With demand still growing for land-based resources, including from the energy sector, what is now referred to
as the global land grab continues to have momentum. Land and water grabbing involves the capturing of control
of land and other associated resources like water and underground material, and most significantly, of the power
to decide how they will be used, for what purposes and who will reap the benefits. Powered by transnational
capital and its desire for profit, a wave of enclosures has been undermining peoples’ democratic control of
their environment in many parts of the world. Now this trend is expanding its reach further, this time, through
unconventional gas development. One form of this new threat is called fracking, the common term for hydraulic
fracturing, a fast spreading technology for extracting unconventional, hard-to-access natural gas.