On a recent afternoon in suburban Philadelphia, Danielle Friel Otten, a marketing consultant and a Democratic candidate for state representative in the Hundred-and-Fifty-fifth District, stood in her kitchen, stress-eating snack-sized Kit Kats. Friel Otten is forty-one, with a round face, glasses, and the requisite pearls of an aspiring politician. That morning, a smear campaign had begun against her, and glossy attack ads had started filling her neighbors’ mailboxes along Colonial Drive, which sits in a tulip-tree-lined subdivision of Chester County. The ads claimed, correctly, that Friel Otten had once declared bankruptcy, that she had a poor record of voting in local elections, and that, over the past decade, she’d racked up sixty-one parking tickets. “My opponent, Becky Corbin, is the queen of special interests,” Friel Otten told me. “I am the queen of parking tickets.” View more Virginia Kerslake—Friel Otten’s neighbor turned campaign manager, who has also worked as an earth scientist—sat at the kitchen table scrolling through VoteBuilder, a Web site that provides the names, ages, and political affiliations of local voters. The women were creating a list of undecided voters for an afternoon of canvassing. Friel Otten and Kerslake had never considered getting into politics until the summer of 2017, when workers building a controversial pipeline called Mariner East punctured a nearby aquifer. As water gushed from the borehole, draining the wells of several surrounding homes, Friel Otten went over to Kerslake’s house to watch the deluge. In Kerslake’s back yard, the women struck up a conversation about their shared anxieties regarding Mariner East, and how it could be stopped. Mariner East isn’t a typical suburban line, carrying gas to heat people’s homes. When completed, the pipeline will carry highly explosive natural-gas liquids—compressed ethane, butane, and propane—three hundred and fifty miles from the Marcellus shale gas fields in western Pennsylvania to a port in Philadelphia. From there, the chemicals will be transported to Scotland, formed into pellets called nurdles, and made into plastic. The project is owned by Energy Transfer Partners—the parent company of Sunoco, which also owns the Dakota Access Pipeline—and it is part of an ongoing multibillion-dollar effort to monetize the state’s natural-gas resources. The company claims that the pipeline will create nine thousand jobs, and will have an economic impact in the state of more than nine billion dollars. The company also has a dismal safety record: its pipelines experience a leak or accident every eleven days, on average. In Pennsylvania, there is no state agency tasked with deciding where pipelines carrying hazardous liquids can be placed. As a result, E.T.P. can lay the line wherever it wants, without constraints, including through people’s property. If there’s a leak, the company instructs residents to “leave the area by foot immediately and attempt to stay upwind,” but there’s no guidance for people to determine whether they are in a safe area. Within the blast zone, ringing a doorbell, making a phone call, opening a garage door, turning lights on, or running an engine could ignite a fatal explosion. “It makes it hard to imagine how the forty-one schools that sit within the blast zone would manage with small children,” Friel Otten told me. The company did not respond to requests for comment, but it claims that it has recently reduced its rate of accidents per thousand miles by thirty per cent, bringing it into alignment with the rest of the industry. “It is our priority to maintain and operate our assets to the highest safety standards,” Lisa Dillinger, a company spokesperson, told NPR last month. “Not just because it makes good business sense but because it is the right thing to do.” Photograph by Michelle Gustafson for The New Yorker It wasn’t just the obvious hazards that convinced Friel Otten to run for office; she also had specific concerns about the health of her son, Jack. Four years ago, Jack was born with a disorder that made it difficult for him to process calcium, and gave him kidney stones. By the time he was eighteen months old, he’d already had several surgeries. He was just recovering from one in July, 2017, when E.T.P. workers punctured the aquifer. Soon after, at a community meeting, Friel Otten learned that, if drilling mud leaked into the aquifer, calcium levels in her tap water could spike. Since calcium was non-toxic, a company representative said, there was nothing to worry about. For Jack, however, calcium could be dangerous. “It was a moment of terror,” Friel Otten told me. Friel Otten scheduled a meeting with Becky Corbin, her state representative, who is now her political opponent. She hoped that Corbin might help her fight back against the pipeline. Before the meeting, she practiced her speech. But sitting in Corbin’s office in the nearby town of Exton, explaining her worries, she noticed that the representative’s expression was stoic, and got the sense that she wasn’t really listening. Corbin, it turned out, has received more six thousand dollars in contributions from the oil and gas industry. About a month later, Friel Otten received a form letter thanking her for her visit. “To have somebody not care at all,” she said, “it makes you feel defeated and it makes you feel powerless. . . . But I refuse to be powerless.” (Corbin wrote to me, in response, “I have a proven record of standing up to oil and gas companies to ensure the health and safety of our community.”) advertisement Friel Otten teamed up with Kerslake and, with the help of a state senator and a local community organization, they crowdsourced more than fifty thousand dollars and hired an Oklahoma-based firm to conduct a risk analysis of the pipeline. The assessment found that, at the time, the pipeline carried a risk of one in eighty-one thousand of killing a school full of children, or everyone at the Chester County Library. They decided to run candidates who were opposed to the pipeline for Uwchlan Township’s school board and board of supervisors. It was an uphill battle, because the region had voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump in the 2016 election, but several of their candidates were elected. “We won sixty per cent of the votes,” she said, “which isn’t bad in a district that’s only thirty-six-per-cent Democratic.” When I visited, Friel Otten and Kerslake had managed to knock on the doors of 31,597 voters—more than any other candidate for the state legislature. Based on projections from past turnouts, Friel Otten thought she would need 11,863 votes to win, and she had already secured 9,184 committed yeses. Among those were Republicans who were willing to cross party lines because of their opposition to the pipeline. To take back the statehouse in November, Democrats need a net gain of twenty seats, a near impossibility. If Friel Otten is elected, however, her victory would likely be driven less by any kind of nationwide blue wave than by a distinctly local ire against a highly contentious pipeline.

