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Q&A With Oscar-Nominated "Gasland" Filmmaker Josh Fox

Q&A With Oscar-Nominated "Gasland" Filmmaker Josh Fox

Several years ago, a natural-gas company offered filmmaker Josh Fox $100,000 for his family's property. That land — 19 acres in the Delaware River Basin in Pennsylvania — just happens to be located in the Marcellus formation, a massive deposit of gas-bearing shale that stretches from Ohio to New York.

Breakthroughs in a technique called hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling have launched a natural gas boom in North America and thousands have leased their land to drilling companies. Fox could have been one of them. Instead, he ended up traveling the country to document the consequences.

Gasland is one of five documentary films up for an Oscar award on Sunday night.

Q&A With Oscar-Nominated "Gasland" Filmmaker Josh Fox

To Lease, Or Not to Lease

To Lease, Or Not to Lease

BNET: When the offer from the gas company first arrived, what was the initial reaction from you and your family?

Fox: There's not a lot that I talk about with respect to my family in the movie. But essentially that series of inquires came to my father, although I'm the resident of that house and so I was like, 'Let's look at this and figure it out.'

I think initially he was much more curious about it because of the money, because like everybody else at the time there was a lot of financial pressure. And I said to him, "Well alright, but I don't know, this sounds like a massive industrialization project and I want to look into it."

BNET: Did you have disagreements over this?

Fox: I remember it was my dad's birthday in 2008, in June, and we ended up having a kind of confrontation about this. I had a lot of doubts and he was like, "But look at all of this money."

So, there was a little bit of having to prove, not only to the people in the neighborhood, but to him as well.

Q&A With Oscar-Nominated "Gasland" Filmmaker Josh Fox

The Epic Adventure Begins

The Epic Adventure Begins

BNET: What compelled you to look into the gas company's offer and the industry's drilling practices anyway?

Fox: This was in spring 2008 during the primaries of the presidential race. I was actually doing door-to-door campaigning for Obama and this was one of the things that came up everywhere I went.

I was getting a lot of stories. I was getting stories from the gas industry's point of view that said we're going to get tons of money and it's just a fire hydrant in the middle of a field, so don't worry about it. And then I was getting from people, who were doing research into the actual process of hydraulic fracturing, horror stories and photographs from Wyoming of huge areas that have been decimated and tales of chemical leaks and exemptions of environmental laws created by Dick Cheney. There was a lot of that wild talk.

I wanted to figure what was true. And I came to the conclusion very quickly that it was beyond the worst nightmare scenario that the environmentalists had been painting. And that was very scary, because the reason to live in that area is because it's a pristine, beautiful place that's not developed. That's the whole attachment and it's the one consistent place in my life that I call home.

After coming back from Dimock, Pa., and having conversations with people in Texas and Wyoming and thinking about taking a trip, it became very clear something really devastating was occurring in communities that were going through it. I had to get out on the road and find out whether Dimock was the exception or the rule.

Q&A With Oscar-Nominated "Gasland" Filmmaker Josh Fox

Citizens vs. The Industry

Citizens vs. The Industry

BNET: The natural gas industry stands by the safety of hydraulic fracturing, a technique they say has been used for 60 years. They've argued since Gasland's release there's no conclusive evidence of contamination. You say the opposite. Isn't this a "he said, she said" type of argument?

Fox: The industry contradicts itself a lot, oftentimes in the same sentence. They'll say, "fracturing has been around for 60 years," and then they'll say new developments allow us to access places we've never been able to go to before. It doesn't add up.

And, "the contamination claim, that's not true. It's been disproven." They should not be able to make that claim ever again because of Dimock (Pa.). It was untrue to begin with.  But even in the recent scrutiny of the media on these events, just because of what happened in Dimock, every time they say that they should be called out.

The Pennsylvania DEP (Department of Environmental Protection) is not an anti-drilling body, by any stretch of the imagination. They wanted drilling to go ahead. For them to come out and say "Yeah, it was absolutely proven that Cabot contaminated the water in Dimock," means something. And it supports what thousands of people across the United States having been saying for years.

People treat citizens like they're some kind of unreliable source, but citizens are data. They are a data set. When you look at the movie and see (in the credits) how many people I talked to, we could have had a six-hour movie. There are enough people across the country saying things have changed and gotten a lot worse with the industry here and they are doing irreparable harm.

Q&A With Oscar-Nominated "Gasland" Filmmaker Josh Fox

A Community Divided

A Community Divided

BNET:You never signed a lease agreement with the gas company. What about your neighbors and the surrounding area?

Fox: The Northern Wayne Property Owners Alliance, which was the group that was leasing, actually ended signing with Hess 80,000 acres all around us and there was nothing we could do to stop it.

We're surrounded by areas that lease. We're utterly at the peril of whatever the Delaware River Basin Commission in the state of Pennsylvania decides.

BNET: Are there any other holdouts besides your property?

