Includes bibliographical references (pages 179-187) and index.

Oil and gas development -- A brief overview of natural gas drilling in Texas -- Activists' concerns about health -- A lack of competent guardians -- Reluctant activists -- Epistemic privilege -- Performative environmentalism -- (In)visibility in the gas field. When natural gas drilling moves into an urban or a suburban neighborhood, a two-hundred-foot-high drill appears on the other side of a back yard fence and diesel trucks clog a quiet two-lane residential street. Children seem to be having more than the usual number of nosebleeds. There are so many local cases of cancer that the elementary school starts a cancer support group. In this book, Jessica Smartt Gullion examines what happens when natural gas extraction by means of hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," takes place not on wide-open rural land but in a densely populated area with homes, schools, hospitals, parks, and businesses. Gullion focuses on fracking in the Barnett Shale, the natural-gas--rich geological formation under the Dallas--Fort Worth metroplex. She gives voice to the residents -- for the most part educated, middle class, and politically conservative -- who became reluctant anti-drilling activists in response to perceived environmental and health threats posed by fracking. --Publisher.