“Pedaling the Sacrifice Zone: Teaching, Writing, and Living above the Marcellus Shale”

by Duane Nichols on October 7, 2015

Subtitle: The Seventh Generation: Survival, Sustainability, Sustenance in a New Nature — Paperback – Published on September 24, 2015

New Book by Jimmy Guignard (Author), M. Jimmie Killingsworth (Foreword)

Book Summary:  Setting of Tioga County in Northeast Pennsylvania

Pedaling the Sacrifice Zone: Teaching, Writing, and Living above the Marcellus Shale”

Before the dust settles, as many as 100,000 natural gas wells may be drilled into the Marcellus Shale on more than 20,000 well pads in Pennsylvania. Living on seven acres above the shale, Jimmy Guignard tells his story as an English professor grappling with the meaning of place and the power of words as he watches the rural landscape his family calls home be transformed into an industrial sacrifice zone.

From the vantage point of an avid and experienced cyclist, Guignard tracks the takeover, chalking up thousands of miles pedaling through Tioga and surrounding counties. Encountering increased truck traffic on the roads, crossing pipeline construction on the trails, and passing a growing number of flaring gas wells, the author’s rides begin to shape his academic work in ways he found surprising and sobering.

Juggling his roles as disinterested professor, anxious father and citizen, and reluctant activist, he reveals how the rhetoric of industry, politicians, and locals reshaped his understanding of teaching and his faith in the force of language.

Comments on “Pedaling the Sacrifice Zone”

“Navigating terrain, cresting hills, glimpsing wildlife at one turn and drilling rigs at another, Jimmy Guignard literally and figuratively cycles the reader through the fraught landscape of his family’s life in the ‘sacrifice zone.’ This is an essential and approachable book for understanding the impact of the natural gas industry on a place as well as on a people. Emphasizing the power of rhetoric as a tool for understanding the industry, Guignard offers an honest and searching account of what it means to live consciously, energetically, and passionately in a place wracked by technological change, uncertainty, and corporate power dynamics.” —Eileen E. Schell, coauthor of Rural Literacies (Studies in Writing and Rhetoric) and coeditor of Reclaiming the Rural: Essays on Literacy, Rhetoric, and Pedagogy

“In Pedaling the Sacrifice Zone, Jimmy Guignard leads us on a nuanced journey through the hard truths and complex narrative frames of Marcellus shale production in rural northeastern America. “Contact! Contact!” Henry Thoreau advised us about our relationship to landscapes. Guignard pedals right up close to the solid earth, the actual world, and where he lives it now sadly smells more and more like cheap gas and high corporate profits.”—John Lane, author of Circling Home

Pedaling the Sacrifice Zone reads like a mystery novel, replete with fully fleshed out characters who may or may not be guilty of crimes against humanity, a compelling dramatic time line, a hard-boiled, beer-drinking, bike-riding environmental detective, and richly drawn sense of place. So engrossing is the story Guignard tells we almost don’t notice how much we’re learning about fracking, environmental rhetoric, and the coming of age—no, the maturing—of a man who cares deeply about the physical world and what we are doing to it. A lovely mix of scholarship and personal narrative, this book should be required reading for anyone interested in nature writing and the frustrating world of fracking.” —Sheryl St. Germain, author of Navigating Disaster: Sixteen Essays of Love and a Poem of Despair and Swamp Songs: The Making of an Unruly Woman.

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Cynthia Westerman, Vestal, NY November 11, 2015 at 12:40 am

Gas promises have turned out to be false

By Cynthia S. Westerman, Press Connects, November 9, 2015

The Marcellus gas land men who knocked on doors back in 2007 made a patriotic argument, as well as promising riches to potential lesees — the more fossil fuel we could produce in this country, the less we would have to rely on unstable sources from overseas.

Fast forward eight years, and there is glut of natural gas in America, largely due to high-volume hydrofracking. Prices have gone way down, so that many landowners who leased in Pennsylvania are getting much less than they expected. According to a report by Fitz Rating service, it currently costs 25 percent more than the selling price to produce a unit of fracked gas.

The result of this imbalance is that the gas companies are slowing down drilling and even shutting down some wells. Storage facilities are full, while the gas companies wait for a price rise to sell or look for new markets outside the United States. Some say that the original goal for the drill companies actually was to sell the Marcellus gas abroad, where the price is much higher than in the U.S.

Problems for the companies range from what to tell their shareholders, whether to lower dividends, and what to do with the excess gas. The last of these dilemmas concerns us here in New York state.

We are fortunate that Gov. Andrew Cuomo temporarily banned high-volume hydrofracking in our state. This act has saved our fresh water, which eventually will be more valuable than fossil fuel. (The California drought is just a harbinger of what may come with climate change.)

However, it has still left us vulnerable to infrastructure impacts from the fracking in nearby states. Many have heard about the controversy over gas storage at Seneca Lake, plans to build a liquid LNG terminal on Long Island, or the Constitution and Algonquin pipelines planned to run from Pennsylvania through upstate to New England, where the gas can be shipped abroad.

So, instead of being a patriotic endeavor, high-volume hydrofracking has actually been a get-rich scheme for the fossil fuel companies. The gas produced in the end may not even go to help Americans become energy-independent.

It is bad enough that we ordinary residents are going to be subject to the pollution from pipelines, compressor stations and underground storage facilities that do us no personal good. These facilities, in the end, are actually going to help in removing fossil fuels we produce from our shores.

If more people become aware of these facts, we can all band together and fight the infrastructure changes that our government, as well as the gas companies, are trying to foist on us with lies. Without strength of numbers, the resistance is doomed to fail.

Cynthia S. Westerman is a member of Vestal Residents for Safe Energy, Vestal, NY.

http://www.pressconnects.com/story/opinion/2015/11/09/guest-viewpoint-false-gas-promises/75466714/

See also: http://www.FrackCheckWV.net

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