Gasland

Gasland (Director: Josh Fox): When dir­ector Josh Fox receives a letter from a gas com­pany offering him $100,000 to drill on his prop­erty, he’s sorely tempted. Until he starts hearing stories about com­bust­ible tap water and unex­plained health prob­lems from others who have allowed the nat­ural gas industry to exploit their land. Setting out on a per­sonal quest to find answers, Fox travels from his home in rural Pennsylvania to Colorado, New Mexico, Texas and Louisiana to see the res­ults in places where this sort of drilling, called hydraulic frac­turing (or “fracking”) has been going on for years.

The nat­ural gas industry is, pardon the pun, on fire. Touting a vir­tual ocean of nat­ural gas under US soil, gas com­panies have been aggress­ively drilling wells in order to exploit this energy source as quickly and as prof­it­ably as pos­sible. In a bid to become inde­pendent of for­eign oil, politi­cians have acqui­esced to the industry’s lob­by­ists at almost every step. The Energy Policy Act of 2005, pro­posed by then-Vice President Cheney, exempted the oil and gas industry from numerous pieces of envir­on­mental legis­la­tion including the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. Since that time, fracking has pro­ceeded vir­tu­ally unreg­u­lated, and Fox’s travelogue shows just how ubi­quitous nat­ural gas wells have become.

Despite admit­ting to being the son of lib­eral hippie par­ents, Fox is smart enough not to come across as a spoiled rich kid from the East coast. His con­fes­sional style and banjo playing endear him to both the audi­ence and to the people he visits in the film. These people, for the most part, are average rural Americans, solid Republicans who likely voted in the very same people who gave cor­por­a­tions the right to drill on their land. I’d dearly love to show this film to some of the cur­rent Tea Party act­iv­ists who are cam­paigning for even less gov­ern­ment in their lives. Why aren’t those people pick­eting out­side the offices of EnCana or Chesapeake Energy?

Fox does a good job of explaining the pro­cess of fracking in layman’s terms and per­haps the most shocking thing about the pro­cess is just how much water it uses. Each well drilled con­sumes 1–7 mil­lion gal­lons of fresh water, which is mixed with chem­icals and injected into the earth’s crust to free up the gas. We’re lit­er­ally sac­ri­fi­cing one scarce com­modity to obtain another. To make mat­ters worse (or better, depending on your per­spective), when the res­id­ents’ drinking water is con­tam­in­ated, they’re forced to buy water from some­where else. Privatization of resources is a capitalist’s dream come true, unless of course you actu­ally live in any of these places. And as the film’s graphics show, a huge por­tion of the United States is either being drilled now or will be in the near future. The gas com­panies began in the sparsely-populated western states, but are now moving east. Fox’s home is in an area of the Delaware River basin that provides fresh water to New York City, and drilling may jeop­ardize the water supply of more than 15 mil­lion people.

And even if you’re lucky enough not to live close to a drilling oper­a­tion, some of these con­tam­in­ants have now entered the food supply, as one rancher sadly relates. Farms and ranches depend on water to irrigate their crops and feed their animals, and even if the humans can afford to pur­chase clean water for them­selves, they often can’t afford enough to take care of the needs of their busi­nesses. So we’re all at risk. Even sadder was the rev­el­a­tion that the Bush gov­ern­ment approved drilling on public land. So now even a visit to land under the “pro­tec­tion” of the Bureau of Land Management is likely to be spoiled by unsightly gas wells at best, and pol­luted air, soil, and water at worst.

Luckily, the film strikes just the right tone, and there is enough humour and banjo music to avoid making this a com­pletely depressing exper­i­ence. But Gasland still delivers an urgent mes­sage, and it’s one that we ignore at our own peril.

Official site of the film

(8/10)

Tagged as: #hotdocs10, environment