Poole, Amanda. Review of Fractivism: Corporate Bodies and Chemical Bonds by Sara Wylie. Conservation & Society 16, no. 4 (2018): 525-26. https://doi.org/10.4103/cs.cs_18_75.
As unconventional forms of fossil fuel extraction transform landscapes and communities, what becomes necessary are unconventional forms of scholarship that can follow these effects across boundaries between nature and culture, our bodies and the environment, state and corporate actors, and different zones and sites of extraction. In Fractivism, Sara Wylie makes critical inroads on this urgent project. Wylie’s ethnographic study of the fracking boom in the US not only addresses the devastating socio- environmental and health problems involved with fracking; in exploring the technologies of knowledge production at the heart of these entrenched and expanding regimes of extraction, she offers critical perspective and analysis to address the question: what can we do about it? Beyond exposing and documenting the unequal distribution of environmental human health consequences of fossil fuel extraction, how might critical social science play a transformative role? (Excerpt from book review)
© Amanda Poole 2018. Conservation & Society is available online only and is published under a Creative Commons license (CC BY 2.5).