This is a guest post by North Carolina Field Correspondent Catherine Farmer. 

Tuesday night, there was a public hearing on fracking hosted at my high school. While I wasn’t able to attend in person, I watched a fair portion of it telecasted on the web. It was pretty great to see the public giving voice to their opinion, but let’s back up – what exactly is fracking?

Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, involves highly pressurized amounts of water, chemicals, and sand being pumped into the ground to break up shale deposits and release natural gas. It’s currently being used in a number of states, including West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Wyoming. Now, my home state of North Carolina is debating whether or not to frack.

Fracking is a pretty heated issue: on one hand, it will provide an influx of temporary jobs and money to our economy, and in these tight-budget times, that can’t hurt. On the other hand, it has been shown that fracking can devastate a community, both by toxic byproducts and by so-called “fraccidents.” Fracking has been argued time and again throughout the nation, and I heard many of the arguments used on a national scale during the forum on Tuesday.

Not a whole lot of research has been done on fracking, but the studies that have been done show that fracking probably isn’t the best for the environment.  For example, the chemicals used during a frack are highly toxic – including known carcinogens and many toxins that will never be able to be removed from the water used during fracking – and they have been released into the air and water supplies of many communities. It’s gotten to the point that there have been stories of people able to set their tap water on fire – regardless of your opinion on fracking, water shouldn’t do that.

In my opinion, fracking seems like a last-ditch effort to get natural gas, rather than a viable long-term solution. Instead of focusing on a technique that can have a very harmful effect on the land and communities, we should be looking into technology that will provide us a long-term sustainable energy solution.