That's the take from some of the families, too.Traditions ebb and flow, and these days Christmas is more about Mariah Carey and the Coca Cola truck than Yule logs or figgy pudding. John Hanger himself, mandated there should be a water line in Dimock to replace the water that was poisoned.Īs far as the industry goes, though, it's been a stonewall. I've had a lot of congressional meetings. On the lawmaking side, there are people who are very active in this. We continue to call for interviews and they say no. They couldn't get any major gas company executives to debate me. Boone Pickens to debate me, and he said no. The Huffington Post was organizing a video debate and they wanted to get T. Since then, has anyone in the industry tried to reach you personally? Have you had more contact with regulators?Īs far as the upper echelons of the gas industry? No. I was struck by the images of the regulators and the bureaucrats who didn't want to go on camera, and the scenes of you calling up companies to talk to someone in person. But in fact you hear the same problems everywhere you go: water contamination, air pollution, health problems, the sense of being completely betrayed, and losing control of your own land. A lot of the things the industry says is that this won't happen in Pennsylvania the way it happened in Texas, or it won't happen in Wyoming the way it happened in Colorado. I wanted to make the film as comprehensive as I could. We're in the process of making a followup, Gasland 2. We had countless willing subjects and we still do. There were so many people who had complaints. It was, like, you'd hear about one thing and then all the sudden you'd call someone and people were so starved for attention, out west especially, that by the end of the day, you'd have seven or eight interviews lined up. How did you gather your subjects? How did you meet them? Were you introduced? They just say, "oh, there's a dispute." This report makes it look like there's facts in dispute when there aren't. This stuff is designed to have one spin cycle in the media. You show several examples of tainted water supplies, and they argue only against two. It's really bizarre.īut when it comes to facts, they don't actually dispute some of the things you've reported. is supposed to play to people who hate the avant-garde. But it's not factually relevant to the story or the film. My work in the theater has had a lot of praise. It seemed as if the words "avant-garde" came up again and again, as if to direct attention from the substance of what you were were reporting on. I noticed that a lot of the effort to debunk the film, instead of going only after your work, also attacks your background. Despite thousands of cases across the country, the industry continues to maintain they have done nothing wrong, even when they're faced so clearly with cases that are impossible to argue against. The second thing that's the most disturbing is the industry's response. That this could happen in the United states in 2010 is amazing to me, that people could be completely run over in their own towns by this industry, lose their homes and have their health threatened. After 2005 when the industry becomes exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act, you see the process explode all over the place. One is the fact that this was really sanctioned by the government-and it was a process that was so dangerous and it was known to be harmful-and all the basic environmental protections were set aside very intentionally to allow this process to occur. There are two things that are really disturbing. What else have you learned, since making the movie, and what still stands out as the most surprising or disturbing thing that you've uncovered? One of the reasons I made the film was that it seemed like this was a huge story that seemed underreported. it wasn't something that I could find a lot about on the Internet. JOSH FOX: All in all it was a two year process, and I continue to learn about it. MERCURY: How long did it take you to learn about hydraulic fracturing?
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