Hardening and Hollowing Out Private Property: Rentiership, Dispossession, and Planetary Extraction in the Marcellus Shale

Southwestern Pennsylvania (SWPA) has long been an energy extractive periphery, continuously remade through cycles of dispossession and accumulation. Here we examine the changing dynamics of private property in these cycles and its central role in the latest phase of extraction—unconventional oil and gas development (UOGD). Drawing from literature on extractive dispossessions and rent circulation, we argue that UOGD has resulted in the “hardening and hollowing out” of property rights in SWPA. Unlike past extractive phases, landowners profit from UOGD primarily by renting their land, which hardens formal aspects of property rights. Yet, the environmental degradation of UOGD has left many feeling they have lost the landscape they knew, hollowing out communities. Residents' experiences, gathered through focus groups and interviews, demonstrate how geographies of planetary extraction are experienced in SWPA as contradictory processes of rentiership and dispossession.