How Rural America Got Fracked | Ellen Cantarow (The Nation)
►http://www.thenation.com/article/167980/how-rural-america-got-fracked
March in Wisconsin used to mean snow on the ground, temperatures so cold that farmers worried about their cows freezing to death. But as I traveled around rural townships and villages in early March to interview people about frac-sand mining, a little-known cousin of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” daytime temperatures soared to nearly eighty degrees—bizarre weather that seemed to be sending a meteorological message. In this troubling spring, Wisconsin’s prairies and farmland fanned out to undulating hills that cradled the land and its people. Within their embrace, the rackety calls of geese echoed from ice-free ponds, bald eagles wheeled in the sky and deer leaped in the brush. And for the first time in my life, I heard the thrilling warble of sandhill cranes. (...) Source: The Nation