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Health & Fitness

Plow to Plate Film Series Presents: Gasland Part 2

Josh Fox’s 2010 film Gasland helped bring hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to the attention of millions of Americans.  By 2011, fracking was the third most cited word of the year, after occupy (#2) and deficit (#1).  No longer obscure, there is still plenty to say about fracking, as Fox’s devastating 2013 sequel for HBO, Gasland Part 2, makes clear.

Gasland Part 2 opens in the same dreamy, dizzy, semi-delirious style, with Fox narrating from the backyard of his childhood home, which sits on top of the Marcellus Shale in rural Pennsylvania, near an idyllic, beloved but endangered stream.  As with its prequel, there’s tipsy, hand-held camera cinematography and Fox’s banjo picking that has a hallucinogenic and menacing effect (think Deliverance).  There’s also more footage of water going up in flames due to escaped methane but this time, because we’ve seen it before, it is not quite the signature shocker it was in the first film.  There are odd juxtapositions, for example dogs and chickens forced to drink Nestle bottled water.  All of this sinister strangeness is no doubt intentional, but one begins to wonder if Fox has anything new to say.  Within short order you realize that he does.  In fact, Gasland Part 2 is sad and upsetting in ways that the first is not.  It’s a more political film, challenging not only the energy industry, but also our very notions of and faith in democracy.

The film opens with audio and video clips of Bill and Hilary Clinton, Mitt Romney, and Barack Obama, all of whom tout hydraulic fracturing as our energy future.  Then Fox reminds the audience of the recent past, revisiting the devastation of the 2010 British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a region that survives as a source of fuel but not as a productive ecosystem.  The stage is set.  This is a David and Goliath story.

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It’s not clear though, as in the Bible, if the underdog will prevail.  Fox is a talented filmmaker, tireless and monomaniacal (Gasland’s his franchise as long as this battle continues and there’s an audience for it) and an effective advocate.  But Fox makes clear that the environmental community is facing one of its greatest challenges.

Fox illustrates this point quite effectively through the actions of the Environmental Protection Agency.  Lisa Jackson, former chief environmental watchdog and head of the EPA, tells Fox that the agency strictly enforces safety standards and subsequently investigates Dimock, Pennsylvania where well water contamination allegedly due to fracking has forced residents to buy bottled water.  The EPA concludes that the water is unsafe, gas extractors are at fault, and orders the construction of a pipeline, to be paid for by private industry, to bring in clean water from a neighboring town.  Machinations, a smear campaign against the EPA, and slap suits to keep people quiet, follow.  A new pro-business governor is elected, and Obama praises natural gas and energy independence in a State of the Union address.  Jackson resigns, and a follow-up inquiry by the EPA finds that the water is now safe; the pipeline is never built.

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This saga illustrates that fracking, whether or not it is allowed to happen, whether or not the problems it creates are remediated, and by whom, is all about money and influence.  People are more willing to openly acknowledge this fact than they were several years ago.  In Gasland, in one memorable scene, Fox fights a phalanx of secretaries and answering machines in an unsuccessful attempt to get a gas company head on record.  In Gasland Part 2, Jackson and more than a dozen members of Congress are willing to speak to him.  But what they overwhelmingly say is that the gas lobby is vastly powerful.

If at the time of Gasland the industry was surprised and unprepared for the assault on fracking, now it is not.  The public relations battle is in full pitch.  The environmental slogan (Go Frac Yourself) has been countered with Fracosaurus, the friendly cartoon dinosaur, who explains the benefits of “clean” energy in a book donated by corporate sponsors to public schools and libraries.  Industry purchases Josh Fox’s domain name to control information on the Internet.  It hires Hill & Knowlton, the global public relations company used by the tobacco industry in the 1950s and 1960s to counter claims that cigarettes and smoking led to lung cancer.  It sends spies to infiltrate community meetings and even goes so far as to employ PSYOP (Psychological Operations) to deal with an “angry public” even though it is illegal to use against Americans.  PSYOP, defined in Wikipedia as “planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately … behavior” was developed by the military during Vietnam and has been widely used more recently to counter insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Gasland Part 2 concludes with Fox getting arrested at a public congressional hearing because he refuses to stop filming.  He’s angry but also exhausted.  After three and a half years of shooting this film, he says it was the most that he could do.  He’s been silenced for the moment, but he’s made his point, and you know he’ll be back.

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Gas Land Part 2: Tuesday, January 14th, 2013

Park Slope Food Coop – 2nd Floor

7:00 p.m.  Free and open to the public.  Refreshments will be served.
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