This Western Pennsylvania Life

I adore Ira Glass/NPR's This American Life program (when I remember to set aside 40-60 minutes to listen, that is.) If you ever need a fascinating look at people, flavored with a healthy dose of wit and whimsy, you couldn't do better the "show presented in three acts."

A while back, some friends and I decided to take a road trip to the great state of Kentucky, which was equally as fun as the drive was long. To help pass the time, my good friend Charles came prepared with a bevy of TAL podcast episodes on his iPod so we could listen in the car. We put this one on somewhere in Ohio, and it lasted us through the Pennsylvania border and a good bit of the way back to Pittsburgh. Never before has a public broadcast program made me more depressed or angry.

It's the perfect combination of fact finding and narrative-driven storytelling, and the fact that it hits so close to home makes it all the more compelling. To hear the interviews of people who live within a hundred miles away, and how adversely their lives have been effected by the Marcellus Shale drilling is devastating. Hearing about how Range Resources strong-armed local communities into adopting the company's policies is infuriating.

This is my favorite TIL episode, and I'm not sure I have the stomach to listen to it again.

Bonus: a diagram of how the drilling/hydrofracturing process works