Not Here, Not Anywhere
Essay by Helen Baczkowska
The natural gas drilled for in fracking is part of an ancient story; it is a story of rocks older than the British Isles, but it is also a tale of the people whose lives have been shaped by their struggle to stop the drilling for the gas. The voices of some campaigners have been recorded for Faultlines, gathered through chance encounters at public meetings, on demonstrations or protest camps; they tell of personal journeys that trace the unfolding narrative of fracking in Britain and of how they had to learn about the technology of gas extraction and about the geology beneath their feet.
The rocks containing the gas are sedimentary shales, formed from older stone weathered and washed into oceans, lakes or swamps; the silt and clay drifted down to a patchy, irregular settling over thousands of years, trapping gases in the faults or flaws and the hollows. Millennia of slumbering followed, sediment compressed by the sediment above, the weight causing lithification, the alchemy of soft deposits turning to rock. Shales can span many ages: north of York and in southern Scotland they are Carboniferous, around three hundred million years old, the same age as most coal seams. These seams too hold natural gas, once a danger to colliers, but now also sought out and drilled. In Sussex, the shales of the Weald date from the Jurassic, around one hundred and fifty million years ago; a time when Stegosaur and Diplodocus moved through forests of ferns, while warm seas spiralled with ammonites.
Fracking is a word condensed from ‘hydraulic fracturing’, a process in which shale rock is splintered by liquid, usually water thickened with chemical agents, injected under high pressure. Grains of silica sand or aluminium oxide, proppants to the industry, hold the cracks open when the pressure is relieved, allowing the release of the trapped natural gas to a surface wellhead. Fracking is one of several ‘unconventional’ methods of gas extraction techniques developed to reach inaccessible reserves and although carried out on a small scale in the UK since the 1970s, the proposals to develop these unconventional methods on an industrial scale were at the heart of concerns raised across the UK in the early twenty-first century.
For many communities, encounters with fracking started with seismic surveys of shales, where sound waves bounced off underground rock form detailed images of local geology and locate hidden reservoirs of gas. The mapping out of license blocks, delineating areas suitable for fracking, followed, along with submissions of planning applications for drill sites and haulage roads. As the planning applications began, so too did the voices of dissent, growing louder into demonstrations and objections to planning decisions, to protest camps and direct action.
As I listen to recordings of the interviews, recorded by photographer John Volynchook, I hear heartbeats of my own past, entwined as it is with the history of environmental resistance in Britain. Over twenty-five years ago, in the south of England, I watched a hill called Twyford Down destroyed to make way for a motorway. The Down was one of the most protected landscapes in England, designated for its flower-rich grassland, ancient monuments and breath-taking beauty, yet, over two years, tonne after tonne of chalk was gouged out and spread on the water meadows below, levelling the land for the carriageways. Despite the loss of Twyford Down, the protests there gave rise to a confident and radical environmental movement, which had to swiftly learn the language of campaigning and the phrases of the planning process. When we lived on the land and took direct action against the motorway construction, we acquired the vocabulary of squatting law and eviction, of arrest and injunction, bail and imprisonment.
Fracking started to attract public attention when seismic surveys began in 2010, with the northwest of England becoming a focal point for growing unease with the industry. License blocks here stretch northwards from Merseyside to Blackpool, along a coastline of towns, such as Formby, Southport and Lytham St Annes, with beaches, sand dunes and salt marsh ebbing into the Irish Sea. The blocks reach inland along the rivers Ribble, Alt and Wyre and eastwards across the Lancashire Plain towards the Pennines, the high rocky backbone of north England.
Kirkham is one of many villages inland from Blackpool and scattered on the West Lancashire Plain. Claire was interviewed in the front room of her family home, close to the farm worked by her husband; a plate of biscuits on the table and two dogs asleep on the floor. Claire smiles slowly as she describes a rural area that is ‘quiet – no industry, no heavy plant or machinery’. She speaks of how the farm is reliant on ‘clean air and soil and the grass-fed cows’. Claire first became aware of fracking in 2014 when a well was proposed just half a mile from her children’s primary school; her initial concern was that the planning application failed to mention the school. Joining with other local residents, she became determined to find out more and helped form the Preston New Road Action Group, named after the location of the nearby drill site. The group started by reading ‘every bit of paper we could get our hands on’, discovering that ‘there are over eight hundred peer-reviewed papers citing harm from fracking.’
