Extractive industries like fracking or coal mining wreak havoc on the environment and on the health of neighboring communities, yet research into local attitudes toward these industries is far from finding the consistent opposition to their activities that their extreme destructiveness seems to warrant and suggests that support for them may even increase with geographic proximity. This study inquires into the ideological priors of so-called fenceline communities in southwestern Pennsylvania that may be handing the local coal and natural gas industries their “social license to operate.” Methods include in-depth interviews with residents, supplemented with interviews with staff members at local grassroots environmental groups, participant observation of the local fossil fuel permitting process, and an analysis of relevant government documents. I find that by far the most coherent and prevalent ideological narrative that residents draw on to make sense of the local fossil fuel industry presence is one that is key to justifying capitalist land development more broadly that I will be calling the growth ethic, which at its core rests on the belief that economic growth is the only legitimate benchmark for determining the value of land use. This dissertation’s central claim is that local buy-in to the growth ethic contributes to undermine the ability of fenceline communities to resist the local fossil fuel industry by making it more difficult to frame its activities as illegitimate.