Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America

Fracking is a nickname for a type of drilling process called hydraulic fracturing, whose aim is to release natural gas buried below the ground. Fracking typically targets shale rocks and can be performed in areas where there are large stores of shale—such as Washington County, Pennsylvania, where the Marcellus Shale deposits lie beneath the ground. The process involves drilling into the ground and then pumping a fluid mixture of water and chemicals, which break apart the rock and allow for the release of the gas contained inside. As a byproduct of the process, the fluid returns to the surface, dredging up with it “radioactive materials, both natural and synthetic, and bacteria that hadn’t seen daylight since the giant dragonflies roamed the earth” (31). In the case of the Yeager site discussed in Amity and Prosperity, this byproduct waste is kept in an open-air pool that “could hold thirty Olympic pools’ worth of flowback” (31).

Fracking becomes a prevalent practice in the United States in the early 2000s. The US government is eager to support the practice, as it believes that domestic fracking could generate enough natural gas to power the entire nation. Such a transition toward domestic gas production would mean that the US would no longer have to rely on costly oil imports from foreign countries.