Fox: Yes! Of course! I mean you're talking about an area that is hotly contested right now. I don't know what the numbers are, but every the time Delaware River Basin Commission has an open public comment session, and we're about to go into a period like this, you have a lot of people who come. And I think the majority of people who come are from the opposition. Now unfortunately, we're not living in a democracy of geography. There are some wealthy landowners, a lot of who are landowners that really want to lease, and have huge amounts of area.

You've got a situation where someone has 3,000 acres and they lease. You might have 19 acres, or one or four acres and you're stuck.

Q&A With Oscar-Nominated "Gasland" Filmmaker Josh Fox

Early Warning Sign

Early Warning Sign

BNET: Is there any active drilling in your area yet? And if so, have there been any reported problems?

Fox: Yes, in fact, a sad tale to report is that the Delaware River Basin Commission — and I think totally irresponsibly — went ahead with what they were calling exploratory wells. They permitted I think 14 of them and these are all in Wayne County. They drilled I think five of them and did not subject those to the moratorium because they were going to only do minor pressure stuff. One of those is a tenth of a mile from my front door. Around the time when they were doing the drilling, there were reported water contamination problems, immediately. There were people who were living right next to it, who were devastated. And this was just one exploratory well.

The rig has come down and the well padding is still there, a huge well pad. It's tucked away in little bit of a corner, but it gives a lot of people pause. I drive by it and I've shot video of it.  The Delaware River Basin Commission sought to allow them to do these exploratory wells; and the commission is now going into a process to draft regulations, which we're trying to stop and say look, this is irresponsible.

It's just amazing to me that this national treasure, this recreation area, this agriculture area, this wildlife area is being thought of as a possible place to develop natural gas, an intensely industrialized process and something that ends up contaminating things permanently. I mean, it is like, how many pristine rivers do we have left in America?

So, I come from it from the rather extreme point of view, no drilling at all in watershed areas. I think that's appropriate because I've seen the devastation that occurs across the United States in the drilling areas. And I've seen what has happened when you deal with an industry that is as ornery, aggressive, bullying and willing to pursue you and corner you, as this industry.

Q&A With Oscar-Nominated "Gasland" Filmmaker Josh Fox

The Industry Attacks

The Industry Attacks

BNET: The natural gas industry has launched a campaign against you and has openly questioned the credibility of the film. The industry lobby group Energy-In-Depth has even sent a letter to the Academy arguing your film should ineligible because it contains inaccuracies. Was there any part of the industry's reaction that caught you off guard?

Fox: We were prepared for anything because the film was thoroughly vetted and everything we put in it had to stand up to a certain kind of rigor. If we were called upon to defend anything then we could. So, we were prepared in that sense.

But I was totally shocked when they attacked the film. I thought, "My God, how dumb could they be?" To be honest, I was shocked that they actually attacked it. I found out in the form of a NYT reporter, he sent me the Energy-in-Depth claims and said "How do you respond to this?" And I said, "Whoa, this is going to take me a few days." I basically said "This is 100 percent inaccurate, this is a smear document and utterly untrue and I will pull together my research and start sending it to you, but here are 3 or 4 examples of how this is a total manipulation and utter lie."

So they were saying things that were blatantly untrue and I think the idea was to get people like that reporter from the NYT to fall for it. And because it's an obscure area of study and you really have to do a lot of work on it to actually understand and see that the gas industry is lying through their teeth, the NYT kind of ended up going for it because they have to be journalistically impartial. And that was disappointing.

The industry kind of knew how to play this game. If the area is kind of obscure, creating doubt is all they want to do. They don't care about the truth; they care to play the PR game. That is their tactic, to create doubt and say look there's no longer an emergency, we don't have to act right now.

What I'm trying to say is exactly opposite. This is not only an emergency; this is an insane thing that is happening in 2011 in the United States, where Americans are being disenfranchised all over this gas land.

Q&A With Oscar-Nominated "Gasland" Filmmaker Josh Fox

Fox Fires Back

Fox Fires Back

BNET: Why did you feel compelled to answer the industry? Why not just let the film stand for itself?

Fox: I did it in the hopes that actual journalists would read what I wrote and that they would then go, "Hey, these guys are just lying."

I responded because I felt like we were being characterized in such a way that wasn't truthful. And for those people who cared to actually read our research and enter into this overwhelming body of evidence of news media stories on thousands of cases of contamination, they would have reassurance that the film is very much real.

And yes, of course, it's designed to be entertaining because it's a movie. The entertaining thing gets your brain going, and it gets your heart going and that is humanity. Being human in the face of this is one of the most important parts.

I guess what I'm saying is that I felt compelled to respond because I did want to set the record straight and I did want to open up our records and our research and show where we were getting our information and the science behind what we were portraying in the film. It wasn't if we put out some slick media statement. We put out a 5-page PDF and it was probably one of the most cumbersome documents to create and I don't even know how many actually made their way through it. But if you wanted to know the facts then the facts were there.

