Up to Heaven and Down to Hell Lib/E: Fracking, Freedom, and Community in an American Town

by Colin Jerolmack, L.J. Ganser (Reading)

A riveting portrait of a rural Pennsylvania town at the center of the fracking controversy Shale gas extraction--commonly known as fracking--is often portrayed as an energy revolution that will transform the American economy and geopolitics. But in greater Williamsport, Pennsylvania, fracking is personal. Up to Heaven and Down to Hell is a vivid and sometimes heartbreaking account of what happens when one of the most momentous decisions about the well-being of our communities and our planet--whether or not to extract shale gas and oil from the very land beneath our feet--is largely a private choice that millions of ordinary people make without the public's consent. The United States is the only country in the world where property rights commonly extend up to heaven and down to hell, which means that landowners have the exclusive right to lease their subsurface mineral estates to petroleum companies. Colin Jerolmack spent eight months living with rural communities outside of Williamsport as they confronted the tension between property rights and the commonwealth. In this deeply intimate book, he reveals how the decision to lease brings financial rewards but can also cause irreparable harm to neighbors, to communal resources like air and water, and even to oneself.

Genres: Nonfiction, Sociology, Politics, Environment

Audio CD

Published April 20, 2021

About the author

I am a professor of sociology and environmental studies at NYU, where I also teach courses on human-animal relations. My first book, "The Global Pigeon," explores how human-animal relations shape our experience of urban life. My second book, "Up To Heaven and Down to Hell: Fracking, Freedom, and Community in an American town," follows residents of a rural Pennsylvania community who leased their land for gas drilling to understand how the exercise of property rights can undermine the commonwealth. I've also co-edited the volume "Approaches to Ethnography: Modes of Representation and Analysis in Participant Observation," and "Environment and Society: A Reader." I live in New York City with my wife and two sons.

Reviews

[Gigi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good stuff. Well written and deeply rendered. Another exploration of the proverbial copper-wiring stripping phase we seem well into post deindustrialization. I’m less optimistic that a country so ruled by scarcity mentality and so opposed to inconvenience of any kind is going to be motivated to change by realizing their actions negatively affect their neighbors. As the snake oil was peddled to them and their input as to how it was administered and dosed was removed from their jurisdiction, so too will any real solution that is fully up to the task of remedying its effects.

[Joey Resciniti · Rating 2 out of 5]

In January of 2020, I found out that two applications for unconventional drilling had been submitted to my municipality and one of the proposed well pads would be about a mile and a quarter from my home. As I was in a bit of a lull professionally, I took to learning everything I could about fracking and ordinances and PA’s Act 13. Now, a year and a half later, the applications are finally moving to our board of supervisors for a vote.

I’m also a lifelong southwestern Pennsylvania resident.

Up to Heaven and Down to Hell was presented as a tale of northeastern PA landowners that leased their property for shale gas extraction and regretted it. That’s exactly the kind of thing I’ve come to enjoy reading at bedtime!

I was so excited to get a copy of the book from Allegheny County’s digital lending library that I tweeted about it and tagged the author. He replied, “Good luck in your fight. As you well know, it’s very hard to get a permit denied. (See especially my chapter “Overruled” which is all about permit hearings).”

I’m 40, and it’s still pretty amazing to communicate directly with the author of a book I’m reading, but I must admit I started out a bit miffed at this guy. First of all, it’s a conditional use application under consideration and Good Luck/You’re Going to Fail/Read My Book doesn’t meet my definition of a compliment sandwich.

Anyway, just wanted to disclose my mindset since my initial excitement was a bit dampened by the time I swiped to open the kindle book.

Jerolmack does interview a lot of NE PA landowners that soured on the gas industry as the harms of fracking took hold. He has an interesting section about leasing public land. The book is free from typos.

It’s a problematic work though and it suffers from revolving around a two prong premise that I heartily do not agree with: this is all about the leaseholders and outside activists are ruining everything.

Leaseholders

Jerolmack seems to argue that we wouldn’t even be dealing with fracking if these PA rubes didn’t lease their land in the first place. Except he’s careful to always interject that he doesn’t really think they’re rubes and he can kind of understand where they’re coming from but also they shouldn’t have leased.

Pennsylvanians are often painted with the same brush Up to Heaven uses. We’re shown as these reluctant people that don’t exercise our agency because we don’t want to make our neighbors angry and we’re also under the errant impression that “they” will take the gas anyway.

