| Gather for a provocative reading of poetry and screening of photographs capturing the impacts of natural gas drilling and pipeline construction challenging easy assumptions and inviting further inquiry and conversation. Shale Play Also, convocation opens with pipeline themed original music from Doug Hendren – Musical Scalpel. Steven Rubin, an award-winning documentary photographer, and Julia Spicher Kasdorf, a distinguished poet, have worked for the past six years to capture the impacts of natural gas drilling (fracking) and pipeline construction, especially in north central Pennsylvania, up to the New York line, and in the southwest, bordering West Virginia. Having traveled together across the state numerous times, documenting people and places affected by the boom, they have produced an art book that encompasses a range of stakeholders with diverse and frequently divisive experiences and perspectives on gas development; these differences materialize as political, social, economic and physical divisions. The project features those who work in the industry and those who work against it, those who benefit from drilling and those who suffer its effects, those who advocate for drilling, and those who refuse to favor short-term gain over long-term cost. Beneath it all lies the land itself, now (as before) voraciously mined by for its subterranean wealth, increasingly threatened by calls for deregulation. This reading of poetry and screening of photographs will challenge easy assumptions and invite further inquiry and conversation. |