Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the thing.
Speaker 1: My guest, Josh Fox didn't set out to be an
Speaker 1: Oscar nominated documentary filmmaker. His family happens to own a
Speaker 1: house in Milenville, Pennsylvania, in the Upper Delaware Valley. He
Speaker 1: tells about what happened there in his film The house
Speaker 1: was built in two when I was born. My parents
Speaker 1: and their hippie friends built it, and my family and
Speaker 1: my brothers and sisters and I grew pretty much the
Speaker 1: same way I did, little by little. There's a stream
Speaker 1: that runs down the property connects to the Delaware River.
Speaker 1: I've been learning more and more about how water is
Speaker 1: all connected. In nineteen that house happens to sit above
Speaker 1: a gigantic deposit of sedimentary rock known as the Marcellus Shale.
Speaker 1: In that shale are tiny bubbles of natural gas, And
Speaker 1: one day a natural gas company offered Josh's family a
Speaker 1: lot of money in exchange for drilling rights, like at
Speaker 1: least my land to this company, and I would receive
Speaker 1: a signing bonus of four thousand, seven hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: dollars an acre, having nineteen point five acres. That was
Speaker 1: nearly a hundred thousand dollars right there in my hand.
Speaker 1: Could it be that easy? Josh Fox's film gas Land
Speaker 1: is about the dangers of hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking,
Speaker 1: a process of extracting natural gas from rock using pressure, water, sand,
Speaker 1: and chemicals. The environmental impacts of fracking can include contamination
Speaker 1: of groundwater, depletion of fresh water, and risks to air quality,
Speaker 1: all of which have long term effects on human health.
Speaker 1: Gas Land introduces us to people whose daily lives have
Speaker 1: been impacted by fracking, people like Pat Farnelli, who says
Speaker 1: there were days when four of her kids were out
Speaker 1: sick from school. For Nellie takes a stand for her
Speaker 1: community of Dimmock, Pennsylvania, and the pressure is put on
Speaker 1: it by companies like cabin Oil and Gas. Everywhere there's
Speaker 1: a gap in the trees, there's a well, there's like
Speaker 1: ten Sometimes it bubbles and hisses when it comes out.
Speaker 1: It's highly recommended. I won't drink it. When Cabot and
Speaker 1: them came in to get the weather and they were
Speaker 1: telling me it was like hey to drink I said, well, here,
Speaker 1: go ahead and drink it. And they wouldn't drink it.
Speaker 1: In the interest of full disclosure. I've met Josh Fox before,
Speaker 1: and I'm a supporter of the anti fracking movement. We've
Speaker 1: appeared on panels together. In his first film, gas Land,
Speaker 1: Fox explored the long term damage posed by fracking. In
Speaker 1: Gasland Part two, he details the fracking industry's attempts to
Speaker 1: undermine the growing anti fracking movement. Josh Fox is one
Speaker 1: of the most prominent public critics of fracking, though his
Speaker 1: background may come as a bit of a surprise. I
Speaker 1: had founded a company in Thailand called the International Wild Company.
Speaker 1: I was taken there for an avant garde theater festival
Speaker 1: right after I graduated at college, and then split with
Speaker 1: this American company. And I developed this relationship with actors
Speaker 1: in Thailand that I was fascinated with, and we made
Speaker 1: a play and that play ended up touring all over
Speaker 1: the country. And I said, let's keep this going and
Speaker 1: we'll develop international exchange between artists from all these different countries.
Speaker 1: And it actually worked. I was doing projects, working with actors,
Speaker 1: learning about their lives in different countries and and I
Speaker 1: did a lot of work in Southeast Asia and Japan
Speaker 1: and India and Indonesia, Germany, France, and I was making
Speaker 1: new plays based on people's lives. So in a way,
Speaker 1: it was a documentary type of undertaking. Where'd you grow
Speaker 1: up in Pennsylvania and then later in New York City?
Speaker 1: So I have your family in the business, your mother
Speaker 1: and father, you know, Um, my father's child Holocaust survivors.
Speaker 1: Um went to City College when it was free, so
Speaker 1: did my mom. Um. They're both shrinks, of course they are.
