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    Gas Drilling and the Fracking of a Marriage
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    Gas Drilling and the Fracking of a Marriage
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    Gas Drilling and the Fracking of a Marriage
    Ebook220 pages3 hours

    Gas Drilling and the Fracking of a Marriage

    By Stephanie C. Hamel

    2.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    After receiving an offer to lease the farmland of her idyllic childhood summers for natural gas exploration, Stephanie Hamel saw her hitherto strong convictions rattled by dreams of royalties and signing bonuses. With a PhD in environmental health sciences, she could not ignore the possible ill effects of gas drilling and fracturing (“fracking”) of the shale beneath the surface. Her decision was complicated further by Pennsylvania’s Law of Capture, which would allow energy companies to collect gas from her property via the neighbor’s well without paying her a dime. Stephanie’s search for answers turned into an in-depth examination of her responsibility to the earth, her spouse, her neighbors and her children. As she consulted friends, colleagues, officials, and online sources and recalled stories from childhood vacations, she faced hard truths about the inconsistencies of her beliefs. She also tested the patience of her husband, who had no qualms about signing the lease. A poetic, heartfelt, honest yet light-hearted memoir, Gas Drilling and the Fracking of a Marriage will strike a vein for anyone who has played weekend farmer or agonized over their role as steward to the earth’s resources. How much sacrifice is required of us? What if our sacrifice means little in the general scheme of things? Hamel may not have the answers, but she poses the right questions.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCoffeetown Press
    Release dateOct 4, 2011
    ISBN9781603811156
    Unavailable
    Gas Drilling and the Fracking of a Marriage
    Author

    Stephanie C. Hamel

    Stephanie Hamel, PhD, grew up in southeastern Pennsylvania. After earning her BS in Chemistry from Grove City College and her MS in Chemistry from Lehigh University, she worked as an organic chemist in the pharmaceutical industry with The BOC Group and at Robert Wood Johnson Pharmaceutical Research Institute. She taught Chemistry part-time at community colleges, then returned to graduate school to study environmental health issues, earning a Joint PhD in Exposure Assessment from the UNDMJ Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, where she also performed post-doctoral research in the Department of Plant Sciences. She now resides in northeastern Pennsylvania with her husband, Tom, and their two sons. This is her first book. You can find Dr. Hamel on the Web at www.hamel.coffeetownpress.com.

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    Reviews for Gas Drilling and the Fracking of a Marriage

