Oct 14, 2024 By Brad Hundt 4 min read

Editor’s note: This is one in a series of stories reflecting on 20 years of gas drilling in Southwestern Pennsylvania.

Natural gas drilling dominated local discussion in Washington County in the 2010s, and with the publication of the book, “Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America” in 2018, the conflicts over fracking and its impact entered the national discussion.

Written by Eliza Griswold, a longtime reporter for The New Yorker, “Amity and Prosperity” was the result of seven years of research and 37 trips to Washington County. The book recounted the story of nurse and single mother Stacey Haney, whose life and that of her family was upended by fracking. The Haneys and some of their Amity neighbors filed suit against energy company Range Resources, claiming that the company’s negligence contaminated their soil and groundwater. That contamination, the 25-count suit alleged, led Haney and her children to become sick and for their pets to die.

The suit was settled out of court not long before “Amity and Prosperity” was published, with Range Resources paying $3 million to the Haneys and two other families, according to court documents.

Range Resources has declined to comment for this series. In 2018, the company said it took the accusations in the book “very seriously” and that its operations at its well site in Amity “did not impact the water supplies or cause any adverse health impacts to the family members or animals detailed in the book.”

“Amity and Prosperity” won glowing national reviews. The New York Times called it “sensitive and judicious” and The Washington Post said the individuals who populate the story are rendered with “novelistic fullness.” It won the Pulitzer Prize in the general nonfiction category.

In an interview with the Observer-Reporter when “Amity and Prosperity” was published, Griswold was adamant that the book was not a denunciation of fracking, but a look at how extraction industries impact families and communities. She said, “I wanted to help illustrate what the social and environmental costs are that private industry puts on people, and who’s left paying those costs.”

When reached at her home in New York last week, Griswold said, “I don’t think the system has changed at all” in the six years since “Amity and Prosperity” was published.

In fact, she added, “I think the system is more intense. But the cost of opposing, or calling these guys out, has gone up, because people need the (fracking) jobs more than ever, and to criticize fracking, even in Pennsylvania, is too politically risky.”

Griswold said her yearslong exploration of the natural gas industry’s impact in Washington County was “a way to look at the structure in which corporations and outside interests made their profit on people’s health and the air and the water. I was interested in how the larger systems worked…”

“Amity and Prosperity” grew out of an idea Griswold had for a book on America’s decaying infrastructure and the country’s “systemic failings.” Along the way, she met Haney at a community watershed event in Morgantown, W.Va., and decided to change the book’s focus.

“These are stories that need to be told, but frequently aren’t,” Griswold explained, citing the thinning number of journalists at newspapers and other media outlets. “Energy has a cost.”

More recently, Griswold has been named the director of the journalism program at Princeton University. In August, her latest book, “Circle of Hope: A Reckoning With Love, Power, and Justice in American Church,” arrived in bookstores. It tells how an evangelical church in Philadelphia was ripped apart at the start of this decade due to ideological differences. It’s among the finalists for best nonfiction book in this year’s National Book Awards.

With the natural gas industry having planted itself in the region for 20 years, does she have any prediction on where it will be in another 20 years?

“No,” Griswold said. “I am not a prognosticator.”