ABSTRACT
How do we, as anthropologists working on the concepts of energy, energy extraction, and the insatiable consumptive behaviors of humans of the present era, contribute to the transdisciplinary discourse needed to construct intellectual models that can account for both extant distributions of environmental illness and the ever-changing processual nature of disease realities? This is really the anthropology of the unknown, the invisible, the just beyond the senses in many cases. The effects of environmental pollution on human health and well-being are ambiguous, long term, and embedded in multiple, sometimes contradictory, scientific and political discourses. Much is not known about how the human body will react to exposures to various chemicals. The ambiguous nature of the effects of chemical exposures provides ample emotionally charged fuel for the political fires surrounding various extractive processes. In this chapter, I will focus on the issue of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, as it is more commonly known.