Speaker 1: Of course they are in different ways. My dad deals
Speaker 1: with developmental psychology for for kids, and my mother does
Speaker 1: had a private practice and then started to work with
Speaker 1: You're spending your life pulling the covers on other people
Speaker 1: because your parents were shrinks. Well, um, and there you know,
Speaker 1: both crazy. Um so, but they're wonderful, well, wonderful, intellectual,
Speaker 1: caring people who built this house in the year that
Speaker 1: I was born. What was their connection to that area?
Speaker 1: You know, at some point in time in the past.
Speaker 1: My dad was introduced to that area because he's a
Speaker 1: folk singer and his heroes were Woody Guthrie and Pete
Speaker 1: Seeger and Dave van Wronk. You know, he was playing
Speaker 1: I think that this sort of Jewish summer camp circuit
Speaker 1: and my mother. Seriously, there are pictures of him, you know,
Speaker 1: and they're all those summer camps right there, so he
Speaker 1: knew the area. My mother, uh is the flip side
Speaker 1: from an Italian imigrant family. She was born in New
Speaker 1: York City. My dad was born in Kazakhstan when his
Speaker 1: family was fleeing Poland and fleeing the Nazis, and he
Speaker 1: was sort of born on the road, eventually landed in Pittsburgh,
Speaker 1: and I moved from Pittsburgh to I think the Bronx.
Speaker 1: I have two younger siblings, my brother Alex, who lives
Speaker 1: in Los Angeles, and my sister Oriana, who lives in
Speaker 1: London or either of them in the My my brothers
Speaker 1: and actress a wonderful actor, and my sister is a
Speaker 1: visual artist and painter and filmmaker who does these incredible
Speaker 1: um pieces film pieces about her life and about the
Speaker 1: history of feminist art. And so yeah, we were we
Speaker 1: all have a chip on our shoulder, I think because
Speaker 1: we had I won't go into it so specifically, but
Speaker 1: we did have a rough time during childhood because the
Speaker 1: family did break apart and things happen, but that the
Speaker 1: house um has been really the only consistent home for
Speaker 1: my whole life, and I always thought of it as
Speaker 1: sort of my twin because it was born at the
Speaker 1: same time. And every time I knew I had a
Speaker 1: brother or sister, they would add another room. And it
Speaker 1: was to sort of make it up as you go
Speaker 1: along where you go to high school. I went to
Speaker 1: high school actually write down the block from here, um
Speaker 1: Columbia Prep. During that time that you were in high school,
Speaker 1: you were Columbia Prep. Was it theater and film and
Speaker 1: media and things like them. I had been in public school,
Speaker 1: and I was doing really poorly. I was getting into
Speaker 1: fights every day and kind of failing, and my family
Speaker 1: was at a really rough moment when my parents were
Speaker 1: broken up and everybody was kind of losing their minds.
Speaker 1: I was in a I was in a public school
Speaker 1: called Wagner Junior High School, where there was two thousand
Speaker 1: kids and they were all between seventh and eighth and
Speaker 1: ninth grade. There was the option there to go to
Speaker 1: this private school, and when I showed up there, I
Speaker 1: was like, well, what happens here? You know? I was
Speaker 1: kind of amazed that they were actually teachers who were
Speaker 1: caring and wanted to educate me, and I ate it
Speaker 1: up like crazy. I took more history classes than any
Speaker 1: person in that school had ever taken. I became very,
Speaker 1: very active in learning about the world, and that was
Speaker 1: an amazing, lucky thing to have happened, the education that
Speaker 1: I received there and in college. When you went to Colombia, No.
Speaker 1: I went to Oberlin College and in Oberland, Ohio for
Speaker 1: two years, and I couldn't stand the weather. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's just great. Uh theater. I went for theater um
Speaker 1: and I spent I've always had this competing interest in
Speaker 1: theater and music um. I played drums in a band
Speaker 1: that was in CBGB's played Scott in New York City,
Speaker 1: and I always didn't know if I was going to
Speaker 1: do music. I was going to do theater. At that time,
Speaker 1: I was acting. So I went to Oberlin. My stepbrother,
Speaker 1: who was a year ahead of me in school, had
Speaker 1: also gone to Oberlin, and I visited him for a
Speaker 1: weekend and I just saw this incredible place and I
Speaker 1: fell in love with it. But then realized, you know
Speaker 1: that the sun doesn't come out in Northeast Ohio between
Speaker 1: October and May. I was done with book learning for
Speaker 1: a while. I left to do something else. I wanted
Speaker 1: to be in the theater, and to me, the theater
Speaker 1: was always the place where you could explore the ideas
Speaker 1: of justice. I mean, there's really two kinds of place.