The collective part of this is pretty spot on. If all the land around you is leased and the drilling rig is coming anyway, why not get paid? It’s that second bit that I can’t get over. Jerolmack goes to great lengths to describe the split estate (landowners own surface rights but may or may not own oil, gas, and coal mineral rights). He alludes to the fact that we went through all this with coal and maybe some people did. Here’s the thing though, it’s a pretty common experience in PA to live on land where the coal rights had already been severed.

I lived in Prosperity, PA at the southern edge of Washington County from age 2 to 22. Prosperity is the town that provided half of the name for Eliza Griswold’s book Amity and Prosperity. Even though Griswold doesn’t write about Prosperity much at all and still uses it in the title, her book is a must read for any fracking book list.

Growing up in Prosperity, we were pretty much always waiting to be undermined and lose our well water and the two springs on our 12-acre property. I knew as a small child that there’d be no financial benefit: we didn’t own the coal. Our nearest neighbor, Milt, lived ¼ mile away. Milt used to frequently talk about how he owned his mineral rights (at the time this just meant coal because we never thought about gas). My dad would say that Milt was either lying or misinformed: no one owns their coal.

Years later when I was dating my husband, I talked with his grandfather about mineral rights. “It’s only if you get them to put the mine portal on your property that you get paid,” he told me.

So I moved through my life in PA thinking that no one owned the coal under their feet. Up to Heaven did teach me that the surface owner probably also owned the mineral rights at some point, but many of us live with those coal mineral rights severed. Mine subsidence and lost springs and destroyed streams are a thing done to us by some abstract “them.”

This gives a different context to the decision to lease shale gas. I can imagine my husband’s now deceased grandfather finding out that he could get paid with no surface disturbance on his property. He’d be pretty excited about that! I can’t speak for all Pennsylvanians, but I can imagine a circumstance where landowners did unite to reject shale gas development. “They” would take that gas anyway and no one would get paid. Just like “they” did with coal. That’s not the musing of a rural rube. That’s just taking our commonwealth’s regard for resident health and safety to its logical conclusion. (See https://www.penncapital-star.com/comm... for one example.)

In 2009, my parents sold their property in Prosperity. The well was still good and the two springs were running. In the 90s there was a big slip that I’ve since learned seems likely to have been the result of longwall mining.

Fractavists

Environmentalists exaggerate risks to well water, the author writes. He goes on to point out that SEVEN landowners he interviewed did lose their well water and maybe they don’t think the risk is exaggerated. But the book takes a lot of jabs at Susan Sarandon and NYU students that have never met a person with a gas lease without spending much time reflecting on what happens when you don’t have running water in your home.


The threat to private well water can’t be exaggerated. How many PA homes are we willing to sacrifice for mineral extraction? Maybe it’s because I lived with well water for so long, but putting even one person into a situation where they can’t drink (sometimes can’t even bathe in) their water is too much of a risk. Fracking waste is now endangering municipal water supplies (https://www.fractracker.org/2019/10/w...), but you won’t read about that in Up to Heaven.

Have you brushed your teeth with bottled water lately? Warmed water on the stove to fill a bath tub so you can make yourself somewhat cleaner than you were before? Have you tried to sell a home that doesn’t have potable water? Don’t diminish the impact extractive industries have on private well water. The home I live in right now has public water because extensive coal mining destroyed so many private wells in the area. What will we do when fracking poisons public water?

There is a debate to be had about how helpful it is to advocate for a fracking ban, but the national conversation around fracking has helped bring the issue to the attention of Pennsylvanians. I’m of the opinion that you need everything, maybe even a flawed book like Up to Heaven and Down to Hell to break through and get the PA legislature and industry to act responsibly.

