LAM EDITORIAL PROJECTS

Welcome to Frackville

Story and photography by Kim Sorvig

June 2013

This story arose as so many great ones do: offhand. Someone had alerted me to a meeting of landscape architects in Upstate New York during the feverish spread of fracking in that region and south into Pennsylvania and West Virginia in the early 2010s. The meeting was to discuss working with fracking companies, who were retaining landscape architects to plan drilling sites. Was this work foul and to be avoided? Or could landscape architecture expertise help blunt the impact of inevitable gas harvesting on ecosystems? Kim Sorvig spent nearly two years driving around (and flying in a plane he hired) to find out.