FRACKING looks set to come to Wiltshire and the fault lines have been drawn. Placard-waving environmentalists stand on one side shouting that drilling will irreversibly harm our environment and health. Against them, our local MPs insist that fracking will bring jobs and prosperity. Separating facts from fog, and spin from the smoke, is infuriatingly difficult, but one thing is for certain: if you don’t want fracking in Wiltshire then now is the time to make your stand.

Known also as ‘shale gas drilling’, fracking is a highly controversial fossil fuel extraction process that involves ramming a high pressure water-chemical mix down a deep bore hole. With the aim of creating cracks deep within rock, ‘hydraulic fracturing’ releases trapped oil and gases, which bubble up through the well to be piped off to power stations. In America, they have been fracking for 60 years but never before has it been done on land in the UK so close to where people live.

Having mined into the evidence, it is clear to see that environmentalists’ health worries have some solid foundation: an online search for 'fracking water' offers dozens of shocking videos of flames leaping from the drinking taps of residents who live near fracking sites.

Several botched American and Australian fracking wells have caused gas to seep into groundwater and drinking water supplies, poisoning the water. In a few remarkable instances, flammable gas can even be seen bubbling up through streams and lakes. Anti-frack campaigners also tell us about the many chemicals pumped into today’s fracking wells, many of which would pose a real risk to health if they were to escape into water supplies.

The actual science is muddy, however. Even though good quality research shows that your health will be worse when you live near a fracking well, many top academics insist that we shouldn’t be alarmed and that fracking disasters are freak events. America has been the Wild West for slapdash fracking practices but UK regulations would keep us safe, they say.

It’s a tough pill to swallow, however. Even with the best will in the world, the less well-known health hazards would be unavoidable: air pollution near wells would increase, water contamination would probably occur at some point and our roads would fill with hundreds of lorries trucking millions of gallons of toxic waste water away from each site every day.

In this fractious debate, I choose to take a cautious stance. I stand with the 20 high-profile doctors, pharmacists and public health experts who wrote in the British Medical Journal earlier this year that fracking poses “overwhelming” health risks and there needs to be an immediate ban on this “inherently risky” industry until further research can be completed.

Before the rigs put their drills in the earth, it’s time to decide which side of the line you stand on.

Log on to frack-off.org.uk to find your local anti-fracking group. For official reports see www.gov.uk and search “fracking”.