cell phone reception, to have to show identification and explain their presence to
guards who determine whether or not they are allowed to proceed, to encounter
fenced-off areas and signs that warn them (sometimes incorrectly) that they are
trespassing, and to be chased off of areas (again, illegally) adjacent to gas instal-
lations. Indeed, Jerolmack experienced all of the above in the course of his eth-
nographic research.
With over 34 million acres of federal public land currently leased by oil and
gas companies (Bureau of Land Management 2014), the industrialization and de
facto privatization of large swaths of the Tiadaghton is a forewarning. If replicated

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nationally, it could result in significant environmental degradation and enclosure Figure 10Water
of portions of Americas most ecologically significantand majesticcommons impoundment pond in
Tiadaghton State Forest,
(fig. 10). In this way, even those of us not residing amid fracking operations may
PA. Photograph by
absorb the spillover effects from the governments decision to lease and develop Nina Berman
(ostensibly) public land. As well, the tragedy of the commons engendered by
private oil and gas leasing in rural communities works directly against the kind
of collectivist politics needed to prevent our planet from lapsing into abrupt and
irreversible climate change. This should be kept in mind when considering the role
of fracking in mitigating global warming and moving us toward sustainability.
For shale gas extraction to be sustainable, it must do more than burn cleaner
than coal: it should foster the resilience of common-pool resources and the
communities that host it.

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Colin Jerolmack is an associate professor of sociology and environmental studies at

New York University. He is currently writing a book about the impact of fracking on rural
community life and is the author of The Global Pigeon (2013).

Nina Berman is a documentary photographer and associate professor in the Columbia

University Graduate School of Journalism. She is the author of two monographs: Purple
HeartsBack from Iraq (2004) and Homeland (2008), which examine the aftermath of
war and the militarization of American life. Her work has been exhibited at more than
one hundred international venues, including the Whitney Museum of American Art
2010 Biennial.

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