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Unnatural Gas: Filmmakers Dig Deep to Expose the Impact of Drilling Across the Nation

Published on April 24, 2010

By Shira Golding

When my partner and I moved to upstate New York after six years of city living, we were motivated by a desire to connect more deeply with nature and a dream of owning a little piece of land where we could grow our own food and generate our own energy using the sun and the wind. Little did we know that this dream was under threat.

Ithaca, NY
Image by bobistraveling

My adopted hometown of Ithaca, like many communities in New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio, sits on top of the Marcellus Shale, a huge geological formation that contains large amounts of natural gas, and multinational energy corporations including Halliburton and Fortuna are determined to get it out.

Touted as a clean energy source by those eager to capitalize on the current “green” zeitgeist, natural gas is anything but. It does burn more cleanly, with fewer carbon emissions, than coal and oil. However, it is still a nonrenewable fossil fuel that pollutes the air, water and ground. Furthermore, claims that natural gas is a necessary and environmentally-sound transition fuel ignore the impacts of extraction.

Natural gas doesn’t just float up from the ground. It is extracted through a process called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Millions of gallons of water, mixed with sand and a heavy dose of chemicals including known carcinogens, are pumped as far as a mile down into the ground at high pressure to create cracks in the shale that allow gas to seep out. About half of this liquid stays in the ground and the rest comes up as industrial waste. And because of a provision that Vice President Dick Cheney, a former Halliburton executive, inserted into the 2005 Energy Bill, the industry is exempt from the Clean Air & Water Act. As a result, the cleanup of this waste goes unregulated.

Communities like Dimock, PA, where heavy natural gas drilling is underway, have been transformed into vast industrial zones. The landscape is dotted by drill pads. Large trucks drive back and forth, wreaking havoc on local roads. Most alarmingly, water contamination is widespread. Some residents can set aflame the water that comes out of their tap.

When filmmaker and theater producer Josh Fox was approached by gas company “landmen” in late 2008 to lease drilling rights for his family’s 20-acre property in the Delaware River Basin, he was confronted with the same dilemma that landowners around the country have faced. Should he take the money (in this case about $100,000 plus future royalties) or should he pass on the cash and retain control over his land and water?

Before making the decision, Fox decided to do some research. He got in touch with people in Fort Worth, TX where the Barnett Shale had been fracked for many years. He learned about people who had saved up their whole lives to be able to buy their home and now had to move away because of air, water and noise pollution.

Josh Fox’s GasLand

Frustrated by the dearth of public information and specifically the lack of films on the issue, Fox decided to make his first feature-length documentary. He traveled to 24 states with his camera, interviewing people who have been impacted by natural gas drilling and seeing firsthand what it looks like when big energy companies get their grip on communities. The result is the feature-length GasLand, which won the US Documentary Special Jury Prize at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, has since been screened at the Big Sky and True False film festivals and which will premiere in Canada at Hot Docs in late April.

Fox made the film to educate himself and now he is eager to get it out to audiences, especially in areas being targeted by Big Energy. In a recent interview on PBS’s NOW, he explained that the Sundance award has really helped him draw attention to the issue and he hopes that more and more will get engaged.

Needless to say, Fox’s family decided not to grant drilling rights on their land, but that doesn’t mean they are safe from drilling. Due to the system of “compulsory integration,” if a high enough percentage of landowners around you sign, then your land can be forced into a lease without you even having the right to negotiate the terms.

Where filmmaker Debra Anderson lives in New Mexico, many landowners don’t even have the opportunity to decide whether or not they want to lease their land to natural gas extractors. New Mexico, like 90% of Texas and 85% of Colorado, is a land of “split estates” where most people don’t own mineral rights to their property. In other words, someone else gets to make the call on leasing the natural gas rights to energy companies and the people living there can’t do anything about it.

Debra Anderson’s Split Estate

When Anderson heard about the alarming health decline of people whose land was being drilled in Colorado, she decided to find out what was going on herself. What started as an idea for a short film became a 76-minute doc called Split Estate that was included in The Good Pitch at Silverdocs and had its television premiere in the Reel Impact environmental documentary series on Discovery Communications’ Planet Green channel.

Like Fox, Anderson made her film to raise awareness and counteract propaganda coming from the industry. What she didn’t realize when she started shooting is that the issue would come to her backyard. About eight months after she began making the film, the gas industry started pushing hard to drill in Santa Fe County where she lives.

Santa Fe is a fairly progressive community, and a grassroots response to the drilling emerged quickly. Anderson’s film became an important tool for activists who screened a rough-cut of Split Estate to local policymakers. As a result of their efforts, the governor and state legislatures passed strong regulatory ordinances that were enough to scare the industry into selling their leases. Recent outreach grants from the Fledgling Fund and the McCune Charitable Foundation will enable Anderson to further engage audiences and policymakers around the country.

As for Tompkins County where I live, we are entrenched in an ongoing battle. While some welcome the industry dollars with open arms, many others (including some of those who have signed leases) have joined Shaleshock, a growing coalition working to prevent the exploitative drilling of the Marcellus Shale. The group has successfully engaged local politicians and partnered with other organizations around the state to voice our concerns to the governor in Albany.

Shirari Industries and The Dacha Project co-production, Frac Attack

And we made a movie, too. Frac Attack is an 18-minute environmental zombie thriller that underscores the preciousness of our water. Made by over 80 members of the community, the tongue-in-cheek horror flick has been screened widely in the community including in high schools. With a goal of inspiring action around the country, we are also streaming Frac Attack online in its entirety for free.

We are living in a world where movies have power, perhaps most notably in the environmental movement, where films are playing a significant role in inspiring Americans to “go green.” Just the documentary An Inconvenient Truth and the Hollywood blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow could probably take credit for at least a few million converts to the ethos of sustainability.

Films are just one tool for those working for social and environmental justice, but they continue to prove themselves to be a particularly potent tool. The effort to protect our communities from natural gas drilling is no exception.

Shira Golding is a filmmaker, musician and community activist based in Ithaca, NY who is getting off her addiction to fossil fuels one day at a time. Check out her work at Shirari Industries.

This article is available for noncommercial use under a Creative Commons license. It was originally published on MediaRights.org, a project of Arts Engine, Inc. This notice must accompany the article at all times.

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