Last night I watched ‘Gasland’ for the first time. ‘Gasland’ was nominated this year for an Oscar along with 5 other documentaries (‘Waiting for Superman’ did not make the cut – apparently criticizing teachers rules you out of consideration.
Gasland is very pretty, the shots are artistic and the editing is slick and attractive. Josh Fox, the film’s director and narrator, has a soft laid back tone that is alluring and soothing. He can play the banjo and he does. He presents himself as a regular guy from Pennsylvania who was offered $100,000 to allow an energy company extract natural gas from his land. He turned them down. Fox says he loves his home and has been hearing bad things about how the gas is extracted.
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Fox sets out to expose the “scandal” of fracking – a process to extract natural gas from shale by using a cocktail of chemicals and a lot of water. By using this method America will get about 100 years worth of energy.
The bad news, according to ‘Gasland,’ is that fracking is killing countless unsuspecting poor people all over the US. Pancreatic cancer, dizziness, loss of sense of taste and smell, ringing in ears, disorientation, coughing, asthma, swelling, tumors and death are all caused by fracking according to the film. This is powerful stuff, compelling. On one side there are the greedy energy companies and on the other poor rural families being poisoned to death.
Incredible that this would happen here in the US. I waited for the killer interview with medical experts in toxicology or pathology and for even one of the of the many cases of illness and death to be closely examined and the evidence of a connection laid bare for all to see. It didn’t come. Why would Josh Fox not investigate the story further? Why would he not interview the kind of experts who would confirm the cause of the illnesses and deaths?
Fox says at one point: “As a detective, I was totally out of my league”. In truth, it’s not so much that he is out of the league of investigative reporters, but that he didn’t want to join them. If he had done any investigation he would find there is no credible, independent evidence that shows fracking for natural gas poses any risk to human health.
But fracking is too good of a story to be spoiled by serious investigation. The truth is that fracking is the feelgood story of the decade. It has meant an economic boom to hundreds of thousands of rural poor in America who until now had owned what was often fairly unproductive land. Now they still own the land but are getting paid huge sums of money to allow gas companies access.
Further investigation by Fox would have uncovered that if you really want to Make Poverty History, as the hipsters claim they do, then people need cheap, plentiful energy to run the cities, hospitals factories and universities.
Why can’t we just have solar panels instead, he says at one point. It’s a very interesting idea. A bit like why can’t we all just get along and not have wars or why can’t we have candy for breakfast. However, this type of juvenile thinking doesn’t really help solve the energy needs of the US or the rest of the world for that matter. It is such a shame Gasland didn’t answer more of its own questions, we might have ended with a great documentary if he had.
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