Speaker 1: There's comedy and they're about love, and there's drama and
Speaker 1: that's about justice. And specifically, what I learned was that,
Speaker 1: you know, there is no great play that isn't about
Speaker 1: specifically the politics of its time, and from Macbeth to
Speaker 1: Death of a Salesman, they're always concerned with this particular
Speaker 1: political situation at that moment if you go back and
Speaker 1: research them. So to me, there was something in working
Speaker 1: in drama that was always relevant about this whatever was
Speaker 1: happening right now. And it would be very, very frustrated
Speaker 1: going to the theater seeing things that weren't relevant, seeing
Speaker 1: things that weren't about um, the collision of the human
Speaker 1: experience and the human spirit with the moment right now.
Speaker 1: Like it felt like in the theater, what kinds of
Speaker 1: things did you do initially that that spoke about? Well?
Speaker 1: I did a play called Hurley Burley by David Rabe.
Speaker 1: This was the first second player ever directed. The first
Speaker 1: one was Glass Menagerie UM by Tennessee Williams and we
Speaker 1: atually we ended up, weirdly enough, premiering it on the
Speaker 1: same night as the LA riots started, and we had
Speaker 1: been inhabiting this sort of depraved Los Angeles world in Ohio,
Speaker 1: and then all of a sudden, LA was everywhere on
Speaker 1: the news, and it was a moment in time when
Speaker 1: we were performing this plane all these it was sold
Speaker 1: out like this, and everybody came in and we were
Speaker 1: seeing all these incredibly violent images and it wasn't that
Speaker 1: they had anything to do with the LA riots, but
Speaker 1: it was this feeling that you got that you could
Speaker 1: commune with some sensibility of culture that was in the air.
Speaker 1: And I think that made me aware of the power
Speaker 1: of what can happen when everyone's in one room together
Speaker 1: watching something that is reflective of what's happening right now.
Speaker 1: And then when did you think that picking up a
Speaker 1: camera and making a film was the next inevitable step
Speaker 1: for you? Well, in the theater, the fingers goes away.
Speaker 1: So I would obsessively videotape all my plays and try
Speaker 1: to do it in a way that you can actually
Speaker 1: watch it, and an adviser just agree with you, I
Speaker 1: don't think it necessarily goes away. Well, no, it never
Speaker 1: goes away. Well in the sense that I have people
Speaker 1: who their memories of some of the theater they've seen
Speaker 1: are greater than the films they've seen. Well, I think
Speaker 1: that the impact is less wide, but it's more deep.
Speaker 1: It's not memorialized, but it's but people do remember. Well,
Speaker 1: when you have to apply for grants to make a living,
Speaker 1: you gotta tape your place. So I got really fascinated
Speaker 1: with how this could work with cameras, and I did
Speaker 1: have a video camera. And a friend of mine named
Speaker 1: Morgan Jenness, who was Joe Papp's literary advisor for ten
Speaker 1: years at the Public Theater, she saw me up there
Speaker 1: and she goes, do you everything about making a movie?
Speaker 1: And I said, UM, yeah, but not really. It's too complicated,
Speaker 1: like you have to plan everything, and I don't like
Speaker 1: planning things difficult. I don't like planning every shot. Like
Speaker 1: from making a play, I'm in the room with new people,
Speaker 1: a certain kind of person to do that job. Well,
Speaker 1: there are other ways to make movies, but I didn't
Speaker 1: know that they existed. You know. John Cassavetti's used to
Speaker 1: just get his actors together with the script and then
Speaker 1: they would go and then they would improvise, and it
Speaker 1: would cut, and it would improvise. There was way, there
Speaker 1: are other ways. Mike Lead does the same thing, that
Speaker 1: there's an improvisational backdrop to their working process. But then
Speaker 1: she said, well, why don't you propose something to Jim McKay,
Speaker 1: who's a friend of mine who's a great filmmaker, and
Speaker 1: his partner Michael Stipe. And I'm proposed to make a
Speaker 1: film of a play that I directed where I didn't
Speaker 1: know them, she knew them. How old were you then?