In Formby, close to the coast north of Liverpool, Simon also began by researching fracking before openly opposing it. In his interview, he talks of the pinewoods that lie between the town and sand dunes and sea, woods renowned for their rare colony of red squirrels. Simon moved north from London to be closer to his partner’s family and describes his life as revolving around work and family, ‘until I got a leaflet through the door about the seismic surveys’. He speaks seriously, the voices of his children rippling through the background:
I’m not the sort of person just to take information I’m given as being correct…the more I read into what would come off the back of a seismic survey, there was really no option other than to get involved and help set up the local group.
As more surveys and applications for fracking came forward, opposition groups were established in communities across the UK, from central Scotland to England’s south coast. These were frequently founded by a handful of people sharing their concerns; some became social media platforms for sharing news, whilst others went on to hold public meetings to share information and generate ideas for opposing the applications. Some groups developed links with the local press and worked up detailed, informed objections to the plans, sometimes raising thousands of pounds to mount a legal challenge. By 2014, there was a network of groups providing mutual aid and support across the land.
Lesley helped set up one of the first opposition groups, Ribble Estuary Against Fracking, based in Southport, a Victorian seaside resort north of Liverpool; the group was founded in 2011, after Cuadrilla moved its fracking drill south of the Ribble to near the village of Banks, close to the town. Lesley describes herself as a ‘cleaner and home help’ in her mid-50s, who had ‘never been involved in anything to do with the environment’; she admits to surprising herself when she started ‘organising a public meeting and writing a letter to the local paper’, laughing as she says ‘I didn’t even know what outreach was’.
Disseminating information on the possible risks of the industry was a primary aim at this stage. Gillian, in East Lancashire, worked with her local group, Frack Free Chorley, to run information events:
We talk about the water, about the geology of the land and the fault lines that run under Lancashire and we also talk about the health impacts of the chemicals, the methane gas, the permanent noise, the lorries going backwards and forwards, the fact that they will have to put in the infrastructure of roads.
Gillian, in her long skirt and warm boots, was interviewed on the edge of woodland located within a license block; a few birds sang, although winter was not quite over:
You look at the countries where they have had hydraulic fracking and you can see the devastation on the land, the wildlife, the environment, the trees, the soil. Where are you going to get your food from? It is a toxic nightmare.
Although interviewed separately, the campaigners are all versed in the lasting changes fracking has wrought in other parts of the world. They talk about impacts on rock formations and soil, the research they have carried out into risks of pollution to air and water. Lesley speaks about the damage to ‘the elements that we need to nourish our lives’. There is noticeable distress in her voice when she speaks of fracking as intentionally causing ‘a trembling and tearing apart of the fabric of our Earth’. Like other interviewees, she mentions the increase in earthquakes that have been reported in countries where fracking is already established. These possibly result from a build-up of stress caused by injecting fluid into faulted rocks deep underground, with tremors lasting for months after operations have ceased.
The threat of earthquakes was the touchpaper for Lesley’s concerns, when she first read about fracking in a magazine. She recalls experiencing earthquakes when she lived in Japan and how her concern led to ‘long nights following different links and finding more and more information’, becoming ‘more and more disturbed that this was going to take place four miles from where I live’. She recognises that the impact of tremors in a small and densely populated country like the UK could be great. This is compounded by geology that is more faulted and unstable than in many other countries.
In 2011, a cluster of earth tremors followed an early attempt at fracking near Blackpool, leading to a temporary halt to drilling there while the industry investigated. For campaigners, however, impacts on geology were only part of the picture and their concerns about water pollution focus on the fluids used in fracturing rocks. These can contain a mixture of chemicals, including arsenic, benzene, formaldehyde, mercury and lead. Claire cites an industry report that admits to very little of the fluid returning to the surface after drilling, ‘so when we inject the water in there, most of it does not come back.’ ‘No one knows’, she explains, ‘where the water goes or where the final resting place is.’
Any contaminated water returning to the surface is frequently removed from drill sites in lorries and interviewees again draw on evidence from the rest of the world when they mention the inevitability of an accident. They stress once more that this time it will be in a smaller, more densely populated country. Simon asks:
What happens if a HGV carrying out wastewater tips over in one of the ditches on the Moss…and gets into the water system? How’s that going to affect the farmers and the agriculture?
