Maryann Lesert is as connected to the natural world as she is to her writing students at Grand Rapids Community College. She teaches composition courses including creative writing, but perhaps closest to her heart is an environmental literature course, a survey of American environmental literature from Henry David Thoreau to the present.
Her newest novel, Land Marks, may find itself on required reading lists for similar courses thanks to its deep dive into the costs to both humans and the more-than-human world of High Volume Horizontal Hydraulic Fracking. Most people know it as fracking, a means of extracting gas and oil from shale rock deep below the surface of the earth.
Fracking is controversial at best, with Michigan at one point one of the potential fracking epicenters thanks to its deep deposits of oil and gas. Frack well sites continue to operate around the state, along with a number of closed sites wreaking their own havoc on the environment thanks to chemical leftovers and ruined landscapes.
“Connection to place is very important to me,” said Lesert. “In 2010, the first major pilot hole was drilled on state land, the State-Pioneer in Missaukee County. In 2011, I started keeping an eye on the science and the risks of fracking and in 2012 started going out to every active frack well site.”
The State-Pioneer was the first high- volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing well site completed on state land. Turns out that oil and gas companies can lease public land for well sites, and those leases can be bought at twice-yearly auctions.
“Oil and gas companies send the DNR a list of the land they want to lease. I thought public land was protected, but they can buy leases in recreation areas, state games areas, and other public land. Barry County and the Yankee Springs areas became the center for this around 2012,” said Lesert. “Once I became aware of how much land was being leased, I started writing articles for EcoWatch and In These Times about the auctions.”
Lesert began traveling around the state visiting well sites, taking a look at the land before and after the wells were built. She learned about the changes to the land and the people living around the frack well sites. She also attended auctions and watched auction protests, heard people asking questions and not getting answers. She never went to frack well site alone, in part because she wasn’t always greeted nicely or welcomed.
She also put together a presentation called “Fracking in the Forest,” traveling around the state to classes, church groups, township meetings, environmental conferences—anywhere the public wanted information. She did more than 50 events a year for several years.
“I did the public service part in getting the word out, but then I wanted to write the story of the people who are trying to stop fracking. I wanted to write about the activists and the people living with fracking,” said Lesert, who is 61 and lives in Grand Rapids.
Several things came together around the same time that brought Lesert’s second novel to the forefront (she is also author of Base Ten, published in 2009). First came the broken Enbridge pipeline spilling 1.2 million gallons of tar sands oil into Talmadge Creek near Kalamazoo, but Enbridge not cleaning it up thoroughly. Then the divisiveness of public discourse, with people feeling they could only gather if they agreed 100 percent on everything. Instead, she saw all kinds of people gathering around environmental issues such as fracking.
“In 2014 I realized that I might have a novel and decided to write it. A sabbatical allowed me to go back through my journals of when I was visiting frack well sites,” said Lesert. “I wanted to tell the story of the places and people I had come to know who loved their places—rivers, lakes, woods, farmland—and who wished for a way to stop the fracking.”
Land Marks follows the journey of Kate, Brett, Sonya and Mark, plus their teacher Rebecca, as they move from talking about the dangers of fracking to an all-out, statewide protest that includes tree-hanging, Dancing Grandmothers, fake oil spills and small-boat armadas blocking the Straits of Mackinac. Activists gathered at one main camp to prepare for the protest—sleeping in tents, organizing meals, holding classes on things like how to hold the line together when police try to break through, and building camaraderie around a common cause.
“The first part of the book is based on my lived experience. In 2018 as I was writing I decided to bring all the characters together at the camp, but that wasn’t my experience. I realized I didn’t have to write based only on my experiences,” she said.
Lesert adds, “Land Marks is a book about fracking, but it’s more about the power of people when we come together.”
When she was traveling the state visiting well sites a decade ago, there were approximately 50 sites either in drilling or in permitting phases. Now there are 13 active sites and 26 completed sites—sites that have been drilled, fracked, depleted, and plugged.
“I firmly believe that the public protests in Michigan helped slow down the spread of fracking in our state forests,” said Lesert. “We made it more difficult for the oil and gas companies. The public was well educated, standing up in public meetings and asking about earthquakes and other things. That kind of public pressure makes Michigan not as attractive or easy to deal with in terms of getting the permits.”
She’s also seeing the public slowly turning away from fossil fuel and the harm its extraction does. “The public is largely falling out of love with the fossil fuel era. We want to transition to different kinds of energy and are concerned about climate change,” she said.
Lesert is currently working on a novel based on her experience of living with Alzheimer’s disease, which she and her siblings helped her father face before his death in 2009. She’s also got another novel in the works, this time set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, that features deep friendship between two women—the wives of logging and railroad barons— during the time with logging, mining and railroads intersected in the UP.
In her roles as writer, teacher and activist, Lesert knows one thing for sure: “The way we treat the natural world is the way we treat ourselves.”
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