Here and There: Reading Pennsylvania’s Working Landscapes by Bill Conlogue

Abstract

Many scholars have written about transformations in the United States that have moved the country to a service- and knowledge-based economy, with deindustrialization as a central feature. Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal region is an early example of the economic devastation that has often accompanied this transformation. Bill Conlogue has written a book that examines the economic dislocations visited upon the anthracite region, but gives particular attention to the impact on the local environment caused by the many decades of exploitation of its natural resources, now taking the form of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking” for natural gas in the Marcellus Shale. But Here and There is a different kind of book. Primarily a work of literary criticism, it is an example of the new discipline of “eco-criticism” with roots in American nature writing that privileges representations of individual interactions with the wild. He uses the device of “narrative scholarship,” interweaving personal stories with history, literature, movies, and plays to give us an intensely personal assessment that “challenges the assumption that literature and local places matter less and less in a world that economists describe as ‘flat,’ politicians insist is ‘globalized,’ and social scientists imagine as a ‘village’”(1). Above all, Conlogue wants us to “pay attention” to the work we do and our stewardship of the land.