Speaker 1: That was when I was thirty three or something, um,
Speaker 1: thirty two. Uh So it's pretty much theater acting up
Speaker 1: until that. In music, I was the director. I was stopped.
Speaker 1: I stopped acting. Actors are very particular people who never
Speaker 1: stopped being on fire, if you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: I just wanted to see and develop a vision of
Speaker 1: some kind of work. So I've developed a film called
Speaker 1: Memorial Day because I had this insane experience on a
Speaker 1: Memorial Day weekend in Ocean City, Maryland. Ocean City, Maryland
Speaker 1: being like a beach town where everyone just goes mad
Speaker 1: on this spring break or more of day weekend, and
Speaker 1: I was there Memorial Day weekend, two thousand four, four
Speaker 1: weeks after the Abu Grabe pictures came out in the media.
Speaker 1: And this is a holiday that is supposed to be
Speaker 1: about the victims of war, the costs of war are soldiers,
Speaker 1: and also the honor. Yeah, but I'm sitting here watching
Speaker 1: barbecues and you know, wet t shirt contests and people
Speaker 1: vomiting on the beach and weird, incredibly, what the troops
Speaker 1: died for. I was just in this weird place of
Speaker 1: being so obsessed with these photographs of sexualized torture for
Speaker 1: the camera, and then watching this girl's gone wild thing
Speaker 1: happening in Ocean City, where and men, anyone who whipped
Speaker 1: out a camera they would do the most lewd and
Speaker 1: disgusting thing that they possibly could. And I thought, what,
Speaker 1: this is a weird conversation happening. Nobody here is actually
Speaker 1: talking about the war. Nobody's talking about the soldiers. They're
Speaker 1: just celebrating the begning of summer. And then I found
Speaker 1: out that the folks who were the soldiers who were
Speaker 1: in Abu grab had gone to Virginia Beach the weekend
Speaker 1: before they shipped out, had done all the same photographs
Speaker 1: of just to their friends they pull their pants down.
Speaker 1: They took pictures of people naked while they were passed out.
Speaker 1: And then it was interesting because I thought, well, what
Speaker 1: we've done is we've just exported fraternity hazing to this
Speaker 1: prison in Iraq and not bothered to tell the Iraqis
Speaker 1: that this is the what what we're doing, and we're
Speaker 1: hazing them. And I felt like we were in a
Speaker 1: moment of extraordinary being disconnected in America to think that
Speaker 1: we're so far away and it were dropping bombs on
Speaker 1: this entire country and we're torturing their citizens. I wanted
Speaker 1: to draw that line closer. So I ended up making
Speaker 1: this feature film with the actors from documentary. Well, some
Speaker 1: of it's sort of guerrilla style, and we did shoot
Speaker 1: one scene which is a horrifying scene of of a
Speaker 1: rape that happens in the back of a van with
Speaker 1: all these people cheering on the actors, cheering on the
Speaker 1: people in the back, and we would shoot. We shot
Speaker 1: the whole thing in traffic, and there are people who
Speaker 1: are not actors, who are cars around our van as
Speaker 1: we're heading down the main Dragon Ocean city who actually
Speaker 1: started cheering on the scene as we were filming it.
Speaker 1: And then Um. We took three or four months off
Speaker 1: and trained with friends of mine who had been in Iraq,
Speaker 1: who were soldiers, who taught us everything about, you know,
Speaker 1: close quarters battle and how to dress and all the things.
Speaker 1: And we took the actress from that crazy debautched first
Speaker 1: a couple of weeks shoot and then we made ourselves
Speaker 1: into soldiers and then took that whole thing to Iraq
Speaker 1: in the second half of the films in Iraq. This
Speaker 1: is the first film that I've made. The film it
Speaker 1: got rejected from every film festival in the face of
Speaker 1: the planet, and then it got into a film festival
Speaker 1: called Sinta Vegas in Las Vegas, which just happened to
Speaker 1: be programmed by Trevor Groth, who also programmed Sundance, and
Speaker 1: he saw this and it started crazy and we had
Speaker 1: fifty people walk out in the first half hour of
Speaker 1: the movie. It was kind of a weird situation because
Speaker 1: they thought it was a beach movie and they end
Speaker 1: up in a torture movie and it was. It was
Speaker 1: kind of Jacket was a recruitment movie. Well it was.
