TELLURIDE MOUNTAINFILM
In ‘Gasland,’ Director Seeks Lessons from West
Gas drilling became personal for director Josh Fox when rigs started coming close to home.By David Frey, 5-29-10
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The film Gasland won the Special Jury Prize for documentary when it debuted at the Sundance Film Festival this year, and it’s been turning heads ever since. The film depicts the journey of director Josh Fox from his home in Pennsylvania, where gas drilling is beginning to boom, to the West, where it has been booming for years. Gasland tells the story of people who say their land, water and their health have been destroyed by the industry.
The documentary has been making the rounds across the country. It’s scheduled to appear on HBO on June 21. We caught up with Fox at Telluride MountainFilm.
NEW WEST: For you this really was personal.
JOSH FOX: It’s personal now. I could have a well pad going in a mile and a half from my house. We’re really, really worried. This is coming and it’s coming full bore and we’re trying to stop it. That’s the truth. The truth is, this activity and an area where people live don’t go together.
You talk about using this film to bridge the East and the West, and for you, it really was a journey to the West.
I had taken a road trip across America in 1994, and I fell in love with the West. With Wyoming, with Colorado, with New Mexico, with Arizona, Utah. When I heard this was going on in the West, I wanted to see if the places I loved were still there. I wanted to see what the effects were. I wanted to see how this had changed the area. I also wanted people on the East Coast to benefit from the experience of what had happened here.
Thankfully, there were so many people who were so willing to do that with me and so generous: to educate me and the audience of this film and the people on the East Coast who are trying to scramble and stop what happens in Gasland from happening there as has happened here.
The ambition is definitely to stop it there and call for a moratorium on this kind of drilling until we can figure out what’s going on across the United States and for tighter regulations to start to protect people in Colorado, Texas, Wyoming who are getting sick.
People are being poisoned in their own homes by these rigs that are off-gassing volatile organic chemicals directly into their living rooms, and they’re having severe, severe health problems.
In the film, whether you’re in Colorado or Wyoming or Arkansas, there’s a certain sameness, not just complaints about the chemicals in the water and in the air, but in everyday people who suddenly have gas drilling in their backyards. Did that strike you as you were making it?
The industry says wherever they go, this is going to be different than we did it in Colorado, this is going to be different than we did it in Texas. I found the same story everywhere. Air pollution. Water contamination. Health problems. Rampant land destruction. People feeling like they’re no longer in control of their own lives.
You’re first words in the film were, “I’m not a pessimist.”
I’m still not a pessimist. I do think the truth will out and that once people understand what is actually happening there will be change in this industry.
Listen, we’re not going to survive another 50 years, another 20 years, of fossil fuels. There are whole islands in the South Pacific that are already disappearing because of the rising sea level. If we continue to burn fossil fuels, we’re not going to like the results of this. We’re going to have hundreds of millions of climate refugees. We’re going to have huge adverse weather effects. It’s going to continue.
We have to make a push. We have to move to renewable energy. We have to do it as fast as we possible can. The natural gas industry is standing in the way of making the true transition that we have to make: a transition to clean energy, to renewable energy, to zero emissions.
Follow David Frey on his website, www.davidfrey.me, and on Twitter.
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Comments
Never mind the guy grew up most likely in a house heated with gas from a hole hundreds of miles away via pipeline. And took a road trip through the West on petroleum that just showed up in his fuel tank?
Wait till you see the film before you shoot the messenger.
"Dost thou not poop?!"
"Yea, verily do I poop."
"Then how canst thou oppose dumping of ye chamber pots in ye street?"
"Nay, think not that I am anti-poop. Merely, methinks there be a better place to dump our poop than in the streets where we doth walk."
"Stupid NIMBY."
I just got back from New York. In the morning, I'm on the Brooklyn Bridge, and at midnight I'm standing in sleet back home. Amazing. And frickin' wonderful.
More amazing is this giant urban agglomeration that was dug out of holes elsewhere, is powered, heated, fed, clothed by stuff from elsewhere.
The sand rats are still gouging away at their big tunnel project on 48th and 10th, to bring Adirondack water down.
It seems like the city runs on magic, the connection to stuff and where it comes from isn't real clear. And that's a shame.
But the subways don't run on windmills in Long Island...it's either nukes, gas or coal. I can just imagine the lathering hissy fits Manhattanites would pitch if it turned out there was enough gas under Manhattan to run it.
Never mind that any film that wins at Sundance was juried by Redford adherents, and that's all I need to know.
Your analogy about the residents f NYC not being appreciative of where their energy and water comes from is ludicrous. It's the same thing as saying your Brain could and should live all by itself without a blood supply , glucose, and oxygen that is piped to it from other parts of the body. Maybe a " Skinner's Brain" in a glass tank with a solar cell and a trickle of rainwater is your idea of redneck Utopian living ---no biological infrastructure required?
How realistic is THAT ? Of course we are all interdependent. But don't use that bare fact of Life to tell me to bow before the petroleum and power priests and pay tribute in gold coin of the realm. Your metaphor is specious.