‘The Moss’ Simon speaks of is the flat, fertile farmland north of Liverpool and inland from Southport; it is a watery landscape of ditches and dark, peat soils drained from marshland over centuries. Small towns and villages on the Moss include Burscough, which is home to a community farm producing food in what Neil, its founder, claims is ‘probably some of the best soil in the world for growing vegetables’. This is ‘the land that fed Liverpool during the Industrial Revolution’, he says as he sits, dressed in work clothes and boots, sheltered from the wind in a polytunnel. The plastic of the tunnel flaps as he explains that he wants to put in a borehole for water on the farm, but worries that the aquifer will be contaminated by nearby fracking:
What happens if they have to drill through the aquifer to get to the shale gas?
Fracking will use lots and lots of water, which has got to come from somewhere and then it’s all going to be pumped underground and either left there or disposed of.
Barbara C. is ‘absolutely appalled, as a nurse, about the effect on local health’ and draws on evidence obtained from the USA, which has pursued fracking as a low-cost source of gas. Barbara has researched the water pollution and airborne emissions associated with fracking, which include sulphur oxide, nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide and particulates. She speaks confidently, but with concern:
I know it will be insidious, it will take a few years, but it will be devastating. It will be kidney failure, cancer, birth defects.
Like many of those interviewed, Barbara believes that the UK government ‘knows all these things will happen’, but is ignoring the evidence in the search for cheap energy.
Unease over fracking proposals has strengthened an awareness of environmental issues among the campaigners, including the connection between climate change and the extraction of fossil fuels such as natural gas. Barbara stresses that gas from fracking is not without its impact on climate change:
The authorities didn’t take into account that there was massive methane emissions, from when they first drilled and for many years afterwards…all wells leak.
The need to both reduce demand for energy and increase the use of renewable sources is mentioned by Ann, who teaches environmental science in Bolton, a former cotton mill town north of Manchester. She speaks passionately about the industrial heritage of her hometown and the ‘hard lives’ of previous generations, but also with a fondness for growing up there, exploring hidden streams on the edge of the town and picking berries with her father, developing an interest in wildlife that continues today in her volunteer work on a local nature reserve.
Ann says ‘we should be thinking about phasing’ out fossil fuels, ‘not finding ways, dirty ways of getting them’. Ann has been aware of climate change for a long time, refurbishing her house to be as energy efficient as possible:
We’ve got a responsibility as one of the biggest carbon producers to look at our consumption and at least consider ways we can minimise the impact. We can still have a good quality of life using a lot less resources.
Simon in Formby talks of creating jobs in renewable energy industries rather than fracking. He asks why governments and companies are not investing more in renewables, ‘when the sun is always going to be in the sky. The wind is always going to blow’.
Halsall village, on the Moss near Formby, is home to Maureen, who sums up the words of many when she says:
It starts off being not in my backyard, but goes a long way further than that once you inform yourself. It’s not ‘don’t frack Lancashire’ – it’s not here, not anywhere.
Maureen’s words also speak for others for whom campaigning on fracking has been a personal journey of growing environmental awareness. Another Barbara, Barbara R., talks of going from ‘being totally oblivious of environmental issues to being very aware’, as her research took her from knowing ‘it was going to affect me directly’ to realising ‘just how devastating it actually is’. Barbara is part of Roseacre Awareness Group, representing residents from Roseacre near Blackpool who oppose fracking not just in the UK, but across the world. In 2015, Barbara attended the United Nations Climate Change conference in Paris and laughs as she says:
I’ve gone from a typical, Tory background…to being a bit of an eco-warrior…once your eyes are opened, you can’t shut them again.
Alongside impacts on climate, on earth and water and air, interviewees also mention the raw shock of fracked landscapes in the United States, New Zealand and Australia, where aerial photographs of mountains and forests show rough grids of new roads and the pale, stripped squares of well sites stretching out across green horizons. Claire from Preston New Road describes how the wells quickly run out of gas, saying ‘to make this economically viable, they are going to have to industrialise the whole area’. Her point is reinforced by Tony, from Ribble Estuary Against Fracking; in his soft, lilting voice he describes the short-lived nature of each new well, with its access tracks and reservoir for fracking fluids, resulting in ‘thousands of redundant wells’:
We are talking twenty or thirty years ahead, having gas fields all over our country – an industrialised landscape.
Concern over the ‘industrialisation’ of landscapes formed part of the opposition to coal bed methane extraction mounted in Central Scotland where Maria was interviewed alongside her friends Fiona and Carol. Coal bed methane is natural gas trapped in coal seams rather than shales, but the process of extraction and impacts are similar to fracking, involving pumped water and often underground explosions to release the gas. The voices of the three women weave in and out of each other as they recall their part in the growing campaign against unconventional gas extraction in Scotland. This followed a planning application submitted in 2012, close to their homes in Falkirk. Not far away, the flares of Grangemouth oil refinery dominate the skyline on the edge of the Firth of Forth, a wide tidal estuary reaching westwards across central Scotland from the grey North Sea. An arm of the Ineos Corporation owns both the refinery and the extraction licenses that pattern maps of the land between Falkirk, Stirling and the new town of Cumbernauld.