Before heading out for the afternoon to speak to voters, Friel Otten led me through her sunroom’s sliding glass doors and into her back yard to see the pipeline firsthand. We made our way over fifty feet of wet grass to a neighbor’s swing set. Jack and Eleanor, Friel Otten’s daughter, trailed behind and climbed onto the swings. Ten feet away, a bright-orange plastic fence ran down a steep hill for a mile between the dense suburban houses. The pipeline lay underground. Behind it, pale-green lengths of sixteen- and twenty-inch-diameter pipe sat in a pile, where they’d been waiting since the cracked aquifer had brought all work to a halt a year earlier. “We’re not wealthy,” Friel Otten said, looking out at the surrounding track of colonials, with brick and vinyl siding. The neighborhood was middle-class, and many of Friel Otten’s neighbors had spent their entire savings to buy into the American Dream of homeownership. “My husband and I, we don’t have a whole lot, but we have our home,” she said. “It’s going to be paid off before our kids go to college. We have that, and that’s a huge accomplishment for people like us.” The pipeline had thrown their plans into disarray. Two weeks before I visited, an E.T.P. line in nearby Beaver County had exploded seven days after it opened. It was carrying methane rather than the much more explosive liquids, but it managed to send flames shooting a hundred and fifty feet into the sky, destroying a nearby home. No one was killed, but, a few days later, Friel Otten woke from a nightmare in which her children were burning in their beds. She called her husband and told him that they had to move. But all of their money was wrapped up in the house, and who would buy a home forty feet away from the pipeline? Energy Transfer Partners has succeeded in building its pipeline under people’s homes by claiming the right to eminent domain. Traditionally, governments have relied on this strategy to build infrastructure for public use, like airports and highways. However, through what one judge has called “a dizzying array of procedural moves,” E.T.P. has claimed eminent domain through a legal loophole that ties its new pipeline to one dating back to the nineteen-thirties, which carried heating oil to people’s homes, and had a “certificate of public convenience.” The company has managed to apply this antiquated certificate to the new pipeline, even though the liquids flowing through it will go directly to a foreign company. “Where is the public good in that?” Friel Otten asked. Through this legal argument, E.T.P. possesses the right to lay pipe wherever it wants under as much as forty per cent of Pennsylvania. Photograph by Michelle Gustafson for The New Yorker As Friel Otten sees it, she and her neighbors bear the risk to their health and property on behalf of a corporation. Recently, their right to speak out against the pipeline had also come under threat. When I visited, there was a bill before the Pennsylvania legislature intended to criminalize protests against “critical infrastructure,” which would make trespassing to protest a pipeline a felony. Similar legislation, sponsored by a conservative group called the American Legislative Exchange Council, has been enacted in other states with controversial pipelines, including Iowa and North Dakota. But the Pennsylvania bill takes the issue a step further, making the planning of protests a conspiracy. If this law were enacted, Friel Otten and Kerslake could be charged with a felony for standing in the parking lot of one of their children’s schools and talking about how they might protest the pipeline.“This is an industry that’s literally stripping away our American values and our right to free speech,” Friel Otten said. As she sees it, this isn’t a partisan fight; free speech and property rights are conservative values, too. Friel Otten isn’t the only candidate hoping to flip her district by opposing E.T.P. Nearby, in the Hundred-and-Sixty-eighth District, Kristin Seale is running for state representative as a democratic socialist. Seale’s district is heavily conservative, but last year she won an unlikely victory in a race for her local school board, based on her opposition to Mariner East. If she wins, she will be the first woman to hold the seat for that district. Seale, like Friel Otten, personifies what happens as the potential effects of fracking move from the poor and rural western part of the state to the rich east. “There’s no real profit from the gas unless it gets to market,” Andy Dinniman, a state senator fighting the pipeline, told me. “If you frack and want to get your product to market, my constituents are going to hold you up because they’re concerned they’re not safe.” The question is whether wealthier citizens can rein in the powerful industry at the ballot box, and whether opposition to the pipeline is enough to flip key districts from red to blue.

