Jacob’s Reviews > Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America > Status Update

"Some feel that the price was worth paying; others don't."

"We uglified our land and called it progress."

"For the administration, the economic and climate benefits of fracking outweighed the possible environmental hazards. But in Stacey's eyes, Obama was sacrificing her family in favor of some fucked-up utilitarian principle." "It was Stacey against most of the world, and Stacey was losing."

Any action has an equal but opposite reaction. A zero-sum game. Someone loses. Suffering is all in the game. But for what?

"Obama, like many others, saw natural gas as a 'bridge fuel': a necessary step in the transition from coal to renewables. In his administration's efforts to stave off climate change, some fossil fuels seemed better than others. Replacing coal-fired power plants with those fueled by natural gas would reduce America's carbon emissions by half."

"The farm was lost to her now, and so was the hopeful young woman who'd lived there, so sure that hard work would yield her the life she dreamed of. Now, much like her parents, who were often jobless workaholics, Stacey no longer believed that hard work yielded anything other than exhaustion."

To quote Min Jin Lee, "a woman's lot is to suffer."

"In Pennsylvania, from 2007 to 2016, tracing the arc of the gas rush, thirty-seven people had moved between the public sector and private industry. Public institutions couldn't retain skilled people because they couldn't afford them. The best people tended to go work for industry."