A drive in the Eagle Ford Shale

It's a drizzly March morning, and the moisture is keeping the dust down on the rocky red roads of Jeff Sibley's South Texas ranch. We bump loosely over low hills dotted with knotty shrubs covered in bright yellow baubles and skirted with small fields of violet flowers, the colors intensified by the close gray sky. The landscape looks lush but prickly.  

“It’s not worth anything, except for recreation,” Sibley says. His family keeps four endangered species on some thousand acres, part of a hunting lease that supports the ranch. Last week, someone left a gate open, and he doesn’t know yet if they lost any animals. He suspects one of the many workers with Chesapeake Energy, which has fracked 10 wells here since December 2010.