A few additional notes just because I’m deep into this stuff:
If you didn’t understand Robinson v. Commonwealth before reading this book, you sure won’t after. It seems that Jerolmack had a thesis written in 2012 that didn’t exactly fit with the regulatory environment post Robinson decision so he just glossed over the PA Supreme Court ruling that gave municipalities the authority to regulate WHERE drilling occurs. Robinson v. Commonwealth gives municipalities the authority to restrict drilling to just one zoning district. Municipalities with strong oil & gas ordinances can use a combination of zoning districts and setbacks to make drilling very difficult. It’s true that municipalities have to allow fracking somewhere, but they don’t have to find vast parcels of open land for it. In short, they don’t have to make it easy and in southwestern PA, that’s made a difference.
The only thing that could be categorized as a solution presented in this book is the severance tax. More on that here: https://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylva....
Sure, a severance tax would be a step in the right direction, but it would have been helpful to also draw attention to the need for increased setbacks from drilling operations.
I’ve not seen anyone else talking about this, so maybe it’s an original idea? Fracking companies are going to a lot of effort to secure approvals for surface disturbance and then drilling just a fraction of the wells they intend to put on those pads. We should be pushing the DEP to limit permits until a driller reaches a set percentage of their capacity on already existing well pads. For example, the operator that intends to drill just over a mile from my house has six well pads. They’ve drilled just a few wells on each pad. They have a capacity to drill 60 wells, but they’ve only drilled 21. They’re going around getting approval after approval for new pads. Why? To secure land before they get crowded out by suburban sprawl. If the DEP would only permit a new pad when most of the operator’s well pads were at capacity (say 80%), the pace of drilling would be slowed. Industry would have to become an unlikely ally to the environmental movement by advocating for policy that slows the rate of suburban sprawl. Industry would need to preserve space for development by some means other than bulldozing a new pad. Slowed development would give markets a chance to shift to renewables.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked the introduction with the history of Lycoming county. The best parts are the chapter on the RDA/Ralph and the conclusion. The conclusion is great.
While reading this book, I felt that the percentage of the book devoted to sentimental retellings of people impacted by drilling was a little high. I empathize with the people who had serious problems caused by drilling, but I feel the value of domestic energy production was underplayed. The conclusion chapter of this book is brilliant.

Not only do I happen to live in Lycoming county, I happen to have spent much of the time covered in this book working on the well pads. I spent four and a half years cementing casings (all over the country- out west in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming, but also in PA including in Lycoming county, Dimmock, Washington, PA, and in the Pittsburgh area), half a year on pipeline in Ohio and Michigan, and half a year hauling waste water for fracs. Through that time, I saw a lot of crazy things. I’ve been on most of the pads and lease roads mentioned in this book. I really identify with Ralph; the sanest solution is the middle way. The ethos of energy independence bridged to social responsibility kept me in the oilfield at the time and now looking back, makes me proud of the work I did. It’s true that there is collateral damage in energy production, but I feel like oil and gas production is much better than coal on this front. I had a buddy whom I worked with in the oil/gas field who couldn’t drink his water at home because an old old abandoned coal mine was leaking into his ground water. He was very passionate about the work of cementing and fracking. I myself had a coal mine move in across the street from a previous apartment in western PA. No one asked our neighborhood how we felt about it before construction began. There was a coal power plant a mile away belching fumes and smog. Those resources were poisoning whole counties of people with impunity. A gas well’s negative externalities are paltry in comparison. And what of oil spills in the ocean like Deep water horizon. Again much more devastating. Americans are addicted to their fuels. It seems more appropriate that we should have to shoulder the burden of their extraction than to allow ourselves the privilege of paying someone else to experience those externalities. Americans are not ready for clean energy. We own millions, maybe hundreds of millions of cars; we lack the adequate infrastructure to transition to green energy. That’s a project for the next decade. For now, for today, we need fossil fuels. Let them come from home. Let the cost be apparent. Let that cost outrage us. Perhaps it will help us to be more ready to make the hard choices needed to make that transition towards a greener future. That cost is being paid by someone whenever energy is produced, whether here or half way around the world. We should feel it. It should be real. I am very glad this book exists and that I have read it.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received this book as a gift, and I'm very glad that I did, because it's not something I'm likely to have picked out to read myself, and it's extraordinarily good. Jerolmack is an academic sociologist who lives for a year in Williamsport, PA, in order to better understand why communities would allow the destructive intrusion of fracking into their midst. As an attempt to get inside the minds of a group of people very much unlike the author, the book reminds me of Arlie Hochschild's Strangers in their Own Land, but I actually came away from Jerolmack's work with what feels like a deeper understanding of the rural Pennsylvanian's he studied than I got from Hochshild—whose right-wing Louisianians seemed pretty much as loony to me at the end of her book as at its start.

Jarolmack has two main insights: The first is that the deep-rooted, individualistic, live-and-let-live culture of the rural US has made it very difficult for the members of a community to speak and act as a community, on behalf of their shared, collective interests. The ironic result, in this particular case, is that they all get screwed by the mining corporations who ruin their landscape and quality of life.