Two hundred miles to the west of Chester County along the pipeline route, in the impoverished and isolated swath of Pennsylvania that lies between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, faith in electoral politics has dwindled. In Huntingdon County, at the edge of the Marcellus gas fields, some people have been fighting Mariner East for the past several years, largely unnoticed. Private citizens have faced off against workers toting chainsaws and security guards wearing body cameras. For some, the idea that Democrats can save the day in the upcoming midterms is absurd; both Democratic and Republican officials in the state have long benefitted from the oil and gas industry. Since 2017, Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Tom Wolf, has received more than seventy-eight thousand dollars in campaign contributions from the industry. Critics argue that, despite Wolf’s environmental platform, he has done little to challenge Mariner East. (In response, Beth Melena, a campaign spokesperson, cited the litany of fines and violations that the administration’s Department of Environmental Protection has issued against the project. “Governor Wolf is beholden to no one and has fought for a severance tax on the oil and gas industry since before he was even elected,” she told me by e-mail. “He has proposed it in every single one of his budgets, but it has been repeatedly rejected by a Republican legislature that has been lobbied with over $60 million from the oil and gas industry.”) Ellen Gerhart, a sixty-three-year-old retired schoolteacher with long white hair, is a local protester with little confidence in government protections. I met her recently at her home, in Huntingdon, where she lives on a steep dirt lane known as Ellen’s Way. She had recently spent two months in jail for protesting the pipeline. She’d spent seven days in solitary confinement and waged a hunger strike, remaining silent and refusing to answer any questions posed to her. As a result, she was placed on suicide watch. When I arrived, Gerhart donned a pair of hiking boots and took me out to see the pipeline site that runs along three of her twenty-seven acres of white pine and shagbark hickory. “My sister says she always knew I’d do something like this, ever since I read ‘Silent Spring’ in high school,” she told me. Gerhart, like Rachel Carson, grew up in an industrial river town near Pittsburgh. Seeking quiet, she and her husband moved out to the woods thirty-five years ago. Then, in 2015, a representative from E.T.P.—called a “land man”—came to their home and offered them fourteen thousand dollars to use three acres of their property for the Mariner East pipeline. If they refused, he told them, the company had the right to take the land under eminent domain. The Gerharts couldn’t understand how E.T.P. could seize private land, so they refused the money and fought the company in court. But in January, 2016, a county judge ruled in the company’s favor and ordered the Gerharts to stay off the three acres. advertisement If it weren’t for the Gerharts’ thirty-one-year-old daughter, Elise, who’d recently moved back to Pennsylvania from Northern California, the family might have backed down. Instead, the mother and daughter mobilized a protest, calling through social media for like-minded individuals to show up on their land and stop the company from cutting down their trees in advance of laying the pipeline. At six o’clock one morning, in March, 2016, Elise and a handful of other protesters clipped themselves into harnesses suspended forty-five feet in the air from the pines. When men with chainsaws arrived, Elise shouted down that if they cut down any of the trees, she would plummet to the ground. Over the past two and a half years of the conflict, Gerhart has been arrested three times and jailed twice, mostly for violating the court order and going onto the easement to block heavy machinery. Recently, she attempted to create an intolerable stink for the workers by pouring a mixture of rancid milk, rotten eggs, and Tabasco sauce (to discourage animals from eating it) over a pile of logs along the pipeline, and by hanging empty cat-food cans from the trees. She was cited for bear baiting, a charge that is still pending. As we walked a half mile through her woods, which were littered with remnants from the battle—including a mess tent and a green banner announcing solidarity with the Rojava revolution in Kurdish Syria—she pointed out the places where she’d poured her noxious brew. “No one said I had to make their jobs comfortable,” she told me. When we arrived at the bright-orange fence that marked the beginning of the easement, we caught the attention of five bearded pipeline workers in yellow vests and white hard hats. They’d already succeeded in placing the pipeline in the ground, and were currently working with three earthmovers and a bulldozer to remediate the land. The workers eyed her warily; one walked closer, carrying a camera and snapping pictures of us, and then picked up a phone, as if to call for backup. Gerhart noted somewhat gleefully that there was nothing he could do. We were standing on her property, and she was still allowed in this stretch of the woods. The company had employed a security firm that kept guards stationed by the Gerharts’ house, and someone had followed Elise to work, posted pictures of her online, and