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The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was approved unanimously in the Senate and with near unanimity in the House of Representatives in December 1969. President Nixon signed the act into law on January 1, 1970. The new statute was both brief and farsighted. In fewer than 3,500 words the congressional authors of NEPA articulated for the first time a national policy on the environment, set in motion an innovative regulatory process centered on environmental impact statements, institutionalized public participation in federal environmental decision making, and introduced the requirement that the president report annually to Congress on the nation’s environmental status and trends. NEPA also included a provision that established a new agency, the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), in the Executive Office of the President. The CEQ’s assigned statutory role was to implement the environmental impact statement process, prepare the president’s annual environmental report on the condition of the environment, develop policy proposals for solving environmental problems, and coordinate efforts across the federal government to address environmental concerns. As stated in the law, NEPA is designed to “encourage productive and enjoyable harmony between man and his environment”; to “promote efforts which will prevent or eliminate damage to the environment and biosphere and stimulate the health and welfare of man”; and to “fulfill the responsibilities of each generation as trustee of the environment for succeeding generations.” The references to promoting harmony between people and the environment, protecting the biosphere, and affirming the nation’s responsibility for environmental stewardship illustrate an understanding of the scope, scale, and significance of environmental matters that was significantly ahead of its time. The language in NEPA quoted above anticipated by twenty years the concern for the Earth’s biosphere and the concept of environmental sustainability that would become more widely articulated in the run-up to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Moreover, NEPA has had an enduring global impact. By the law’s fortieth anniversary, a majority of U.S. states had established their own environmental impact statement requirements and more than 160 nations worldwide had adopted similar legislation.

This chapter provides an overview of the theoretical and methodological approaches that were used to conduct an ethnographic study of natural gas drilling activism in the Barnett Shale, a natural gas field located beneath the populated Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex. Included is discussion of conceptualizations of the environment and how those conceptualizations impact human relationships in the natural environment. Also included are details about the ethnographic practice of this project, data collection and analysis, reflexivity, and the ethical considerations that went in to this work.

With developments in hydrofracturing (fracking) and horizontal drilling, natural gas exploration began in earnest in the Barnett Shale region of North Texas in the late 1990s. This chapter discusses the process of natural gas development. Much of the physical infrastructure and processes of extraction in this area are located in urban areas, in close proximity to neighbourhood homes and schools.

This chapter discusses the phenomena of the reluctant activist. These are residents of an environmental sacrifice zone who became activists after coming to a realization that their health and wellbeing were being negatively impacted by environmental pollution. Included is the process of becoming a reluctant activist and the characteristics of this social group. This is followed by a discussion of social privilege and environmental justice, NIMBYism, and ecological and sexual ecological violence.

This chapter presents a sociology of community-level health threats. A community-level health threat is an event (such as pollution or infectious disease) that has the potential to harm the health of any resident in that community. This theory described the ways in which communities react in the face of such a threat, using natural gas developing (fracking) in North Texas as a case study.

Opposition to the Corrib gas project entered a new phase in mid-2005 when five men were jailed for refusing to obey a High Court injunction taken against them by Shell. Rather than dissuade people from opposing the project, the jailing of the ‘Rossport Five’ served to escalate resistance while projecting the issue into the country's media as a national, rather than simply local, dispute. This chapter articulates the multiplicity of issues underpinning resistance and provides historical detail on the progress of the Corrib gas project. Attention is paid to civil society reactions such as nonviolent direct action alongside the deployment of state and private actor coercive tactics to repress such dissent, juxtaposed with efforts to build consent. This chapter advances analysis of the dispute by emphasising the state's role and illustrating how the state's defective approach has led to emergent controversies surrounding potential onshore gas production via ‘fracking’ and possible near-shore oil production in Dublin Bay. Raising key questions around how and why the state developed such an approach to the management of its gas and oil, this chapter sets the scene for an examination of the historical development of the Irish model which occurs in subsequent chapters.