Speaker 1: It got compared to Full Mettle Jacket by Robert blows
Speaker 1: his head off. Yeah, but it was. It was like
Speaker 1: I we got people stormed the box office and said,
Speaker 1: yes they did, Yes they did. They store in the box.
Speaker 1: I said, We're going to burn the casino down if
Speaker 1: you show this again. This is the box office. I
Speaker 1: don't even know what they were thinking. I'm not really sure.
Speaker 1: I think that it was holding a mirror up to
Speaker 1: a very very dark time in America, and people didn't
Speaker 1: want to accept it. It's hard to make a war
Speaker 1: movie that's not glorifying war. You know, there is a
Speaker 1: formula to war movies, even if it's the most anti
Speaker 1: war war movie. So what I wanted to do is
Speaker 1: make a war movie with no battle scenes and and
Speaker 1: just deal with some of the much more difficult moral
Speaker 1: questions that faced soldiers. What's the next time we do
Speaker 1: after that? Well, then is the second film? You mega? Actually,
Speaker 1: in two thousand and eight, I was at home in
Speaker 1: Pennsylvania because I had given the next Landville, had given
Speaker 1: the next two months to Barack Obama to campaign for
Speaker 1: him in the Pennsylvania primary. I felt that strongly about
Speaker 1: um and I watched him lose the Texas and Ohio
Speaker 1: primaries in March, and I said, you know what I'm
Speaker 1: given the next eight weeks to Barack Obama. I'm going home.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go door to door. And when I was
Speaker 1: starting to go door to door, everyone was talking about
Speaker 1: gas drilling. So in in a map of Pennsylvania near
Speaker 1: the southern tier of New York, Milandville is ware way
Speaker 1: way up north towards the border. Yeah, it's right up
Speaker 1: in the northeast corner. So uh in two thousand and eight,
Speaker 1: right at this all the same time we got the
Speaker 1: letters in the mail in about February saying don't lease
Speaker 1: your land for natural gas drilling yet, because we can
Speaker 1: get you more money. And it was the Northern Wayne
Speaker 1: Property Owners Alliance that was saying, you know, join our
Speaker 1: property Owners Alliance and we will get you the best ghastlies.
Speaker 1: And the crisis was almost immediate. Learning what was happening
Speaker 1: when I was going canvas thing for Obama. People want
Speaker 1: to talk about Obama, and they want to talk about Hillary,
Speaker 1: but they really wanted to talk about gas. What's Obomba's
Speaker 1: position on gasts? What is this stuff about fratie? What's
Speaker 1: going on with this fractic So you were you conscious
Speaker 1: of and aware of hydraulic fracturing before that you would
Speaker 1: never even heard of it, never heard You would never
Speaker 1: even heard of it until two thousand when you started
Speaker 1: the canvas and people are bringing this up their piggyback,
Speaker 1: and that onto the conversation about the election. No one
Speaker 1: has heard about it. No one knows anything about it.
Speaker 1: But but fracting have been going on for years prior
Speaker 1: to about in other parts of the country. Well, yes,
Speaker 1: and no, not that we explained that, because a lot
Speaker 1: of people intimate that fracking is a process has been
Speaker 1: going on for decades. Distinguish if you would, what they're
Speaker 1: referring to to modern fractic This is a totally different
Speaker 1: type of thing from what you you might have called
Speaker 1: fracking fifty years ago. Okay, let me go back. When
Speaker 1: you're drilling an oiler gas well, Traditionally those are vertical wells.
Speaker 1: The well just goes straight down and you're trying to
Speaker 1: tap into an anticline or a dome of natural gas
Speaker 1: or oil. It's a pool that you kind of hit
Speaker 1: and you can suck it up. When you're talking about
Speaker 1: modern hydraulic fracturing, you're into a shale play or a
Speaker 1: tight sands formation, or any of the different formations you're
Speaker 1: talking about gas or oil is trapped in side of
Speaker 1: a rock, and then you have to drill horizontally along
Speaker 1: that rock. This is kind of amazing engineering that you
Speaker 1: can drill down and then torque that drill bit and
Speaker 1: sometimes go out up to two miles right um, and
Speaker 1: in some cases now they're experimenting with even now the gas.