called her an eco-terrorist on a shadowy Facebook page called PA Progress. (The Gerharts currently have a suit in federal court against the page’s alleged creator, as well as against Energy Transfer Partners and others for violating their right to protest.) The family received death threats from people living nearby. Only the day before, Gerhart told me, workers had removed the two surveillance towers surrounding her home, but a series of blue and black signs warning visitors that they were being filmed and recorded still ran along the orange fence. Late that afternoon, as the sun dropped behind the pine ridge, I sat with Gerhart and Elise around a kitchen table that was handmade by Gerhart’s eighty-seven-year-old husband, Steve, and carved with their names. I wondered if the Gerharts considered their battle a victory. After all, the pipeline was in the ground, and would soon be flowing with explosive liquids. Elise had hoped that they might be able to halt the company entirely, but her mother was more pragmatic. “We never intended to stop them,” she said. “We wanted to slow them down. They thought they’d be through here in three months and it took three years.” In the region, which locals call Pennsyltucky, there had been little chance of blocking the pipeline through politics. Seventy-three per cent of the county’s votes had gone to Trump—though, because of high poverty rates and low education rates, only a small proportion of the population actually voted. “People around here, for the most part, don’t get involved with politics,” Elise said. “A lot of people don’t vote because they don’t see value in it, because they haven’t been valued by those people who have been in those positions of power.” The protest was really a strategy to call attention to what the company was doing, which allowed people farther east along the pipeline, in wealthier and more densely populated places like Chester County, the time to organize. They’d taken their stand to draw the attention of people like Danielle Friel Otten, who had more means to fight than climbing trees.

The next morning, I visited Ralph Blume, a seventy-eight-year-old gun-shop owner who was sporting a thick gray beard and a blue button-down that was labelled “U.S. NAVY.” His land sits sixty miles east of Huntingdon along the pipeline, midway between the Gerharts’ camp and Friel Otten’s suburban neighborhood. As I drove there, I passed villages with names like Burnt Cabins, which were full of old brick homes set close to the roadside. The entrance to Blume’s Gunshop, in his old garage, was marked by a sign covered in pink hearts that read, “DEFEND WHAT YOU LOVE, RESIST MARINER EAST.” The walls and shelves were lined with shotguns, pink plastic stun guns designed for a woman’s purse, and water bottles filled with thick orange sediment from Blume’s tap. “I fought for this country,” Blume told me. “Then I came home and they’re taking my land.” Blume is a Navy veteran, and lives with his wife, Doris. Three years ago, Energy Transfer Partners started digging on their land against Blume’s opposition, and Blume claims that the company ruined their well. Blume drove me on his yellow and green John Deere gator from his garage to the trailer where he lives, and opened the tap to show me the foul-smelling sediment that flows out. Blume and his wife were also furious that the workers had dug up their hayfield to install the pipe. Although the workers were gone, it was easy to see where the pipe lay: a yellow band of weeds, called foxtail, ran through the green hay where the earth had been replaced. “I won’t be able to grow anything here for a decade,” he said. Doris couldn’t walk, owing to age and infirmity, and relied on the gator to navigate the farm. If there was a leak in the pipe, she wouldn’t be able to trek half a mile upwind to escape the blast zone. advertisement Blume lived in a less remote region than the Gerharts, and was slightly more hopeful about the prospect of opposing the pipeline through electoral politics. A local candidate running for state legislature named Emily Best had visited him. “She’s more of a farm girl than a politician,” he told me. Best had served in the Peace Corps in West Africa, and had a passion for agriculture. She was also the first Democrat to run in their conservative county in twelve years, and it was highly unlikely that she’d win. When I reached Best, she told me that she was running, in part, to give people a political choice for the first time in more than a decade. “We need to reinvigorate democracy in this area,” she said. “Even here, in this very conservative district, people realize that the economy is rigged against them.” Blume doesn’t think of himself as a Democrat. “I think I'm registered as a Republican,” he said. But he’d voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Presidential election—among only thirty-eight per cent of voters in his county to do so. Blume didn’t like Clinton’s policies, but he voted for her as a marketing strategy. “She would want to take guns,” he told me. “And as soon as you say, ‘You can’t have it,’ everybody wants one.” His best sales booms had occurred under the Clinton and Obama Administrations, amid fears that they would ban firearms. Blume didn’t think that a Democratic upset was likely, but he liked Best, and he wanted to see her party win, both to help him sell guns and to block the pipeline.