Tom Wilber

Tom Wilber has spent years interviewing key players and local residents on all sides of the Marcellus Shale issue. Running from southern West Virginia through eastern Ohio, across central and northeast Pennsylvania and into New York, the Marcellus Shale formation underlies a sparsely populated region that features striking landscapes, critical watersheds, and a struggling economic base. It also contains one of the world's largest supplies of natural gas, a resource that has been dismissed as inaccessible until recently. Technological developments that combine horizontal drilling with hydraulic fracturing -- "fracking" -- have removed physical and economic barriers to extracting gas from bedrock deep below the Appalachian basin. Under the Surface is the first book-length journalistic overview of shale gas development and the controversies surrounding it.Tom Wilber has been in the newspaper business for more than 20 years and has written for the Central New York Business Journal and the Watertown Daily Times. For 17 years he worked for the Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin, covering business, health, and environement beats. From 1992 through 2005, he taught various journalism courses at Broome Community College and Binghamton University.Presented in partnership with Baltimore GreenWorks as part of the "Sustainable Speaker Series." Recorded On: Wednesday, June 20, 2012