Speaker 1: When you say it's it's embedded in these rocks and
Speaker 1: stuff with the and and and tight sand formations that
Speaker 1: so that people understand this, does it exist like kind
Speaker 1: of like the tar sands are words bubbles and pockets
Speaker 1: and pieces of it and you blow it all out
Speaker 1: of there? Or is it in the rock? Is there
Speaker 1: are big pools of it inside of a rock? Or
Speaker 1: how does it work? It's like Dr. Sanderstein Greber describes
Speaker 1: it as a frozen champagne pop. So that you have
Speaker 1: this spreading out of all these little bubbles all across
Speaker 1: the rock formation. But you do this by injecting high
Speaker 1: pressure water silica which they call sand, but it's actually
Speaker 1: silica which is different water, silica and chemicals and a
Speaker 1: mixture into that formation at such high pressure that you
Speaker 1: fracture the rock. You cause these mini earthquakes along that
Speaker 1: either vertical or horizontal well boar, and you're doing that
Speaker 1: with enormous pressure pressure that rivals the cluster bomb in
Speaker 1: some cases. And that in that mixture of water, is
Speaker 1: this fracking fluids? And then why are those fluids necessary? Why?
Speaker 1: And again I'm not assuming you know every detail of this.
Speaker 1: I don't want to hold you up with some geo physicists.
Speaker 1: But but when they have that, they talk about the
Speaker 1: proprietary nature of their list of chemicals, and they can't
Speaker 1: tell you what's really going into the ground. Why do
Speaker 1: they need this stuff to blow through the rock? What
Speaker 1: is what is it accomplish? There are nine different chemicals
Speaker 1: that we've identified. Many of them are proprietary and we
Speaker 1: don't know enough about them. But the ones that we
Speaker 1: do know a lot about our carcinogenic, their neurotoxins, their
Speaker 1: endocrine disruptors are very bad for people At different stages
Speaker 1: of the process. You need to have that liquid be
Speaker 1: at different viscosities. So to carry the sand down, the
Speaker 1: sand is propping open those cracks, if you will, um
Speaker 1: the s The sand is getting in there so that
Speaker 1: it opens up these cracks. Because when the pressures on
Speaker 1: these fissures are open. When when they turn off those
Speaker 1: FRAC pumps, a lot of it collapses back down and
Speaker 1: all that material is trapped inside the rocks with the
Speaker 1: sand is home. Sand is a prop and it holds
Speaker 1: open the cracks. But if you notice, if you go
Speaker 1: to the beach, water doesn't carry sand. The water won't
Speaker 1: bring it down. So you have to thicken that water
Speaker 1: with a viscosi fire, and that's one kind of chemical.
Speaker 1: So you have a chemical mixture there, and then the
Speaker 1: minute you do the frac you want that condition to
Speaker 1: be very very smooth and slippery and have no friction
Speaker 1: at all, so that there are another chemical and presto
Speaker 1: change though this whole mixture becomes like you know, the
Speaker 1: it was just this was subscribed to me as like
Speaker 1: the jet engine valves on a jet engine, you have
Speaker 1: to have that be very very lubricated in order for
Speaker 1: your plans to keep flying. So they have very intense
Speaker 1: lubricants and liquid fires that are down in there. Plus
Speaker 1: you have biosides you have down in the ground what's
Speaker 1: called anaerobic bacteria, and anaerobic bacteria exists without oxygen. It
Speaker 1: does certainly some cases, it's never ever been to the surface.
Speaker 1: You don't know what it's gonna do to you. It's
Speaker 1: also going to corrode your pipes. And if you're drilling
Speaker 1: a five to ten million dollar well, you certainly don't
Speaker 1: want it to rush. So as an anti corrosive device alone,
Speaker 1: they have to kill every living thing down there are
Speaker 1: corrosion inhibitors, the bio size, there's cross linkers, there are
Speaker 1: all these different chemicals that change the viscossi, the mixtures
Speaker 1: you're going down there, not taking any chances when they
Speaker 1: go down there, of course not. And you know, Haliburton
Speaker 1: has said, oh, we're developing non toxic fracking fluids. Well
Speaker 1: they're not there yet. Chesapeake, the largest natural gas coming,
Speaker 1: the second largest natural gas company Americas, has said, very honestly,
Speaker 1: there's no such thing as non toxic fracking fluids. And
Speaker 1: the reason why is if you're spending ten million dollars
Speaker 1: on one hole and that whole is eight inches wide,
Speaker 1: you don't want it to get gummed up. Their priorities
Speaker 1: are not about protecting groundwater or keeping this situation non toxic.
