Elizabeth Berkowitz

How Should We Do the Mountain?: Who the heck is Calvin Tilman?

On a grassroots blog asking “How should we do the mountain?”, writers wrestled with development pressure in vulnerable terrain. Beneath the rhetoric lay a real tension: economic opportunity versus irreversible landscape change. Mountains are not abstractions — they hold water, wildlife corridors, tourism economies. When extraction proposals arrive, communities must decide whether “doing” the mountain means drilling it.

Source: How Should We Do the Mountain? (2010) Read More

People that no one is helping

Elizabeth Berkowitz chronicled families who said drilling changed everything — air quality, property values, even their health — while regulators and companies pointed elsewhere. Complaints lingered unanswered. The people living nearest the wells described isolation more than outrage: feeling small beside billion-dollar operators and distant agencies. In the rush to extract gas, some residents wondered who, exactly, was responsible for them.

Source: Faces of Frackland Read More