You can tell when a documentary is having an impact when on the night of its television premiere you tweet about what you're learning -- in this case how Halliburton and other companies have carved a loophole in Federal Legislation that excludes them from oversight about the impact on clean water reserves by some of their key oil and natural gas drilling -- and you get a response from natural gas drilling company:
That was only the beginning. As we watched more of Josh Fox's powerful new documentary, Gasland, about the irrevocably destructive impact of natural gas drilling (called "Fracking") on our health, drinking water and, more broadly, environment, and followed case after case of interviews he conducted with people who's lives, health, well-being and welfare have been ruined by corporate and social greed (In this case, people taking pay-offs and signing Faustian NDAs to allow gas companies to drill on their land only to be subsequently prevented from speaking about the health crises that ensued because of the NDA), we realized, yet again how delicate is the balance between humanity's insatiable need for fossil fuel energy and our very survival on the planet.
Clearly the energy companies realize there is a "there there" or they wouldn't be launching a pre-emptive a website to "de-bunk" Gasland. (In fact, they've even bought ads on Gasland's Facebook page!) What they should be doing is embracing him instead of attempting to "de-bunk" Josh's overwhelming evidence about the negative impact of fracking, which only makes their effort Shakespearean in its protest. After the above tweet to me, the same organization tweeted (and then deleted) describing Gasland as a "shock-u-mentary". This kind of characterization is tantamount to BP referring to humans who have lost lives and welfare in the Gulf Coast as "Small People."
We've known Josh for a number of years and have blogged about the power of his work. The characterization that Energy companies would like to tar him with -- being "fringe," "artist," "New Yorker" -- are so transparent in their blatant use of social code words as to be nothing more than modern day red baiting: They do nothing to undermine the fact that Josh unwittingly discovered that an offer he received from a natural gas drilling company to mine his land, for what would have been a personal profit for him in excess of $100,000, uncovered a nasty secret that this process is horribly and irrevocably destructive to our environment, our clean water preserves, and our health.
The cheap shots by the PR firms who have been hired to paint a counter-narrative about Josh as some sort of "fringe" New York artiste are a rhetorical foil to distract us from the real issue: Natural Gas drilling (or "fracking") is unsafe and its impact on what remaining clean drinking water we have is irrevocable. We owe it to ourselves and our time on this planet to put aside corporate profiteering and ask ourselves if we want to be the snake who ate our own tails out of greed or be the civilization that saved itself from itself.
History repeats itself, as Rita J. King discovered in her seminal investigative piece exploring corporate profiteering in the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina and the role of energy companies in that debacle.
This one is only beginning. And, fortunately for us, Josh Fox has flagged it while we still have a chance to have an impact.
You Need to Watch This Movie.
And for our European readers, this issue pertains to you too: Similar natural gas reserves have been discovered in Europe and is considered to be a possible solution to Europe's dependency on oil.
To tie this into cultural relations and the importance of having impartial, socially conscious cultural relations organizations in a country, the work of the British Council focuses on Climate Change as one of its tenets. Climate Change is cultural relations: It is an issue that effects us all. As such, the global impact of Natural Gas drilling is a critical cultural relations issue as well.
[Gasland: The Movie]
Update: The New York Times published a good interview with Fox, although they pay lip-service to the "rebuttal" by the Gas company instead of exploring the Faustian-bargain details behind such efforts.
Vanity Fair has also published a thorough write-up of the fracking issue, while, oddly, presenting Gasland the documentary as an after-thought.
And, finally, Josh Fox was on The Daily Show last night as well. Enjoy ...
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Josh Fox | ||||
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