Speaker 1: That couldn't be further from their priorities. Their priorities to
Speaker 1: get the gas out of the ground and make their money. Now,
Speaker 1: you're going door to door in two thousand and eight
Speaker 1: with Obama, and you come to people's houses and they
Speaker 1: are some of them, to whatever degree, are introducing you
Speaker 1: to the the natural gas issue while you're campaigning for Obama,
Speaker 1: when you get bitten by this. So I want you
Speaker 1: to talk about the moment you decided this was something
Speaker 1: you were going to get engaged with, and then also
Speaker 1: talk about the moment when you came across because because
Speaker 1: in my mind, I see Josh Fox going door to
Speaker 1: door even before maybe he's even decided to make a film,
Speaker 1: and people are saying, oh yes, let me show you
Speaker 1: the cisterns of water I've got to have, and oh yes,
Speaker 1: methane does come out of my sake. And then I'm
Speaker 1: waiting for the next guy to tall you see, do
Speaker 1: you get the funk off my property? I want to
Speaker 1: blow your head off because I want natural gass. Like,
Speaker 1: did you confront both all of a sudden. No, that
Speaker 1: didn't happen. Early on in my area there was no drilling.
Speaker 1: So when I'm going door to door, there was no drilling.
Speaker 1: There's just leasing happening. You know, we received those offers
Speaker 1: and I want to know what was this, because the
Speaker 1: gas industry comes and they basically just say, Hey, it's
Speaker 1: no big deal. It's just free money. It's a fire
Speaker 1: hydrent in the middle of your field. We probably won't
Speaker 1: even drill. You don't even know we're there, exactly right. Well,
Speaker 1: you'll never check, you'll never know we're here. And it's
Speaker 1: just free money. And call mailbox money. And in neighbors
Speaker 1: of mine had looked into it, and they said, but
Speaker 1: this is called hydraulic fracturing, and they're all these chemicals involved.
Speaker 1: And look at these pictures of land scarring in Wyoming.
Speaker 1: And I had fallen in love with Wyoming when I
Speaker 1: was twenty two years old. I took I took off
Speaker 1: across the country when the Knicks lost the championship in
Speaker 1: and I never looked back. And um, so this, this
Speaker 1: whole film is John Stark's fault. I just found this incredible,
Speaker 1: magical state of Wyoming, the Grand Tetons, the Big Horn Mountains,
Speaker 1: the Flaming Gorge, the um the incredible planes that look
Speaker 1: like lunar or Martian surfaces. I just spent all my
Speaker 1: time in Wyoming, camping out and doing just falling in
Speaker 1: love with the landscape, and I saw these pictures of
Speaker 1: Wyoming just destroyed to spoiled gas wells everywhere. So this
Speaker 1: was from who from people in the miling who started
Speaker 1: to do some investigatory where they were just my neighbors.
Speaker 1: One of my neighbor was a glass artist. She made
Speaker 1: these little glass sculptures and she had happened to have
Speaker 1: a biochemical degree from Columbia University, and so she had
Speaker 1: been out there. She did all the research. Factor you're
Speaker 1: on the internet looking at pictures of Wyoming, but I
Speaker 1: don't know these people, No, they had There was a presentation.
Speaker 1: She did a small presentation. I thought it was gonna
Speaker 1: be about twelve folks, you know, twelve people hanging out.
