"It was just like something from Nasa," says Doreen Stopforth,
pointing from the front window of her bungalow to the flat
expanse of cabbages and the River Ribble beyond. One day last
year, an enormous drilling rig materialised in the fields. It
was not the visual blot on their landscape that bothered
Stopforth and other residents in rural Lancashire: it was what
was going on underground. Hesketh Bank was being prepared for
fracking – mining shale gas by injecting water, sand and
chemicals into rocks far below ground. Hydraulic fracturing, or
fracking, is the new bete noire of conservationists, who condemn
it as a dirty and desperate attempt to grab the last fossil
fuels from inaccessible rocks in unsuitable locations. In the
US, where fracking began and has prospered, it was revealed this
month that Matt Damon will star in an anti-fracking film,
following on from the Oscar-nominated documentary Gasland, which
exposed widespread pollution in fracking hotspots such as
Pennsylvania. But North American horror st