I feel ill.  I feel sad.  I feel hopeless and depressed.  Just earlier today, life was happy, but now there almost doesn’t seem a point for the future.  All it took was watching “Gasland”

In a social media binge earlier today I took a useless news clipping that mentioned the higher percentages of oil chemicals that are in the swimming waters on beaches, thanks to our good friends at BP.  I wasn’t even trying to fear monger with it… my headline “?*yawn* Exploding water…. not nearly as cool as they made it sound!”

My childhood friend, Justin replied: Those kids’ sunscreen probably has worse ingredients. If you’re into exploding water, see Gasland. Tap water ignites right out of the faucet.

Tap water that ignites?  That sounds interesting!   I grabbed Gasland, and decided that I’d watch it with my dinner tonight… I did not expect my dinner to want to come back up.  It didn’t, but it took effort.

I like this movie, despite that it depressed me.  First of all, it takes a lot of balls to go up against an entire industry… especially a large one.  Josh Fox, the guy who came up with, directed, and narrated this documentary has a lot of balls, and my respect!

War is a business.  I had already spent the energy that I was going to spend being angry at Bush and Cheney for putting us in Iraq and Afghanistan just so they can make millions upon millions of dollars for their shares in Halliburton– a company which until today, I thought was a military contractor… but doing my research for this blog-post, I now know is an oil and gas company, which happens to do a lot of its own military contracting to get control of oil in other parts of the world. I had only known about them as the company that was doing the defense contracting with no competition, building prison camps, and now also involved with that giant BP Oil Spill.

Cheney had created what’s known as the Halliburton loophole, a law that exempted gas and oil companies from caring about such laws as the Safe Drinking Water Act, or any of the other acts that make them report any of the hundreds of absolutely toxic chemicals that they dump into the ground in order to extract the gas.

Josh Fox’s brilliant documentary, Gasland, documents the growth and consequences of natural gas production in the US.  Josh started locally in his home area near the Delaware river.  People were getting ill, animals were losing hair, and there were rumors of water that could light on fire. He got into all this because he received a letter from the gas companies offering to lease his land in order to put some wells on them.

At this early part of the documentary, I was already getting slightly irate at how the gas companies were avoiding all blame for health issues, but by the end of the movie, when Josh had traveled to Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah, followed by Texas, New Mexico, and Louisiana, all areas where drilling had been more prevalent and mature (by mature I mean “going on for a longer period of time”, not “done in a more responsible manner”), I was just in tears.

Peoples’ lives were completely destroyed.  The environment completely poisoned.  Josh not only spoke to the people, but also to scientists, doctors, congress people, EPA whistle blowers…..

I guess there isn’t a story to destroy, unlike if I was reporting on a Hollywood thriller.  I highly recommend this film.  It is a real eye opener.  Until I saw it, I kept thinking that natural gas was harmless, clean, and our way to break away from foreign oil…. now I am pretty much against it.  At least the way it’s currently being drilled for, with no oversight or responsibility for the chemicals it uses.

Right now, natural gas drilling – in the form that Josh reports on – takes place in 34 states, and is a growing trend… not only expanding in the USA, but also in Africa, and Europe.  The reason my heart felt broken, my meal wanted to rise, and all hope had escaped is because I had a vision of what a future like that looked like.

That future had a lot of rich dudes who own the companies, and billions of sickly, dying people whose only mistake was drinking the water, or breathing the air…  Massive animal death would also take place.

Learn more about the film, about the chemicals, about the laws, and more at http://gaslandthemovie.com/