Fracking gets its own Occupy movement

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This is a story about water, the land surrounding it and the lives it
sustains. Clean water should be a right: there is no life without it.
New York is what you might call a “water state.” Its rivers and their
tributaries only start with the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, the Delaware
and the Susquehanna. The best known of its lakes are Great Lakes Erie
and Ontario, Lake George and the Finger Lakes. Its brooks, creeks and
trout streams are fishermen’s lore.

Far below this rippling wealth there’s a vast, rocky netherworld called
the Marcellus Shale. Stretching through southern New York, Pennsylvania,
Ohio and West Virginia, the shale contains bubbles of methane, the
remains of life that died 400 million years ago. Gas corporations have
lusted for the methane in the Marcellus since at least 1967 when one of
them plotted with the Atomic Energy Agency to explode a nuclear bomb
to unleash it. That idea died, but it’s been reborn in the form of a
technology invented by Halliburton Corporation: high-volume horizontal
hydraulic fracturing—“fracking” for short.

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