GASLAND
Written & Directed by Josh Fox
Produced by Trish Adlesic, Fox & Molly Gandour
Released by International WOW Company
USA. 107 min. Not Rated

Director Josh Fox’s back-to-the-garden hippie parents settled in the Pennsylvania woods of the Delaware River Basin in the 1970’s. With the personal investigative flair of Michael Moore in Flint, Michigan, and Morgan Spurlock at McDonald’s, he sets out to examine what’s behind an offer of $100,000 for drilling rights to his family’s 16-acre homestead.

He first narrates home movies of his family frolicking in the stream by their house at the time that the Clean Water Act was passed. Thirty-five years later, he learns he is sitting on top of the Marcellus Shale Field, an “ocean of natural gas” under the Catskills and Appalachian Mountains. As energy prices have soared, and foreign supplies of fossil fuels became unreliable, it has become feasible to extract underground natural gas using a mixture of water, sand, and chemicals in hydraulic fracturing, a process nicknamed “fracking” (to the chuckles of sci-fi TV show fans familiar with that term as an all-purpose expletive).

Fox first talks to his neighbors in Pennsylvania, who have agreed to have many, many wells dug on their properties, but who now have tales of woes, from hair loss to exploding water. His suspicions are further raised when the drilling company’s representative won’t drink the local water. It’s unusual in this kind of advocacy journalism that the conspiracy theories actually seem more real than just paranoia. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 exempted fracking from such environmental regulations as the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Clean Air Act in what is amusingly labeled the “Halliburton loophole”—former Vice President Dick Cheney’s company sells the fracking technology. (One would have thought that corporations would know by now that they will be the butt of humor when they avoid filmmakers’ repeated requests for interviews.)

With companies pressing to expand drilling further into the Delaware and New York watersheds, Fox sets out across 24 states to see for himself how landowners have fared when they sold their drilling rights. When he travels to places like Colorado and Texas, he covers some of the same incidents already seen in Stephanie Soechtig and Jason Lindsey’s Tapped and Debra Anderson’s Split Estate, including the same scientific testimony from Dr. Theo Colborn and MacArthur Genius Award recipient Wilma Subra on the health effects of water contamination from fracking. But Fox brings a folksy sympathy to his amateur detective work that manages to cut through the confidentiality agreements families have signed as part of legal settlements.

Just when the repetition of extreme health problems starts straining cause-and-effect credibility, Fox switches to a detailed examination of each stage of the fracking process beyond the initial drilling. He particularly targets the drilling companies’ insistence on not revealing the chemical composition of the fracking mixture. They claim it’s proprietary business information, though environmental activists insist that among the 500 probable chemicals used are banned carcinogens. (At least one company has since given into pressure to reveal its fracking recipe.) Sadly, when corporate suits stonewall legislative committees, few people are in the hearing rooms and the press gives it scant coverage.

Though Gasland becomes less interesting when it turns into more of a doctrinaire harangue, Fox’s personal angle (taking the audience back to the bucolic creek by his house) and his substantive investigation make it both involving and entertaining enough to absorb its warning message. Nora Lee Mandel
September 17, 2010