The second has to do with the deepest cost of fracking, which Jarolmack argues lies less in the direct environmental damages it causes than in the "landscape of fear" that the giant trucks, rigs, roads, and industrial plants give rise to. "Landscape of fear" is a term from environmental science that describes what it feels like to be a species of prey in a particular place—basically, a landscape in which you always feel on edge, on guard, nervously waiting for attack or some other disaster. That's what much of North Central PA has now become for its residents.

Jarolmack doesn't let the fracking companies, or the state courts and legislature, off the hook. He sees them as cynically creating a system of exploitation that almost literally overruns the lives and homes of the people of Pennsylvania. But he's most interested in the how the people who have to live with fracking try to go about doing so. Few of them manage it very happily, which makes Jarolmack's book both sad and very humane.

[JenBsBooks · Rating 3 out of 5]

This wouldn't normally have been a book on my radar. I happened to grab it at a library sale (10 for $1, for my #LFL182597) and saw it had decent reviews, although none of my GR friends had read it, no questions/quotes saved. I went with the audiobook, a little surprised my library didn't have it. Found it on Hoopla with my second library. I went primarily with the audio ... when I did turn to the text it felt different, seeing all the direct quotes and numbers for reference. It felt more instructional when I looked at it in print, even though it was also written in a 1st person/conversational tone for much of it.

I'd recently watched the Paramount+ series Landman, which, while not fracking per se (more the traditional drilling) still made the things discussed here a little easier to visualize, some of the glow of a burn off, the talking to the land owners for mineral rights, some of the equipment and such. I think the TV series hit harder on the "it's in everything, it's finite but we don't have a realistic alternative yet" ... here some of the other smaller issues seemed to be the focus: all of us not really reading things before we sign them (we all do it, when you have to check the terms before using an app, etc), all the warnings (this may cause cancer ... on everything, so you just start to dismiss all of it). The celebrities stepping in to bring awareness, but not really being IN the fight, not actually affected.

Lots of words ... some that I just note in all my reads (seldom, anathema, swath, bucolic, preternatural, halcyon, nascent) and some I had to look up (anodyne ... although that had JUST been in the book before too!). Profanity x5 - pretty much all quotes from someone, not author inserted.

It was interesting - the title referred to ownership of the land, it is just the land, what's in it, how far down, how far above? What is ownership (and how easily was it stripped from those on it originally?) and what are the private/public rights/responsibilities when what you do on your land affects those around you/your land (pollution/visuals/traffic).

It was worth it to have the text - notes and index of course not included in the audiobook. There were also several pictures/illustrations, and the Kindle copy even had some discussion questions, which I don't know that I would have expected, but were some good points to ponder.

It was all just a little dry - but still interesting enough. Some bias I'm sure.

[DM · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is really frustrating. On one hand, it's a nuanced portrait of fracking in one town and I liked the theorization of ambient insecurity (the atmospheric disturbances fracking created); the ways he used real names for his ethnography; and the historicization of fracking in a longer history of resource extraction (logging) in the area. But the book had a startling lack of engagement with Indigenous perspectives on land/resource and really glamorized white settlers values (even if it did try to make a privatization of the commons argument w/out engaging any Marxist thinkers/Federici etc.). Critiques Locke but in a way that seems palatable to mainstream US liberalism. Appreciate the cultural difference argument (how anti-fracking became partisan) but seems like he didn't really push back on any of the mainstream narrative (and doesn't think about whiteness as crucial at all). Also there is a point where he literally calls a woman activist a witch??? After going at lengths to be super pro the one reasonable nice-guy white activist for being moderate (who I am sure is lovely, but do we really need this in public discourse?) Anyways good but disappointing in really revealing the parochialism of US sociology and environmentalism.

[Erok · Rating 5 out of 5]

An intimate and human portrait of the very real effects and broken promises that central Pennsylvania landowners experienced in the fracking boom of the early 2010s. The book grapples with and clearly articulates the immensely complicated, yet rational decisions that landowners and communities make when faced with leasing their land to the rapacious and dishonest gas industry during the early gold rush when very few people knew what exactly would happen. Ultimately, it tries to get to the bottom of how exercising your individual freedoms, in this case property rights, may actually impinge the freedoms of your fellow citizens, serving as an allegory for, well, America as well as the rural-urban divide. At times it feels like on the ground first-person journalism, other times it delves into political and economic theory, the book is sure to challenge your assumptions about why people choose to lease, and even how they responded after seeing the outcome of their fateful decisions. Insights and lessons in the book are useful for activists, general interest readers and prospective lessors alike.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m a Philly area liberal who considers himself an environmentalist. But other than write checks, drive a Prius and do some park cleanups, I’ve really done little to act on my beliefs since abandoning a career as an environmental advocate 25 years ago. I appreciated this book very much for its insights into local folks who are living with an environmental problem and how they are dealing with it in different but often conflicting ways: embracing the gas industry and the $$$ that comes with it, or opposing it with all their hearts, and everyone navigating a multilayered social and economic fabric that puts so many values at odds. While taking a strong viewpoint, the book does a very fair job of explaining the motivations and perspective of all involved. I learned a lot and how to learn more.

