The True Tragedy of Fracking: On Colin Jerolmack's "Up to Heaven and Down to Hell"

Colin Jerolmack | Up to Heaven and Down to Hell: Fracking, Freedom, and Community in an American Town | Princeton University Press | 2021 | 336 Pages

I remember the first time I encountered fracking infrastructure in the wild. I think every resident—or, in my case, former resident—of modern America’s shale country must have such a memory. For me, that first discovery came as a shock, less because of the fracking itself than because of the location and context. I had been hiking near Raccoon Creek State Park, located just outside of Pittsburgh, PA, on some adjacent state forest game lands. I didn’t know these lands were already being fracked; indeed, I barely knew what fracking was. This was back in 2010 and the term “fracking,” which serves as a shorthand for the extractive process known as hydraulic fracturing, had only started to worm its way into casual conversation in Western Pennsylvania. But there it was, a well pad located just off trail, encircled by chain link, only partially shrouded by a cover of leaves and ferns, and emitting a telltale, noxious scent. 

I didn’t know it then, but that well pad owed its existence to Ed Rendell, Governor of Pennsylvania at the time. Between 2008 and 2010, he leased 102,679 acres of the state’s public forest land for drilling, or else for infrastructure related to drilling in the form of pipelines, compressor stations, and storage tanks. Rendell was a Democrat, but his enthusiastic leasing of public lands for profit has made him look, in retrospect, more or less identical to his Republican successors. I learned of Rendell’s actions more than a decade after the fact, though, from reading Colin Jerolmack’s stirring book Up to Heaven and Down to Hell. In it, Jerolmack charts a dual course in tracking the legislative and economic sides of the fracking boom, focusing on the small town of Williamsport in central Pennsylvania. Jerlomack sets out to understand how the legal basis for fracking, which is rooted in laws governing private property, resulted in two seemingly antithetical outcomes: first, the successful privatization of the commons and, second, the usurping of private property by corporate industrialists. As a sociologist, Jerolmack’s approach involves profiling members of the local community and then aligning their personal histories of fracking with more official narratives, meaning those that originate from institutional and legislative structures and are amplified by their paid representatives.  

Early on in the book, Jerolmack introduces readers to Cindy Bower, who, he tells us, is one of “the few who sounded alarm bells” about the encroachment of fracking in and around Williamsport. It was Cindy’s account of seeing her first fracking installation that evoked my own memory of having experienced the same near Raccoon Creek State Park. Jerolmack gives Cindy room to expound on her feelings of intense, “jaw-dropping” shock, as she comments, and goes on to describe the changes that Cindy and others witnessed, explaining how 

five acres of century-old white pine trees had been ripped out and piled on the side of the road like matchsticks; dozens of belching big rigs overran the edges of steep gravel switchbacks; …earthmovers had leveled the side of a mountain to build a parking-lot-sized well pad; two huge drilling rigs manned by dozens of workers operated around the clock; tractor trailer caravans snarled traffic and pulverized the road; and a fifty-foot plume of fire shot from a flare stack for days.

The scenes that Jerolmack describes in these opening pages of Up to Heaven and Down to Hell are devastating ones but also, sadly, expected. This is a book about fracking, after all. 

What is less expected, though, are the decisions that are made in spite of such devastation, and by those most affected by it. This is what Jerolmack is primarily interested in documenting in his book. Cindy Bower laments the “noise, the light pollution, and the smells” of fracking; she grieves for the decimated landscape and for the loss of her little slice of sylvan “Eden” as she calls it; she joins a local anti-fracking advocacy group. Yet, as Jerolmack discovers, Cindy is part of the conspiracy of private ownership that has made fracking possible in the first place. Cindy leased her land for drilling in 2012, a year before Jerolmack moved to the Williamsport area in order to conduct research for his book. As such, Cindy Bower appears representative of the personal and economic paradoxes that frame the discussion around fracking. And she is not the only one: Jerolmack shows us others like Cindy, people who resist and protest fracking and yet sign away portions of their land and serve as host to it, or else those who embrace fracking from the get-go only to find themselves, years later, on the side of resistance and protest, long after such measures can do them any personal good. 

Representing this second type of lessor, or accidental convert to the cause of anti-fracking, is George Hagemeyer. When all the fracking drama started in Williamsport, George lived a mere two miles from Cindy Bower. Yet, as Jerolmack notes, these two people, who might be seen as neighbors by the standards of rural America, “never discussed their experiences with each other. In fact, they never met. One could say they occupied different worlds.” Except, of course, they don’t, and they didn’t: none of us do. Fracking, as Jerolmack shows, is an issue of national and communal significance that, thanks to drilling companies’ insistence on arranging separate contracts with each landowner, is too often dismissed as being merely one of individual, or private, significance. This is the true tragedy of fracking, as Jerolmack sees it: a bifurcation and splintering of the commons, of people from each other and of the land from the people who inhabit or even own it. Because the decision to frack or not to frack is essentially a private one—enshrined in laws governing property ownership and thus easily reduced to what looks like just one person’s choice—state governments and local communities find themselves at a loss when forced to deal with the wide-reaching and essentially public consequences associated with its fallout. “[I]f lessors had some say in how fracking transpired in their communities, or if the government took a more active role in regulating mineral leasing and the process of fracking itself, local landowners may have responded to fracking differently,” Jerolmack argues.