The threat mentioned by Tony and Claire, of many wells spread out across the landscape, also concerns Maria and she outlines how ‘every application is considered on its own merits’, with the ‘cumulative impact’ barely considered. Fiona picks up this thread, describing how the companies ‘would be putting in yearly planning applications for another twelve years, leaving the local residents ‘continually fighting the next set of wells’. They outline how the initial application alone was for fourteen new well pads with twenty-two new wells, pipelines to connect the sites, a gas processing and water treatment facility, plus a waste outfall into the Firth of Forth.
Falkirk was once surrounded by coal mining, the fuel for Scotland’s industrial towns shipped along the railways and canals between Glasgow and Edinburgh. Disused mine shafts still run unmapped below houses and streets, adding to concerns about earth tremors. Fiona explains how conflicting views over the value of the landscape became central to the public inquiry held in 2014, after two local councils rejected the initial planning application and the applicant appealed. Fiona says that industry spokespeople argued ‘it’s an industrialised area anyway’, but ‘we don’t see it as being industrialised’. Both Fiona and Maria, speak of how the area has been recovering from the demise coal mining and heavy industry, with new parks, walks and cycleways encouraging people to enjoy being outdoors. They feel that bringing gas extraction into this context is a backward step; their friend Carol believes that that the landscape left in the area:
Is all the more precious…because there is industry we need it all the more…the greenspace and the nature that we do have…skylarks and brown hares.
Fiona discovered the landscape close to Falkirk soon after she moved there, exploring ‘just beyond the housing estate’ on family walks and bicycle rides:
I had no idea this part of central Scotland had these delightful back roads with views of hills beyond…we literally turn a bend and it opens out and there’s fields…a stunning view, with the backdrop in the distance, with the Ochil Hills.
Maria, Fiona and Carol helped build a strong opposition campaign to unconventional gas extraction in Scotland, gaining support from local councils and resulting in a temporary moratorium in 2015, to allow time for further consultation. In October 2017, following the publication of the consultation responses, the Scottish Parliament stated that it does not support the development of any unconventional oil and gas in Scotland; although Ineos attempted to overturn the decision through a legal challenge, the Scottish parliament has so far upheld this position.
In Lancashire, concerns over impacts on the landscape were also core to the local groups’ opposition. Barbara R. from Roseacre talks of being on the point of retiring in 2014 when she ‘got a letter from Cuadrilla’, proposing fracking near her home, shattering her dreams: she ‘wanted to live in the countryside, for the scenery, for the peace and quiet’, hopes of spending time walking, ‘making jam, the Women’s Institute’:
It’s very, very quiet out here, particularly in the summer, all you hear are the birds and you go and stand outside and it is so beautiful and peaceful.
I have actually stood outside my house and I actually cried one morning, ‘cos it was so beautiful and I thought – this is all at risk.
In Barbara’s words and in the other insistent voices, I hear that which cannot be captured on the graphs of impacts, benefits or costs used by the industry and planning authorities. Interviewees speak of their connection to places that are not the far-flung wilds or high mountains, but instead are the intimate landscapes of the local: of footpaths and tow paths beside canals, the wide blue skies above tended fields and edge lands of valley or woodland close to their homes. Here our eyes are relaxed by the greenery around us, we encounter wildlife, watch streams or clouds or the sea and find space away from cluttered, frenetic lives.
Rachel has been to fracking protests across the northwest and speaks about the impacts on the local landscapes she values. She describes how ‘a peace descends’ when she is walking, how it clears her head and how, despite having travelled widely, she finds the nearby Lake District and even the canal close to home ‘as beautiful as anywhere I’ve seen’. She is a teacher from Newton Le Willows, near St Helen’s; her family life rooted in the north west of England. Rachel talks of the ‘Mucky Mountains’, the local name for a former industrial site that is now a green space near her home. She contrasts the wildlife that has reclaimed this area from industry, with the potential damage to the land from fracking:
The chemicals involved in fracking are too much…it is basically not in anyone’s lifetime that the land can be used again or even safe to be near.
Rachel considers open space vital to human health, stressing ‘we need our green belt, we need the landscape, we need the fresh air’.