Q&A With Oscar-Nominated "Gasland" Filmmaker Josh Fox

Obama's Clean Energy Plan

Obama's Clean Energy Plan

BNET: In the State of the Union address, President Obama calls for 80 percent of our electricity to be generated by clean energy by 2035. He includes natural gas among those clean energy options. Many argue that natural gas will help us transition away from coal and would say you're not being realistic by fighting it. Can't natural gas be part of the solution?

Fox: If we were being realistic in 1940 we never would have won World War II.

First of all, the idea that natural gas is better than coal is a lie, especially when it comes to fracking for natural gas. It is a lie that was bought into by a lot of Democrats and a lot of environmentalists because I think they wanted to have a win against something — against coal.

The idea was that natural gas would be cleaner. But if you look at the infrastructure; at the way natural gas is produced and developed; and look at this recent incredibly stunning thing that came out from the EPA (and was reported in Propublica) that they had in some cases underestimated natural gas fugitive emissions by 9,000 times — then you realize you're not actually doing a lot of good in terms of changing from coal to natural gas.

This plan of Obama's is inadequate. However, the problem is that you have, for example, (Rep.) Maurice Hinchey who was campaigning for even the most moderate reforms in drilling practices. He wanted the Safe Drinking Water Act exemption [for hydraulic fracturing] reversed. The natural gas industry — in a safe district, a very safe district, where everyone likes Hinchey — ran a $2 million campaign against him and he barely squeezed by with a lot of help from outside forces that he had to call on.

You can't underestimate this corporate influence on government and the corporations have the biggest loudspeaker aimed at Washington. And so every single act is a compromise. It's not what's best for America; it's not what's best for the citizens. Obama saying natural gas is one of the ways that we can get out of this, alright well, then it's on the natural gas industry to figure out a way to do this stuff and be profitable, while obeying the laws of the United States because I don't think they can.

The laws of the United States, the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, Superfund law and Safe Drinking Water Act. The fact that they're exempt from the very laws that pertain to them is amazing, it's disgusting to me. You have a project that injects toxic material into the ground by the millions of gallons and then you're going to exempt them from the very law that monitors underground directional toxins? This is an Orwellian universe.

I would argue that fracking is not economically viable. If they had to pay for the mess, they had to pay for the cleanup, pay for all of the water they ruined and had to pay for every Superfund site — if they had to pay for all of that stuff and if that was all included in the price of gas, well then renewable energy would be much more competitive. But since they get to game the system and externalize the costs on the rural landscape, externalize the cost on the citizenry, then they can try to make a dollar doing this totally financially unfeasible project.

This is not the kind of thing that sounds good in a State of the Union address, but what we need is to start to realize that all of these things have consequences and unless we're using a sustainable accounting, which is to say the best price is the sustainable price -- not the cheapest price.

I'm very troubled that Obama included natural gas in the clean energy goal. But I will say that their EPA has been as aggressive as they can be, given the circumstances, into investigating this.

Q&A With Oscar-Nominated "Gasland" Filmmaker Josh Fox

A Better Solution

A Better Solution

BNET: How should the U.S. proceed from here? Should the emphasis be placed on ending the exemption for hydraulic fracturing in the Safe Water Drinking Act or something else?

Fox:  On the basic level, all those exemptions have to be repealed, the Clean Water Act and the Superfund law. The Superfund one being very, very important because it would mandate that they have to put money into a trust to fix the problem. There is almost a moral obligation, I think, to restore the sanctity and the sanity of those laws.

But, at the same time, you can't clean aquifers, it's like almost impossible. The industry hasn't proven it can follow the rules. For example, there's actually one category in which the industry is regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act, which is if they're fracking with diesel. Well, gues what? They (regulators) went in and asked the industry "Are you fracking with diesel?" A bunch of companies came back, including Halliburton and said "Oops! Sorry, we were fracking with diesel this whole time." And as far as I understand it there have been no repercussions to the admission of blatantly breaking that part of the Safe Drinking Water Act.

BNET: How do you "topple" the natural gas industry and get the country to switch to renewables?

Fox: In that regard, I think things won't change until people get onto the streets and yell for it. Which is why I've said in a lot of these speeches that civil disobedience, by that I mean strictly nonviolent action, is what it takes. And it's what you see happening. 

That is what made things moving in New York, where you had 14,000 public comments (on natural gas drilling) and each of the public comment sessions were swarmed with people. We're not talking about lobbyists; we're talking about people [laughs]. That's what changes things. When all these people out there — who have skin in the game and are in the same position I am — are willing to take on this industry, we'll get somewhere.

I think what we all have to do is make this big leap towards renewables.  And it has to be a solution where you're actually building the answer; and it has to be built faster than the natural gas industry can build their answer.

What I need Obama to do is the equivalent of saying we're going to put a man on the moon in the next 10 years. Meaning this is a race to renewables faster and we need to mobilize to do that. This isn't just about "putting a man on the moon" — it's about changing your mind and unseating the industry that has been in power and in charge of the world for 100 years.  That's hard and more akin to toppling a monarchy than some kind of technology innovation.

Q&A With Oscar-Nominated "Gasland" Filmmaker Josh Fox

Image of a flammable water faucet from Gasland.

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