This is a deeply ironic book, because fracking is a deeply ironic subject. Among the myriad ironies explored by Jerolmack, in addition to the aforementioned link between private choice and public consequence, is that of government responsibility. For the most part, legislation aimed at restricting or permitting fracking has been the provenance of individual states. On one side of the fracking divide are states like Pennsylvania, which, as previously mentioned, has leased its own public lands for drilling without the direct, democratic consent of its state taxpayers, who were not allowed to vote on the auctioning of their public land (except vicariously in voting for their elected representatives). On the other side are states like New York, where the practice of fracking has been banned while its products are still used and enjoyed by state residents who get them imported from fracking-rich Pennsylvania. And in the middle of all of this are towns like Williamsport, the lonely “ground zeroes” of fracking that are populated by individual lessors and thus ripe for manipulation by large-scale corporate lessees, or energy companies. 

Jerolmack documents how the fight over fracking plays out in such communities, calling it a “tragic simulacrum of civic engagement” since state governments in places like Pennsylvania, ironically enough, retain the legal right to trump decisions made at local, municipal levels. One such fight unfurled in 2013 in the town of Old Lycoming, a suburb of Williamsport, during a series of rowdy public hearings organized by the town’s Board of Supervisors. Jerolmack was there to document it all. He observes how, at the first meeting, the audience was “whipped into a frenzy,” despite the BOS’s “lack of jurisdiction over oil- and gas-related matters.” People were upset because they believed, as any citizen might, that an important communal decision was at stake and that they had a voice in making it. One meeting turned into seven as residents continued to debate a proposed drill site that would siphon 275,000 gallons of water a day from their local waterway, Lycoming Creek. And though the Lycoming BOS, bowing to unremitting pressure from the local community, elected to deny the permit, in the end they were forced to grant it anyway. As Jerolmack laments, this is one of the many cases in which “local sovereignty was overruled” by larger state governments. 

The irony, of course, is that allowing state governments to supersede the decisions of local, municipal governments rather resembles big government, that specter that is supposed to haunt American politics and energize the right. Yet the situation of “big government” in Pennsylvania is, it turns out, also in many ways an invention of the right and of Republican proponents of fracking. Indeed, Pennsylvania’s Act 13, which codified the state’s ability to override the decisions of local governments and effectively put a ban on local fracking bans, was signed into law in 2012 by Republican Governor Tom Corbett. Act 13, as Jerolmack explains, asserts that “the regulation of oil and gas is a ‘statewide concern’ and is therefore ‘within the sole authority of the state to regulate’.” It is this clash between individual rights, municipal sovereignty, and state power that has created the current situation of fracking, one in which individual lessors get blamed for decisions that they had little choice about in the first place, thanks to legal roadblocks set into place by overarching state governments. 

Who is to blame, then, for the mess that is fracking? Who is to blame for the well pads that crop up in state parks and forests, for the decimation of public waterways, for the promises of economic boom that have soured, with time, into an inevitable bust? To answer this question, Jerolmack points away from the local—from states like Pennsylvania and cities like Williamsport, even from individuals like Cindy Bower and George Hagemeyer—and toward the philosophic roots of American culture. He asks an important and disturbing question: Does the notion of “liberty” itself, which is sacred to American cultural identity, in fact have the power to taint or dismantle another sacred ideal, that of “democracy”? Are these two philosophical tenets, in fact, incompatible in practice? Jerolmack concludes in the affirmative, arguing that, based on what a year in Williamsport has taught him, “America’s legal and political privileging of individual sovereignty and property rights sanctions the usurping of the commons, frays the fabric of communities, and undermines the social contract.” It’s a bleak conclusion that is not much tempered by Jerolmack’s fleeting reference to what he calls a “glimmer of optimism” found in the philosophical doctrine of human rights. In reading Up to Heaven and Down to Hell, it’s hard not to come away with the feeling that it’s already too late for such “glimmers” to shine through and make any difference.

Yet I, for one, find reason for optimism in the topics and situations that Jerolmack overlooks in his study. Though the book is bravely written and rigorously documented, it sometimes indulges in thin or superficial treatments of Appalachian culture and Pennsylvania’s history. For instance, Jerolmack leads off with a long history of the region that is supposed to speak to, or explain, how a rather paranoid flavor of individualism took hold there. “It eventually became clear that this fiery individualism was a defining ethos in [rural Pennsylvania], even a point of pride. Most folks kept to themselves, neighborly obligations were minimal, and the right of personal sovereignty over one’s land was sacrosanct. Live and let live, as the old saying goes.” Then what, I wondered in reading this, explains the history of labor solidarity that also defines this very same part of Pennsylvania? How was the modern labor movement, which took root in the region’s coal mines a century ago, born from such ineluctable, “fiery individualism”? In treating selfishness as a natural state of affairs in rural America, and especially among the historically union-heavy hills of Appalachia, Jerolmack overlooks an essential part of the culture in such regions and reduces them to a community of suspicious, isolated actors who are incapable of banding together to safeguard their collective interests. This is significant, because it’s exactly what Jerolmack—rightly enough—accuses energy companies of doing in their negotiations with individual lessors. 

This is not my experience of Pennsylvania, or at least not exclusively. The decade that I spent living in the Pittsburgh area taught me the meaning of solidarity. Though fracking has marred much of the surrounding landscape and, as Jerolmack charts in his book, left many of the region’s communities in economic and social tatters, it is still a relatively recent development, one that has already started to recede and go bust. Meanwhile, the history and culture of the region are longer, deeper, and far more extensive than the surface-level conflicts that erupt there today. The people of America’s shale country—those who have faced impossible choices—deserve our understanding and encouragement, not our disparagement.