    2.5/5

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    • 3/5
      I wanted to read this book because I live in Pennsylvania and I was hoping for a nice, balanced look at the issue of fracking. Because of the author's background, I thought I would see some unbiased balance of this issue. I was wrong. If you are looking for a scientific look at the issue, don't read this book. However, the book's title does suggest that it's more of a personal response, so if you are looking for a memoir regarding the difficult decisions about fracking, this may be the book for you.
    • 3/5
      Stephanie Hamel writes a pretty good book about a real persons confusion, decision making process into her families turmoil concerning gas drilling on their property in her book, Gas Drilling and the Fracking of a Marraige. Although I was alittle disappointed that there wasn't some bomb dropping new information here, and the information she had was somewhat old. She still portrays her families arguments around the money and their life dreams, the pollution possibilities, the dreams we all have of getting big money, the frustration of finding out the truth from big business and government, and the dissappointing reality of not getting in on the get go, so maybe no money anyway.This was a Librarything giveaway, and I like to keep these, but it's one of those timely subjects for our area, so I think I'll give it to our library.
    • 3/5
      Well, there is good news and bad news about my experience of "Gas Drilling and the Fracking of a Marriage" by Stephanie C. Hamel. I requested the book from the Early Reviewers because over the past few years I have become aware of the Energy Crisis in the world and wondered about the impacts on our life style and economy of the US. I also attended a gathering of local residents in the New York City watershed who were concerned about the threat of 'fracking" in their area. I was hoping that this book would present more factual, scientific information from the mouth of someone with a scientific background who was personally experiencing the situation. In that regard, the book failed me.What it did deliver was the personal turmoil that facing a decision "to frack or not to frack" might present to someone who wanted to preserve the sustainability of her piece of land. Filled with mental gymnastics and seesawing over the decision, the author recounts her angst and its effects on her marriage.I actually found it hard to relate to the author. I also found it hard to identify with the relationship she had with her husband. In the end...there is really no resolution...and I was left holding a book that I think could have been half the size and still been filled with repetitive mental meanderings.
    • 1/5
      Drilling for shale oil via "fracking" is a serious environmental issue and I was hoping that this book would be a grown-up discussion of the problem. However, what we have here can best be summed up as "Wendy Whiner ponders her imagined life style versus taking the money."Here is s woman with a PhD in Chemistry with post-doctoral studies in environmental health issues who can not see the hypocrisy in her desire to live green when she makes a 4-hour drive each weekend from her home in New Jersey to her weekend farm in northwestern Pennsylvania. (And come to that, just how green is it to have a second home no matter the distance from one's primary residence?) She also is incapable of reading anything serious because she's so "stressed" by taking care of two children - so stressed that she can't remember when her son's school starts. And lastly, what would possess a woman who obsesses over environmental issues to marry a man who doesn't believe that climate change is happening and whose main goal in life is to play golf all day, every day?For 226 pages the reader is subjected to the author's child-like fantasies of an ideal life while at the same time she refuses to look reality in the face or to display any grown-up ability to cope with it. This book is poorly written, has no logical premise and was a total waste of my reading time.
    • 3/5
      Hamel has written a truly captivating memoir chronicling a nearly-three-year period in which she dealt with the issues of gas fracking on an old family farmstead passed down to her, which she and husband Tom use for summer vacations in north central Pennsylvania. The core conflict of her memoir begins with a gas company offering $2,500 an acre to lease the land for gas drilling and fracturing (fracking) the shale beneath the surface to get to the gas. "We'll be 'Texas Rich,'" her husband happily declares. Hamel, with a PhD in environmental health sciences, has a completely different reaction. Thus begins the mild conflict between the two of them.The memoir actually is poetically written, as stated in the cover notes, with imagery and emotion that puts the reader in the old farmhouse and out on the land Hamel loves. One also shares her difficult internal deliberations and conflicted desires both to make things better for her family and to protect the land. Disclaimer notes in the book state that gas fracking laws have changed since the time period (2008 - 2010) she worked on the book, but this is still a relevant look at the process those who try to live responsibly as caretakers of the planet go through when presented with near-impossible choices. The book takes us along on Hamel's research process and lets us in on her communications to and from the gas company, environmental experts and others as she tries to find her way to a stand on the issue. Ultimately, her quest to reach a conclusion stalls during the daily routine of taking care of her family, but some of her best writing centers around her interactions with the children and flashbacks to her childhood on the land and her memories of family there. Yet, by the end of the book, her deliberation process has been so long detoured that the gas company is now no longer offering contracts on the land; but horizontal drilling from another location may pass under her land anyway. (The documentary, "Gaslands," was also released which raised public awareness of issues around fracking and made the term a household word.) Hamel touches on a list of issues, such as eminent domain, that are timely concerns today for citizens all around the country as big power and utility companies stretch their influence across the states seeking more profit. "It is easier to identify a problem than to fix it. It is easier to ignore a problem than to prevent it," Hamel writes during her struggles. What do we do? Take the money and build a better future for our family and perhaps spend the money on some other environmental issue we CAN win? Or do we keep fighting? My disappointment is that Hamel never made a choice. What came out of it, however, was a lovely memoir that raises important questions and resulted in a good read for lovers of memoir as well as environmental activists. I found the title a bit misleading in that the marriage wasn't "fracked" at all, unless there's a lot that never made it into the memoir.