Contemporary American literature that addresses the social and cultural
anxieties about the impending climate crisis, by focusing on the environmental
threats caused by fossil fuel extraction, can be understood as breaking a long
silence fostered by dominant discourses of prosperity that these energy regimes
promised. While climate change speculative literature tends to concentrate
on their long-term nefarious consequences in imagined dystopic futures,
contemporary petro- and hydro-fracking narratives focused on the present,
frequently represent the damage caused by fossil fuel extraction not only to the
environment but to also the equally vulnerable human body. This article, using
insights from energy humanities and ecocriticism, discusses how this dissolution
of the nature/body boundary is represented in two texts, Caridad Svich‘s play
The Way of Water (2012) and Jennifer Haigh’s novel Heat and Light (2016), which
directly address oil production and shale gas extraction. It will examine how their
narrative strategies invest in the trope of eco-sickness developed by Heather
Houser (2016), to render visible and intimate the frequently hidden costs of fossil
fuel energy systems, signaling how human corporality is inseparable from the
environment.