Financial Times: Salad belt becomes fracking war zone

The black earth of the “Lancashire salad belt” has become a front line in the war on fracking. The ancient forests compressed a mile beneath the surface have helped make the flat, marshy landscape among the most fruitful in the UK and have also created vast pockets of gas in the rocks.

Some locals want the UK to follow France and Bulgaria and ban the extraction technique that blasts sand, water and chemicals into the rocks to fracture them and get the gas out.  MORE