Director Josh Fox had nothing but his camera to assist him for the documentary. It all started, with a simple letter from a gas company which arrived at his family home in Pennsylvania, a haven of peace on the Delaware River. For a year and a half he immersed himself in the nightmare of shale gas to understand how it would affect his countryside. Together with a friend who is an editor, he produced Gasland, a political, ecological and expressionistic documentary about an America prepared to sacrifice clean air, fresh water and human health for a few cubic meters more gas. He has become a leading figure in the fight against an unscrupulous energy industry, and presented his first film in Europe, in London from 16-21 January. Pending the arrival of his film in France, Josh Fox agreed to speak to OWNI about some of the details of his mission and other points of interest.
It happened exactly as I said in the movie, my father received a letter which proposed to extract gas from our land. He asked me to “take a look at this story”, as Upper Delaware is not an area where hydrocarbon are mined, it is a beautiful area of ponds and had never seen anything like it. Sure, gas companies promised us that we would not even notice them, and that we’d earn a lot of money…. and that’s what they offered us.
The Delaware River, which flows alongside the family home of Josh Fox
But my neighbours came to tell me that that they had investigated the process, which involves injecting chemicals into the soil. In short, it looked like a huge industrial project and I wanted to know what was going on. So I went to Dimmick, where this kind of drilling had taken place. When I returned, I knew I had to prevent that from happening to us and investigate it further because it was a national scandal. It started as a movie to give my neighbours more information!
The title only came to us when the film was finished; we watched a movie ad campaign from the 1950s for natural gas in Pennsylvania and there was a line that struck us about the pipelines and wells: “and these kind of sites and sounds, you can see them all around Gasland!” . And just like that, it was decided. My co-producer and I looked at each other: we had our title.
We showed the movie as and when we made it so as to inform the residents of Upper Delaware; we showed snippets of 10 minutes, 30 minutes… We were already in contact with our audience, which helped us select sequences, and enabled us to see more clearly the structure of the movie.
But the film Gasland itself was born from working together, with the editor, locked in a room for a year where we chose what we liked most and inspired us from experimental cinema, notably our greatest reference: Jean-Luc Godard! Rather than ask “What would Jesus do?” To guide us, we had a WWGD on our fridge for “What would Godard do?” Even if we wanted to make a mainstream project, we felt it essential to add our own artistic stamp.
The gas industry has ridden the debate started by this film; they launched a huge advertising campaign, which I think benefited us a lot because it increased the buzz. They even produced their own movie, adopting the same “handheld camera” style as ours, which is quite flattering when you think of it! But their efforts backfired in the end; the more they did, the more people wondered what was wrong. The more they attacked our film, the more they drew attention to our cause, helping people realize that their defense did not make sense!
All this stuff about the Terror Watch, it is just the kind of thing you would expect: these companies have so much money and power, it’s scary! But it’s much more frightening to lose a life time of work: my family’s house in Pennsylvania, my father built it with his own hands. At the end of the day, you have no choice but to fight.
For starters, hundreds of thousands of people are involved throughout the United States, everyone feels involved, and for circulating information and alerting people, using the foundations that we met during our tour was crucial. We screened our film for Congress of the entire state of New York at the Environmental Protection Administration Agency (Environmental Protection) and the Department of Justice. We have also received considerable support from the documentary film community, including the provision of legal aid when we were attacked by the gas industry.
There is a division in the United States between those who are content to be at the mercy of the operating companies of hydrocarbons, who are of the opinion that human beings are of of no great importance, and then there is an army of people worried about the “real” America who advocate equality, freedom, justice and education. As for us, we are between the two.
We have just won a great victory: New York State passed a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing because of evidence that we first discovered! To achieve that, we had to give a copy of Gasland to each member of the State Assembly, which is a few hundred people, plus one to each of the 70 senators of the state.
Tom Corbett, the new governor of Pennsylvania, received one million dollars from the gas industry for his campaign.
In Pennsylvania, where the Delaware River flows, it is another matter: the state has elected a governor who was highly sympathetic to the extraction of shale gas, Tom Corbett, who received one million dollars from the gas industry to fund his campaign. The Delaware Basin Commission has approved several exploration wells, three have been drilled and we have already seen signs of water contamination, one of which is a few miles from my home. This only further motivates us to fight.
In the United States. Information has remained under alert status for quite some time. The first explosions took place in Texas, Colorado and Wyoming, which are sparsely populated states where the production of oil and gas is already happening … Hardly enough to make the national media. But when the companies moved up to New York and Pennsylvania, highly populated areas, where they heavily exploited groundwater and without liability extracted hydrocarbons, the media was very quick about covering the story.
We have collected some material about the exploitation of coal bed methane (Coalbed methane) in Australia, which is very similar to the issue shale: the technique is similar to hydraulic fracturing and the government has aligned itself with companies to literally to expropriate people. There are similar problems with contamination of fresh water, air pollution and theft of agricultural land … Like in the United States, people have been pushed out to make room for large projects to exploit gas. We were there to support people and talk to them about the situation in Australia.
We do not yet know what will be the follow up to Gasland but we probably will make one: everything is moving so fast now that we have not had time to take a step back. We are also working on a film about renewable energy.
We chose to do both: a cinema distribution in our own way and a partnership with HBO. We were allowed to go on tour with our film before it was broadcast on TV and to show it to an audience afterwards. We knew that the subject was very serious and we wanted it known. We showed the film in 40 million homes, which is an incomparably powerful force! Having access to television is to go directly to people in their homes and it helped us tremendously. We have benefited from their public relations machine which is fantastic but we also want to stay directly in touch with people, showing the film across the country and answering their questions. Making contact with local organizations was a key point of our campaign.
As a theater director, I accustomed to devoting my life to my projects. But this project is different because it is a national issue and what we are doing is changing the debate. It’s very exciting and it taking a crazy amount of time but we are fighting for the State of New York, Pennsylvania …. We are fighting for so many people: to hear stories of so many people is an extraordinary experience, and it gives me a moral obligation to fight for them.
I am a searcher, I seek the truth, and I think that having an education gives you a responsibility. I am a theater director but I have put everything aside for this project, much to the disappointment of my company. But they understand I did not choose this battle, it chose me, by arriving in my mailbox!
Currently I am doing everything I possibly can: people around the world contact us every day asking us for help or advice, to see the film … This is the kind of adventure that happens once in a lifetime, so I have invested everything I have because it is a biohazard. What I would like is to get back my home, my life, this sense of peace and security … And if it takes two years of relentless campaigning to make it stop, then I will and I know we will win.
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Photo Credits: Nicholas T ; Pennstatelive, both on CC licence
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