In our era of mobility, attachment to place could be viewed with suspicion, associated with a narrow worldview. Yet, the interviews underline what it is that we find in the places we connect with: what it brings us in solace, of being the place where we seek out ourselves, whether it is through working the land, walking or watching it change through the seasons. As Barbara R. says, ‘even people in the cities want to go out and enjoy the countryside’.
The seaside resort of Blackpool, with its bright lights and amusement arcades, lies on the seaward edge of the Fylde. The Fylde itself is an almost square peninsula between the wide sands of Morecambe Bay and the estuary of the Ribble, with the Bowland Fells, a spur of the Pennines, to the east. The river Wyre crosses this flat land of villages and farms and broadens into saltmarsh and sandbanks before reaching the Irish Sea. License blocks cover much of the Fylde, where Pam, from Residents Action on Fylde Fracking, watches each year for the geese, which winter near the coast:
I get a lump in my throat when I see those huge flocks of geese flying in here and here we are, we are about to destroy the land that they fed on in winter.
Pam is also one of many who speak of how events in Lancashire stoked the fires of simmering rage among campaigners. Early in 2016, Lancashire County Council refused permission for fracking at Preston New Road; that October Sajid Javid, then Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, allowed Cuadrilla's appeal against the decision and granted permission for construction of the well head to start. The overruling of the council’s decision led many of those interviewed to question democracy itself. Claire sums up their thoughts:
As a county we said ‘no’, but the Government has taken it out of their control. Democracy is under threat.
Claire relates how in the wake of the planning appeal, local residents ‘started lobbying, we did a petition and a press campaign’, but this led to ‘a lot of attacks from the industry, both verbally and on social media’:
One day, me and my kids were blocked in on a country road by Cuadrilla’s security guards …they were taking pictures and videoing us and followed us for six miles, taking photos.
Following Sajid Javid’s decision, Tony lobbied politicians and the House of Lords; his anger is tangible, aimed at those who wield power, their ‘myopic view’ and the way ‘they treat everyday people as relatively minor’. He encourages us all to ‘sift through the facts’, suggesting we will discover that ‘our politics are nastier than you might of believed’.
Across the Pennies from Lancashire, a similar frustration was felt in Yorkshire, where fracking sites were proposed from the edges of the North Yorkshire Moors National Park to the gentler hills of the nearby Wolds. In October 2012, a subsidiary of Third Energy submitted an application for two new wells alongside a longstanding conventional gas well at Kirby Misperton, south of Pickering on the edge of the Moors.
Eddie grew up in Ryedale, not far from Kirby Misperton and speaks slowly, carefully weighing each word. He describes how the local community challenged the proposals by ‘doing everything that we thought were we supposed to’ within what he calls the ‘normal democratic system’. Over four years, the campaign grew to encompass most of the community; it ended when a judicial review failed and the High Court ruled in favour of fracking, leaving residents feeling ‘incredibly let down’.
The failure of democratic processes to protect land and water and human health created a frustration among the campaigners that resonates with me and the years I spent fighting road-building. Our protests began after planning enquiries and judicial reviews failed to stop roads that threatened communities or wild, green places and led to us setting up protest camps and taking direct action. In a similar way and especially in the wake of the 2016 decision by Sajid Javid, anti-fracking groups across the UK set up camps, forged links with each other and organised demonstrations or blockades at the depots and offices of companies involved in the industry. Weeks of action were advertised, summoning people from far and wide; social media carried reports of people occupying lorries, ‘slow-walking’ in front of construction vehicles to disrupt the building of the drill site and of the involvement of police and of private security guards.
Barbara C. was involved in similar actions in Lancashire and was interviewed at the New Hope camp at Preston New Road; a child, pleased with an ice cream, interrupts as Barbara describes the camp:
It’s an ex-petrol station, but it’s all completely overgrown. It’s got mature trees, a wooded path to go on to the site.
It’s a lovely place to be if it wasn’t for the fracking.
Barbara talks about local support for the camp, of food brought by neighbours anxious to help, of the camaraderie of evenings of shared meals and campfires, singing and guitars, even in the depths of winter. Staying at New Hope saved her money on travelling to protests, allowed her to take part in the early morning blockades and was for her a natural step to take after she become involved in direct action at Preston New Road:
A lorry came along and I dived under the long banner I was holding…there was about ten of us zipped straight in front of the lorry. Three of us sat down…Prior to that I thought we were utterly helpless.
