Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America

Harley had decided to give up on lawn care and go to work installing residential gas pipelines. There

Why was the EPA willing to move on Flint and not in Washington County? The difference was public versus private water. If there had been forty houses below that leaking pond, and if Stacey, Beth, and Buzz relied on public water, which, unlike their private wells, was subject to regulation, then they’d have a winning criminal case.

There was another working theory among Range employees as they searched for a money trail leading to the Smiths: the money was coming from Russia and being funneled through a foundation like Heinz in an attempt to disrupt the U.S. energy industry.

The advance of technology was such that a growing number of countries were able to run their power grids for more and more hours of the day on wind and solar power.

Although Pappy loathed Range, he focused on what he could do for others with the money. He could be generous with his grandkids in a way he’d never been able to be with Stacey and Shelly.

No matter what the long-term burden of abandoned wells and other public costs would prove to be, these were sizable contributions; one township supervisor, Wayne Montgomery, called them “a godsend.”

Stacey attributed all of these financial setbacks to the gas wells. Every day brought a fresh outrage that seemed to lead her further from the life she’d envisioned. She’d been so sure that her goodness, paired with relentless work, would yield success. In her mind, she’d set herself apart from her parents, who worked impossibly hard but still foug

Her whole life she’d worked on sowing good things, and what she was reaping was, frankly, shit. It made her think of the story of Job.

In its lab, the DEP was testing for twenty-four different metals, yet it was reporting results for only eight. Copper, nickel, zinc, chromium, boron, titanium, cobalt, and lithium—all could be harmful and relevant to drilling contamination. However, if any of these were in someone’s water, they were missing from the test results homeowners saw. If