Gasland

I recently watched the documentary Gasland about the dangers of hydraulic fracturing, fracking, in the US for natural gas. I had seen some clips about the film from "The Daily Show", so I was expecting to see some tapwater set a flame with nothing more than a lighter beneath the running faucet, but I was horrified by the human, animal, and general environmental toll this practice is wreaking on our fair country. Most interesting is the loss of taste and smell in some of the victims. It can be expected that people are dying from cancers, animals are suffocating instantaneously, and streams are bubbling with natural gas like the US has been transformed into Willy Wonka's natural gasland. Two women featured in the documentary looked woefully into the camera as they described how food to them was now only texture. This is of course, an absurdist lament, atop the migraines and real sickness the natural gas is causing, but in the absurd, we are given an insight into the landscape of this very real menace big business has recently thrust upon us. And this is no propaganda damning big business arbitrarily; in 2005, as the movie describes, Dick Cheney passed an energy bill, The Energy Policy Act of 2005, which exempts the oil and natural gas industries from 30 years of environmental regulations, under the guise of an effort to move away from greenhouse gases (natural gas is a much cleaner source of energy than oil and coal). But it was all for Halliburton, because by easing these restrictions, big companies such as Encana, Williams, Cabot Oil & Gas, and others were now able to use the new Halliburton technologies to undergo "the largest and most extensive domestic gas drilling in history". These technologies are currently being undergone in 34 states. The product of which is most likely powering my computer right now.
The film begins in media res, in the middle of this hullaballo, with our auteur, Josh Fox, the documentarian, receiving a letter from some big company, proposing a lease of his 20 acres of land in Milanville, NY, for fracking along the Marcellus Shale, a large swath of mineral sediment, which houses what he calls "an Iraq of natural gas". These shale basins all over the US are our great sources of natural gas, which, sadly, we have decided to rape in a half-assed haste which I do not fully comprehend. The rape is as such: a host of chemicals are pumped 8000 feet underground into the sediment to cause a mini-earthquake with several tons of water, to create wells, which release the natural gas into great reactors. These chemicals are a great mix of toxins and carcinogens the likes of which we should be running from, not producing and pumping into mother earth. Then, when the gas is reaped, it is full of all of the toxins, which they simply burn off, and emit freely into the air. If this isn't the dirtiest desecration of our beautiful America, I dont know what is. Fox's concern is for where he lives, here, on the East coast, along the Marcellus Formation/shale, which is housed in the Appalachian mountains, and is no small part. If we lose this area to fracking, the devestation will be so wide-spread, there is no way to compute it simply. In a nutshell, say goodbye to our clean drinking water, the water NY prides itself on, which also serves parts of NJ and Pennsylvania. Even the most sophisticated filtration systems dont stand a chance against the corrosive chemicals that eat the filters of the systems. You can slowly say goodbye to the grassfed dairy and livestock of the catskills, as the air and water will slowly kill the vibrant pride of that small beacon of light in this dark, American foodscape. Oh, and say goodbye to hiking and camping, as the streams will be bubbling with natural gas, and the rocks may be hissing a wealth of that good stuff! But who cares, right? This is all hippie shit.