47 VOL. 75, NO. 1, SPRING 2016 Human Organization, Vol. 75, No. 1, 2016 Copyright © 2016 by the Society for Applied Anthropology 0018-7259/16/010047-12$1.70/1 “Do you want to see the mine,” asks Harlan? Of course, I reply. Harlan fetches his boots. Joined by his wife, Edith, we walk across a farm ield, our trajectory curving slightly with rows of ledgling Roundup Ready soybeans. At the end of the ield, we push through several feet of brush before reaching a ridge that overlooks the open-pit mine. Harlan deiantly hikes past the thin wooden stakes marking his property line. He climbs to the edge of the pit, striking the pose of a seventy- something mountaineer who has just conquered an imposing summit. I join him but do not ascend as high. Edith remains a few feet behind as we peer deep into the mine. We look out at what had once been farmland worked by their family for generations. For over thirty years, Harlan and Edith had operated a successful dairy operation with around forty cows, small and increasingly uncompetitive by today’s standards. In thirty years, they left their farm for only one night so that Harlan could stand in a friend’s wedding. They nurtured their animals and their land with a combination of hard work and love. “We took care of the cows and the cows took care of us,” Harlan explains. Nearing retirement in the Thomas Pearson is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. He is currently writing a book about frac sand min- ing, tentatively titled When the Hills Are Gone: Frac Sand Mining and the Struggle for Place, Community, and Democracy, and under contract with the University of Minnesota Press. A Faculty Research Initiative grant from UW-Stout provided inancial support for the research discussed in this article. The author wishes to acknowledge Daniel Renfrew, Barbara Flom, and Stephanie Hintz for providing valuable feedback and support. Frac Sand Mining and the Disruption of Place, Landscape, and Community in Wisconsin Thomas W. Pearson Driven by hydraulic fracturing, sand mining has expanded rapidly in western Wisconsin, with hundreds of mining operations appearing over the past several years. Silica sand is extracted from hills and then shipped by rail around the country, where it is pumped under high pressure with water and chemicals into oil and gas wells. An often overlooked dimension of America’s unconventional energy boom, the growth of sand mining in Wisconsin has been incredibly divisive, generating wealth for some lucky landowners while creating new environmental hazards for others. This article documents how people experience mining-related changes and conlicts, drawing on ethnographic interviews with residents living next to mines, processing plants, and hauling routes. While not everyone experiences mining equally, I argue that people grappling with a sudden inlux of mining activity suffer signiicant disruptions that erode their sense of place and belonging. These experiences, however, are rarely taken into account by policymakers, local oficials, or others seeking to evaluate the costs and beneits of frac sand mining. This omission underscores the need for ethnographic research to deepen our understanding of how people are impacted by new resource extraction industries. Key words: natural resource extraction, unconventional energy, social trauma, environment, place early 2000s, they sold part of their land, along with their original home and farm buildings, to an aspiring farmer and then built a new house on their remaining property up the hill. Ten years later, however, the neighbor was presented with an offer he couldn’t refuse: an out-of-state investment irm wanted to purchase the land at six times the going rate to harvest sand from the property. He sold, signed a nondis- closure agreement, and retired out of state. The town lacked zoning and, at that time, regulatory ordinances addressing mining, and few knew that multiple mining interests were buying up land in the community. Now the land is gone, swallowed by a massive hole in the ground. We watch as a solitary construction excavator sits amid a sea of sand, patiently waiting for a dump truck to ap- proach. The truck will haul the sand to a processing plant and then to rail cars. One truckload at a time, sandstone bedrock fashioned by hundreds of millions of years of geological pro- cesses will be shipped to oil and gas wells around the country and then forcefully injected back into the earth. Innovations in oil and gas production known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, have spurred unconventional drilling in several parts of the country. The surge in oil and gas drilling, however, has also fueled an unprecedented growth of sand mining in Wisconsin. Mining companies extract a special type of silica sand unique to western Wisconsin, ship massive quantities of this so-called frac sand around the country, and then pump truckloads of it, along with water and other chemicals, into oil or gas wells. Deep underground, the granules prop open splintered shale bedrock, releasing valuable hydrocarbons.