Gasland

The fifth nominee and final nominee for Best Documentary Feature for the most recent Academy Awards that I've got a chance to see is Gasland, a stark and frightening look at the environmental havoc wreaked by natural gas drilling, specifically a technique called hydraulic fracturing.

Written, directed, and narrated by Josh Fox, it's a personal story for him, as it begins with him getting an offer from a gas company to lease his wooded land in northeastern Pennsylvania. He declines the offer, and starts to investigate just what happens to people who are unfortunate enough to be close by to the thousands of wells that have been dug.

There are two prongs to Fox's argument: one is that the chemicals used for hydraulic fracturing are proprietary, and therefore unknown, and two, the oil and gas industries are exempt from the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Safe Drinking Water Act. The villain here, no surprise, is Dick Cheney, whose ties to Halliburton are cited as the impetus for ramming through legislation that makes it easy for these industries to basically get their way.

Fox interviews people from Pennsylvania to Texas to Colorado. All either have chronic health problems or, in eye-opening scenes, display how their tap water can be lit on fire. The film has come under fire (no pun intended) by the gas industry, who point out falsehoods (apparently one of the men who can light his tap water on fire is because of natural coal beds) but clearly the answer of natural gas, which is presented as preferable to foreign oil, is far from perfect. Numerous chemists testify that the chemicals used, primarily a variety of benzenes, are not good for living things.

Fox has made a film that is different than the usual documentary of this type. He takes an almost poetic approach, using shots of nature, and punctuates the action with some interesting music choices, including himself on banjo.

For anyone who has a general, automatic distrust of large corporations, none of this will be surprising.