Questions on Fracking - Essay Example

Teacher Describe the process of Fracking. Fracking is also known as hydraulic fracturing. It involves fracture stimulation whereshale gas drilling companies come to an area, buy up drilling rights from landowners, cut new roads and raze patches of land. It disturb natural environments by drilling holes vertically down and then horizontally under while using huge amount of water and chemical in the process in addition to the volatile compounds it emits into the atmosphere.2. Who benefits from Fracking?

Oil corporations and big business are the one who enjoy the benefits of fracking. They are so big that they can impose it on us that often people accept it as a way of life.3. Who pays? (What are the environmental and social costs of Fracking?) It is the community and common individual who pay for the environmental and social cost of fracking. The process of fracking employs high pressure jets of water to fracture rock and release natural gas. This process consumes a lot of water and dries the water source in the community.

Although it can be argued that the overall impact of fracking on reservoir is smaller compared to agriculture and homeowner use, it local impact can be severe. For example, in the Upper Trinity Groundwater Conservation District (UTGCD) west of Fort Worth, the share of groundwater used by frackers was 40 percent in the first half of 2011, up from 25 percent in 2010. If this will continue unabated, it will not be long that fracking will dry up our water reserves where we no longer have water to use because fracking dried it up.

The social cost of fracking involves disturbing the peace and serenity in the community where noise from the digging stresses us and then leaving the land pockmarked with drill pads with the air no longer as fresh before because it has been polluted with volatile organic compounds.4. If we believe that fracking is harmful, what can people do about stopping it?People can do something about fracking by employing Prof. Tamotsu’s conflict theory that could bring about social change. Today, we are confronted with values and norms of which we are a part but never agreed nor participated with it.

The classic example is fracking. We do not want it nor participated in it but it is there imposed on us by big companies. Normally, we would just accept it as fact of life because we do not like conflict nor do we feel empowered to make change. Not so According to Prof. Shibutani, modern pluralist society, including us have different and even conflicting alternatives either to conform or overcome a one-sided emphasis of development which in this case, fracking that provides energy but destroys our environment and way of life.

Instead of being passive and just accepting it as an acceptable norm, we can gather and actively pursue to minimize if not totally ban the use of fracking. One pluralist alternative is to bombard our legislators to minimize if not totally ban the use of fracking because it harms the community and environment. In turn, our legislators will be forced to craft laws that have a tougher regulation against fracking so that its unabated use will be stopped. And all of this can happen because we exercise the better collective alternative of Prof.

Shibutani’s theory of Social Change. We are not as helpless as we think we are.