SALFORD, England — Just a few yards from the messy camper van where he now spends his nights, Hytham Chlouk points through some winter-stricken trees at what he calls “the death star.”
It’s a giant derrick that rises high in a clearing behind a perimeter of fences topped with razor wire. To the company that runs the deep-bore drill inside the structure, it offers a potential gateway to lower natural gas prices in energy-hungry Britain. But to Chlouk, it’s a death knell for England’s picture-postcard countryside.
“This is the selling of Great Britain,” Chlouk said, peering out from behind a pair of glasses and a mop of brown dreadlocks. “I don’t want my beautiful country destroyed. I’d hate for it to be like some places in America that look like alien landing zones.”
Chlouk is one of a band of dedicated activists determined to keep Britain free of what they see as a plague that has blighted parts of the U.S. and other countries. Their enemies are the corporations eager to start digging deep into the earth to suck up trapped gas through hydraulic fracturing of shale deposits, or fracking.
A few nations and some American states and cities have put a hold on the practice because of its possible deleterious effects on the environment, such as contamination of groundwater.
But nowhere does public opposition seem as tenacious and as vocal as in Britain, where the fracking industry, heartily backed by the Conservative-led government, is still in an embryonic stage. Companies are lining up for permits to drill exploratory wells, prospecting for rich and accessible seams of gas-laden shale across the country.
The deep-seated hostility is rooted in peculiarly British characteristics and experiences. One is the near-religious reverence among many Brits for the countryside, which makes them especially zealous in driving away any threats to their “green and pleasant land” of hills and sheep and hedgerows, whose beauty has inspired poets and soldiers at war.
Then there were the literally jarring events of the spring of 2011, when two small earthquakes struck near the seaside town of Blackpool in northwestern England. The larger registered a mere 2.3 in magnitude, but the tremors were big news on this seismically docile island, and even more so after government-appointed independent experts concluded that they had been caused by a new fracking operation in the area.
Now environmental groups are out to create a shake-up of their own, to make fracking publicly unwelcome and politically nonviable with protests that include campaigns to heckle and harass those involved.