If I were to make my own version of " Gasland" it would script something like this: My natural gas comes from wells that w ere drilled in the 1930's, located 20-25 miles from town. They are actually bleeder wells to tap off natural gas, sour gas, and CO2 from the crude oil reservoirs. Back in the 1950's those gases were either flared or vented straight into the atmosphere...millions and millions if not billions of cubic feet of " waste gas" that there was no market for. They could not give it away . "They " were Husky Oil, Texaco, Marathon, Amoco, Conoco, and smaller producers. They did their best to trash the atmosphere for profit.
Today , I buy that natural gas from Energy West Corp of Great Falls MT, who bought out Cody Gas Company about 20 years ago. Cody used to have really REALLY cheap natural gas because they got it at a good price as a secondary product of crude oil , and it only had to travel 20 miles to the customer through simple small pipelines. Everybody was happy. Now, I pay full New York retail price set by some greedy commodities broker at NYMEX or the Chicago Board of Trade. I pay five times what the gas costs to produce and deliver, just because some broker says he can jack the price up that high without respect to production expense and and a reasonable profit. I pay the same retail price as natural gas that leaves Wyoming and travels 1500 miles through pipelines to New York . Actually it only goes to Findlay Ohio, but it's assessed as though it were everywhere in the gas pipe grid at the same time , like electricity. I am paying greedy corporations a severely gouged price for my own hometown gas that never even leaves the county , but is somehow subject to Interstate Commerce regulations and Common Carrier tariffs, etc.
That's the first segment in my eprsonal " Gasland" movie take.That is utter capitalist BULLSHIT ; your kind of bumtuous BS , Skinner.
Chapter 2. Across the river from my town sat an oil refinery belonging to Husky Oil. It was built in a rush during WWII from crude rusted parts of other crumbling refineries , moved here by rail and reassembled without plans or maps of underground pipes as installed. The 50,000 gallon tanks in the tank farm were lined with 6-8" of lead. The refinery produced asphalt and road oil alongside gasoline and diesel. It was a helluva huge mess; real Eastern Europe environmental Hellworks.
This refinery used to burn off its vast pools of waste oil. The afternoon skies of Cody were often blackened by these giant clouds of oily black smoke like the worst thunderhead cloud you have ever seen ,except they were manmade and darkened a full quadrant of the sky. That was the 50's, the era of unrepentant Smokestack Industries. Come the ate 60's, environmental sensibility started to take precedence at the Husky Refinery began burning off its waste products in the dark of night, to hide the big black clouds. Simply put, they w ere " trying to get away with it". I worked in that hellhole refinery one summer, filing railroad cars with road oil, a OCAW union job.
In 1973 I was a radio DJ who was On Air till midnight. One summer's nigt about 11pm , my old refinery buddy's called me to report the oilers were burning off the sludge and making the Big Black Sky. I editorialized about that on the air...chastising the refinery execs and supervisors for trying to hide their shameful evil black clouds under cover of darkness. The next morning I was called on the carpet and lectured for offending the town's largest employer and all those good high paying jobs. Then I was fired, and went to work as a newspaper photographer. But have been an active environmentalist ever since. Since it wasn't fashionable.
That refinery was later shut down and dismantled because there was no way it could meet even the most basic environmental standards. Today , the amount of Lead leeched into the ground and massive amounts of hyrdrocarbon plumes in gravel layers just above the Shoshone River are testament to how Big Oil would operate without any environmental oversight. The whole refinery site was buried---out of sight , out of mind. For now.
Without envronmental regulation and watchdogs, the energy corporations would be rampant polluters. I know, because we lived through the era when they were just that. It was a stunning example of l'aissez faire and unregulated greed. People really didn't matter.
Added to my seismoggraphing, roughnecking, drilling and blasting at strip mines, and some other sundry blue collar drone jobs, I've already lived through my own version of "Gasland". I can't wait to see the film.
Your New York Story is just another shallow dive into your own fetid wallow.
The New Yorkers probably wouldn't crave "your" gas so much if they'd built nukes instead, but of course that's politically impossible. Never mind the Portlandians are wanting it too rather than bear the horror of an LNG terminal in Astoria.
But you typify a mindset very well...while you apparently acknowledge that stuff almost always comes from elsewhere, you apparently can't stand the idea of someone wanting "your" stuff elsewhere to run the modern city state you laud. Consistency, please.
By the way , there are six nuke plants in the vicinity of New York City : Yankee Point, Shoreham, Limerick , Millstone. Haddam Neck, Indian Point. I support nuclear power. Always have, even when it was out of favor.
It's always fun to tease your pet goats.
Never mind that this movie is about not wanting gas made in PA, or trying to justify not producing it there, which would probably increase the pressure to poop it from Wyoming, right?
By hyping the "suffering" in Wyoming and the West, in order to inoculate back East, won't do anything to lessen demand for gas, and therefore production, out West. In fact, it exacerbates both and is therefore counterproductive.