A group of residents from a heavily drilled Texas town have banded together in an effort to ban hydraulic fracturing in their city. If they are successful, Denton would become the first city in the state to ban fracking outright. “We’ve spent years trying to make fracking compatible with our city,” Adam Briggle, a member of Denton Drilling Awareness Group, the group organizing the ban, told Al Jazeera. “But we’ve realized that you can have fracking, or you can have a healthy city — but you can’t have both.” Denton, a city northwest of Dallas and with just over 100,000 residents, is home to hundreds of gas wells and hundreds of miles of pipelines. Fracking critics say the drilling — shooting pressurized water, chemicals, and sand underground to release oil and gas trapped there — impacts public health and safety. Briggle said there is strong support for the ban, and that residents who […]