Barbara explains some of the motivations behind continuing the protests, even once construction work was well underway:
We have to protest. We have to make our mark. We can’t do it by just standing at the gate - we get swept away. We can’t do it by slow-walking alone. The press give us absolutely no coverage, but the investors have to know that it is not welcome here.
At Kirby Misperton, the local campaign also embraced what Eddie calls ‘radical action’, which he considers ‘amazing….’cos it is mostly a Conservative community’. Eddie tells of how a ‘little group’ of people occupied a field close to the drill site after the failure of the judicial review in 2016; they established a ‘small camp of tents and caravans’, which ‘over a couple of years’ grew to be ‘quite a bustling community’. Although Eddie has praise for the camp as a ‘social hub’ and for the ‘sense of comradeship’ there, he pauses before calling it ‘the hardest place I have lived’:
Very cold, very wet. The buildings all made out of makeshift materials – reclaimed wood and pallets and stuff. Rats were a problem.
As well as the hardships of merely living, day to day, camps and actions across the country also saw many arrests and in May 2018, Cuadrilla Resources went to court to obtain a temporary injunction against anyone taking or actively supporting action at Preston New Road. This was later made permanent and those who break it face being jailed, fined or having their assets seized.
Fracking started at the Preston New Road drill site in 2019, but was quickly followed by a succession of earth tremors. Increasingly these exceeded a magnitude of 0.5 on the Richter scale, the safety limit set by the UK Oil and Gas Authority. In August, earth tremors of 2.1 and 2.9 occurred; these were considered a ‘red’ event by the Authority, requiring fracking to be stalled for further seismic monitoring.
In November, in the run up to the General Election, fracking in England was halted altogether. The timing of the ban, in the wake of the tremors and as competing political parties vied for votes in northern England, led to much conjecture over the motivation behind it and how long it will last. As I write, in spring 2020, a fragile peace still holds, although applications for fracking are still being submitted.
Despite the current pause in unconventional gas extraction in Scotland and England, years of campaigning have left their mark on those involved. As the stories are told, they tell another tale I recognise, of campaigning taking over lives, putting strain on relationships, of burn out from exhaustion and stress. Maria in Falkirk gave up a year of her life ‘to try and inform communities’, only to face attempted dismissal from work, eventually losing her job of twenty years. She recognises that the campaign has caused friction in her community ‘because obviously some people are for and some people are against it’. Her friend Carol says she had ‘seen the best and the worst of human nature in this period’. Fiona and Maria fall silent as she speaks carefully of how her husband was diagnosed with cancer just before the public inquiry for the Falkirk application:
The last year of my poor husband’s life was dominated by this. He was in a hospice. He died during the public inquiry.
In Lancashire, Barbara C. recounts the consequences of being arrested during an occupation of the worksite. Initially this was on a charge of aggravated trespass, the law used to stop protestors entering private land and disrupting work, but a charge of assault was added when a security guard ‘reckoned he’d got a paper cut from a pamphlet’ she had given him. Unable to afford an appeal, she was suspended from the nursing register for eighteen months. At the age of 63, this caused her to retire unwillingly. Barbara also describes how campaigners have dedicated most of their time to campaigning, so that ‘all the things that we want to do are on hold’.
Eddie hesitates, emotional as he talks of waking from ‘recurring nightmares’ in the year after the protests at Kirby Misperton and of speaking with others who have experienced the same. He mentions the ‘tough’ life on camp as a catalyst for this, but also how leaving the camp every day to protest at the drill site meant always living ‘in this fight or flight confrontational mode’. In a brighter tone he talks of how, in the years since the application for fracking was first submitted, several communities have founded neighbourhood renewable energy schemes ‘turning the energy of opposition into something of creation’.
Fiona in Falkirk also recognises the ‘good things’ gained, of becoming more aware of ‘plastics, pollution, climate change, all these interconnected things’, and about:
The building of new friendships and stronger links between like-minded people in the community.
The resilience the campaigners reveal in their interviews is an act of commitment to the future, to land and community and to less destructive ways of living. It stands in the face of the enormity of human impact on the Earth, in an epoch that scientists call the Anthropocene: a time when human activity is the dominant influence on climate and the environment, written for eternity in the geological record of the planet. It is an age made real in the drilling and shattering of rocks, in the removal of hills.
I write these words in uncertain times, the outcomes and consequences of fracking in the UK still to unfold, the campaigners still vigilant and defiant. Thinking of what might be next in the story, I find myself re-playing the interview with Gillian, recorded on the edge of a wood at the tail end of winter:
Collectively we are little drops of water that on our own can’t do much, but together we are a rising tide.