Nature and Culture

When we started to plan this special issue, shale gas extraction and hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) as a technology and its related social conflicts seemed to be—except in very few countries, such as the United States—an environmental issue in a state of “fading away,” while still being of historical interest. However, things changed after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Beyond creating immense human suffering and massive destruction of Ukraine's infrastructures, the invasion has affected, and is affecting, distant countries, their peoples, and economies around the world, in various ways. One major issue at stake is the effect on energy markets and energy mixes in European countries, where strong dependencies on Russian fuels exist. Energy prices have skyrocketed, and several European governments (especially, Germany) had to reconsider their past politics of energy supply and transition. The war, so to speak, has unexpectedly opened a new window of opportunity for re-evaluating shale gas as a player in the energy transition (Teuffer 2022). This is mainly due to economic questions regarding energy prices, and political questions regarding energy autonomy and mixes.

Our empirical study tackles the definition of shale gas within the French administration and gas companies before social mobilization erupted in 2011. We analyze how and why shale gas was neither considered problematic nor perceived as part of the political agenda, even though it was the object of policymaking. We argue that shale gas was caught up in a regime of invisibility shaped by the actors in charge of dealing with license requests. Invisibility was made possible by the administration's cadastral department, which considered itself as the sole expert in granting licenses, and because of the department's marginal position within the administration, which rendered shale gas proponents invisible to their own hierarchy. This regime of invisibility helped define shale gas as a “non-problem.”

The framing of shale gas development has received widespread attention, especially in the UK, United States, and throughout Europe. However, little has been said about what lessons can be learned from the shale development case about the role of language in use in the construction, contestation and closure of environmental problems. This article teases out and clarifies the subtle variations in the way the concept of the “frame” has been interpreted and operationalized; puts forward an analysis of the difficulty of achieving discursive closure in the UK shale development policy debate; and identifies possible implications of the failure of the “bridging fuel” argument for environmental discourse more broadly, asking in particular if this failure represents a challenge to ecological modernization or its continuation.

The article presents an analysis of the use of Facebook on the over 400-day-long anti-fracking protest by farmers in the village of Żurawlów in Poland against the global corporation Chevron. Analysis of this case study was used to discuss the deliberative potential of social media and their power in countering hegemonic discourse and providing visibility in the public sphere to actors and arguments marginalized or excluded by the traditional media. The results discuss Facebook's potential for mobilizing and providing identity while emphasizing the problem of visibility in the public sphere, which was key to the inclusion of discourse in public debate. Harnessing emotions and legitimizing minority interests helped create counter-power, while polarization and “homophile acts” against deliberation geared toward arriving at an agreement.

The article presents a comparative study of shale gas media debates in Germany and Poland. Drawing from the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD), it addresses discursive conflicts over the use of hydraulic fracturing and its environmental impacts in both countries. The authors relate their analysis to the theoretical debate that emerged in the 1990s in French sociology concerning the question of “green justifications” that form a specific way of how social actors intervene, dispute, and build compromises in public discussions to protect non-human entities. Referring to these discussions, this article identifies several ecological justification clusters and the associated social actors that are ‘compromised’ or enclosed in existing orders of worth.