[Ethan McKenzie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sympathetic ethnographer comes to town to call our people "greasy roughnecks" and our beloved establishments "quaint but dumpy." While purportedly attempting to engage with the community he studies on their own terms, Jerolmack can't resist lobbing one ad hominem after another to assure the reader that they really are that naive for accepting a lifeline to their ailing economy. See? They're "greasy" -- "ruddy-faced". They shop in "grungy old store[s]." They don't realize how stupid they are.

An analysis otherwise compelling in certain instances if it weren't weighed down by the author's persistent and gratuitous classism toward his subjects.

[Gerry Dincher · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I grew up in Lycoming County, but moved away after college in 2000. I missed the shale years. I followed it on the Sun-Gazette's website and through conversations with friends and family. I believe the author presents this story in a fair manner. The stories of the protagonists are compelling. The failure of the state to have greater control over the fracking is bothersome. My only complaint, there's no perspective of the so-called "shaleionairre."

[Alix · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a page-turner but an incredibly important discussion on energy policy and the role of government in the U.S.

[Niki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love reading about oil and gas. Super interesting.

[Linda Morris · Rating 4 out of 5]

The discussion of the public/private paradox as it relates to fracking AND COVID was thought-provoking.

[Wendy Sung · Rating 4 out of 5]

Never thought I would enjoy a book on fracking but this honestly gave me such great insight into American individualism and it’s impact on our environment.

[SVEN Reigle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book literally hit home. Very strong profiles of the impacts of the natural gas industry in Lycoming County, Pennsylvania.

[Lawrence · Rating 5 out of 5]

An eye opening and complicated portrait of fracking in rural Pennsylvania told through those who lived through it.

[Masha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well-researched and realistic. I enjoyed this read very much even though I'm a novice in energy.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

I discovered Up/Down when I read this article by the author a few weeks ago in the NYT:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/op...

Although I have kept fairly current with the issues related to the extraction of natural gas by a method called hydraulic fracturing, the piece provided a different, informative, more personal perspective on this topic. Thus, I decided to read the book.

Jerolmack lived for 8 months in 2013 in a small town in central Pennsylvania named Willliamsport where fracking was being done and then he returned there many times over the course of the next 6 years. Thus, he was able to cultivate relationships with the residents leasing their land to oil companies. Getting to know these people allowed him to gain a very deep and thorough understanding of the individual, social, political, and corporate dynamics which underlie this complex process. Combining that with a comprehensive review of the research that has been done on fracking he wove a very informative and comprehensive narrative.

By writing in a direct prose the author did much to make Up/Down quite readable. When he used sophisticated concepts like ‘resource dilemma,’ ‘public/private paradox,’ or ‘ ambient insecurity,’ he always defined these terms clearly. Additionally, he gave clear examples from the lives of the people he got to know which demonstrated these concepts. Furthermore, he provided careful, if not at times lush, descriptions of the places and the people depicted in the book. These plus numerous photos allowed me to develop very clear visual images of what and who he was discussing.

For the scholarly reader who might wish to follow up with some reading on his/her own Jerolmack provided references to his sources. And there are 58 pages of notes at the end of the book. There is no bibliography but the notes are annotated should a reader wish to consult the sources.

For readers like myself who are already familiar with the issues related to fracking, Up/Down will enhance their knowledge and provide a very personal perspective on what it is like for people living in the midst of where it is going on. For readers who are not knowledgeable about this issue the book will be an excellent primer on the topic.

I would add two modest provisos to my 5 star rating of Up/Down. First, some of the descriptions are so thorough as to make the book a bit slow going at times. Second, the extent to which the residents struggle with and suffer from the consequences of having leased their land gets to be distressing to read about at times. Ie, in some respects Jerolmack is a victim of his own success.