What am I doing in this handbasket, and why is it headed downhill so fast? Probably it's the gravity of the situation and/or because I'm in the wake of an enormous mad bull, aka Big Oil, charging recklessly ahead of me. In any event, people scatter to get out of the way of this rabid, overwhelming mass of bull, although most people just ignore it. Vision is impaired by a hail of words and a blizzard of $100 bills spilling out of the back end of this humongous monster.
Fracking is a good thing for those of us who like oil in our crankcases and gas in our tanks, but for the people who live in proximity of a well and must endure the smell, noise, light, polluted water and air, plus the rumbling and shaking of the ground from trucks and heavy equipment day and night, not so much.
That's a bothersome perturbation to say the least, but so is the loss of millions of gallons of fresh water. I cannot comprehend that in this day and age of mind-bending technology we can land a truck on Mars, billions of people can talk on their phones at the same time, we can produce electricity from buoys bobbing up and down on the ocean but we can't figure out how to filter, recycle and purify fracking fluid.
Here's a hint: The demand for US oil and gas in tandem with incalculable sums of money stoked by greed and devil-may-care attitudes all contributed to the phenomenon of all the above far outpacing the speed of technology and ecological concerns.
We wouldn't think of throwing up a nuclear power plant in a couple of months and then waiting to see if there are any safety concerns, so why would we buy up millions of acres of land, pop up thousands of fracking wells and then wait and see how the activity affects people, wildlife, agriculture, wetlands and other ecological concerns?
For an interesting study, read "The Boom," by Russell Gold, and "The Tyranny of Oil" by Antonia Juhasz.