Fracking Awful

I recently watched the documentary film GasLand. It's an examination of the natural gas mining process of hydraulic fracturing, colloquially known as "fracking." Essentially, a massive cocktail of chemicals is injected into subterranean fissures at high pressure, opening up more space underground and releasing the gas. The chemicals are then pumped back out... theoretically.

As presented dramatically in the documentary, the process is far from perfect. Hundreds of chemicals are leeched into the ground as a byproduct of this process. It pollutes natural wells, poisons wildlife, and even renders some landowners' drinking water so toxic that it can actually be lit on fire as it pours from the faucet.

The facts of this situation, of the serious danger fracking poses to land and life, are so extreme that I believe anyone and everyone should be made aware of them. That might be from watching this movie, or could come from reading books, doing some web research, what have you. From that standpoint, I would recommend that everyone see this movie.

That said, the movie itself isn't perfect. It's made very much on the cheap, by a man named Josh Fox -- an ordinary guy with a couple of camcorders. I don't mean to suggest that compelling work can't be done under those circumstances, but I do feel that Fox has a whole lot of learning and growing to do before he could truly be called a documentary filmmaker. He's forthcoming about the fact that he's just a guy whose own water supply was endangered by a company's efforts to buy his land for fracking; nevertheless, he remains less a movie maker and more a guy telling a story no one else was telling.

Props to him for that, by the way. And yet, his own low-energy personality is one of the biggest drags on the movie. His editing is also dry at times; we don't need a whole 10 minute sequence of people igniting their tap water to get the point. The drama of the subject matter itself has to make up for a lack of dramatic documentary film making in some cases.

But, as I said, regardless of the quality here (and what's here is more than passable), anyone who isn't aware of the facts about fracking needs to watch this film (or otherwise educate themselves). I give the movie just a B-, but still give it my strongest endorsement.

And one footnote here, dragging this post even further into the political territory with which I'm already flirting. The film also chronicles the efforts of some representatives in Congress, trying to pass a bill to ban fracking. One of those representatives is the woman from my very district here in the Denver area, Diana DeGette. I had already been fairly well aware of her, as she has vocally supported and championed a number of causes I firmly believe in. To see her pop up again here, at the front of the charge against fracking, just gave me the warm fuzzies all over again. There may be a lot of buffoons in the U.S. Congress, but I feel like at least I've done my part here in my district -- we've got one of the "good ones."