Ontogenic landscapes: hydro-fracking, potentiality, and the assemblage of identity over the northeastern Marcellus Shale

Recent environmental, ecological, and economic concerns have interwoven in an increasingly complex manner with movements often coalescing around both particular practices and regions. Of great contemporary interest in the wider New York metro area is the growing public controversy over the practice of hydraulic fracturing, otherwise known as “fracking.” An unconventional extraction process conducted over a massive underground shale gas formation known as the Marcellus Shale, fracking asks residents to pick between the industry’s promise of economic stability and the potential of a radically altered landscape. In part, this thesis is a response to the paucity of work on fracking which fully engages important questions of perception of and one’s position in landscape as well as the attendant dynamics of subject formation. Additionally, the social conflicts inherent to large-scale energy extraction in this region present notable insights into community, environmental identity, and questions of scale. Drawing on participatory qualitative research, particularly among environmental activists, this thesis seeks to illuminate a processual and non-representational theory of nature, landscape, and environmental politics while demonstrating the fecundity of an emergent and rapidly growing environmental activism that is simultaneously “rooted” in notions of locality while dependent upon a fundamental mobility.M.A.Includes bibliographical referencesby Daniel J. Danz