Ecology and Community Well-Being
Frack pond in Western Pennsylvania. Photo credit Anastasia Hudgins.
Subjectivity Undermined: Fracking’s Future in a Coal Mining Past - In this project I follow a community of long-term renters whose trailers are adjacent to a newly established fracking site. Part of a special issue on fracking in Culture & Agriculture 2013, the article explores community members’ fears of this invasive form of energy extraction based on their memories of the effects of coal mining on the health and well being of family members.
Framing Fracking: Private Property, Common Resources, and Regimes of Governance - This publication in Journal of Political Ecology is based on the authors’ (Anastasia Hudgins, PhD and Amanda Poole, PhD) policy ethnography examining the discourses of natural gas development in Western Pennsylvania designed to manufacture consent through expressions of political power. We focus on the overlapping spheres of influence between the state and capital to dissect techniques of governance as they operate at the level of civil society. Data collection from fieldwork and discourse analysis, particularly focused on discourse about recent legislation to regulate the booming natural gas industry in Pennsylvania, reveals the ways in which industry proponents attempt to corral public opinion to the goal of extracting and amassing capital. We analyze how industry actors try to gain and draw from the authority and approval of the state in those efforts. In turn, the state uses its socially sanctioned authority to reframe water, land, air, community, health, and self around a paradigm that interprets those as sources of profit. This case study examines how, under neoliberalism, the state organizes knowledge on the topic of fracking such that the balance of power shifts further out of democratic reach.
“I care more about this place, because I fought for it”: exploring the political ecology of fracking in an ethnographic field school - After leading an Ethnographic Field School at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania the authors (Amanda Poole and Anastasia Hudgins) published an article that captures the range of the students’ projects. This paper draws on that experience to accomplish two goals: to open questions about the impacts of hydraulic fracturing on people’s relationships to the environment in western Pennsylvania, and to explore the pedagogical possibilities and limitations of teaching through publicly engaged projects rooted in political ecology. The history of local land use, whether coal mining and its consequences or the creation of conservation zones, captures the imagination of differing publics and influences their interpretation of energy extraction, particularly its acceptability and risks. At the same time, the encounter with Marcellus Shale has prompted people to explore, question, and redefine their relationships to place and to the legacy of coal in the community. This paper details the possibilities and pitfalls encountered in ethnographic projects by student researchers designed to explore and prompt public dialogue about people’s changing relationships to land and water. Despite theoretical and methodological challenges, this paper argues for the value of community-based ethnographic field schools and publicly engaged political ecology research in creating a context for productive dialogue between stakeholders on a controversial issue.