Speaker 1: It was four people. I've never seen as many people
Speaker 1: in one place in the Upper Delaware. But I watched
Speaker 1: her presentation. Her name is Barbara Arundel, and she was
Speaker 1: totally didn't know how to use the microphone. She would be,
Speaker 1: you know, well, frackings, chemicals are So I just thought,
Speaker 1: oh my god, this person needs help, needs a little
Speaker 1: media help, you know, say that all right, Well, I
Speaker 1: just thought I'd make a five minute video for her
Speaker 1: of her presentation, and I wanted to find out, well,
Speaker 1: what's who's really telling the truth here? Is this the
Speaker 1: gas industry or is this this person Barbara Arundel I've
Speaker 1: never met before, or or neither. Yeah, I just wanted
Speaker 1: to get to the bottom of this. But I realized
Speaker 1: I was not sleeping. I couldn't sleep. I was completely
Speaker 1: terrified because when you when you live in the woods,
Speaker 1: when when it's that important, when you have a stream
Speaker 1: and you know, you travel the world, you see how
Speaker 1: fragile these systems. Were you terrified or were you angry?
Speaker 1: I was. I was terrified at first. What I did
Speaker 1: was friends, mindset, go to Dimmick, go to p A.
Speaker 1: It's only sixty miles away. And I had started to
Speaker 1: interview people, thinking all right, maybe I'll make a documentary.
Speaker 1: Everyone made one of mine. Been shooting. I shot with Barbara.
Speaker 1: I got her presentations she did. Five hour into shooting.
Speaker 1: I did. When you went to Dimmick first, That's where
Speaker 1: I went first. And when I arrived there, that's when
Speaker 1: I was changed. Um. There were Haliburton trucks swarming all
Speaker 1: over the landscape. People were reporting their children were getting
Speaker 1: sick there. They were under siege, and they were under
Speaker 1: siege and they were completely terrified. Um and they had
Speaker 1: sold leases. Now again people in the Milanville area had
Speaker 1: been leasing, but there wasn't as much fracking. Now you're
Speaker 1: seeing another evolution. You go to to Dimmick and this
Speaker 1: is there further down the road. We had joined this
Speaker 1: Northern Waine property durs Alliance. We were. My father was
Speaker 1: very interested, obviously in the money. It was a lot
Speaker 1: of money, even just for twenty acres. It was in
Speaker 1: the neighborhood of a hundred thousand dollars just for signing,
Speaker 1: and then royalties there was you know, we're not rich people.
Speaker 1: There wasn't. So I went to Dimmick, said, may maybe
Speaker 1: it's not gonna be so bad. But when I got there,
Speaker 1: I arrived and right on the corner of this place
Speaker 1: called Carter Road, Norma Fiarentino. She lived in a trailer.
Speaker 1: Her water well spontaneously combusted on New Year's Day, just
Speaker 1: blew up. Everybody was at I guess church or a
Speaker 1: hangover party or whatever. She came home and the concrete
Speaker 1: casing from her well was all over the front yard.
Speaker 1: It was everywhere. It was like six inch concrete casing.
Speaker 1: And then never started talking do you notice something funny
Speaker 1: and going out with your water. Oh yeah, my my
Speaker 1: washing machine stopped up. The water turn black. Oh my
Speaker 1: driveway is bubbling. And then people discovered that they could
Speaker 1: light their water on fire, um, and that something drastically
Speaker 1: had gone wrong, and all of a sudden they said,
Speaker 1: don't drink the water anyway. All of these people, this
Speaker 1: is important to because this is to me, this is
Speaker 1: among the biggest problems, and that is something like this happens.
Speaker 1: You know, you're you're well blows up while you're at church,
Speaker 1: and where do you go? Who do you turn to? Well,
Speaker 1: the first thing they did was talk to their neighbors
Speaker 1: to see if they were all, you know, having the
Speaker 1: same problems along this one road, and they were different
Speaker 1: kinds of problems, but similarly with their water. I think
Speaker 1: they called the Pennsylvania Department of Environment Protection first, and
Speaker 1: their first complaints were the d E P and Cabot
Speaker 1: Oil and Gas. The drilling company would show up arm
Speaker 1: in arm, basically in cabins. So for those people that
Speaker 1: haven't seen the original gas Land let alone, the sequel,
Speaker 1: Cabint is the company that was the major player in
Speaker 1: the northern Pennsylvania in that area, so they would complain.
Speaker 1: And when d EP came from p A, they came
Speaker 1: with cabint reps. Interesting that they would come together and
Speaker 1: they would say, oh, your water is fine, and then
Speaker 1: they would go and get them a glass of water
Speaker 1: to drinks. All right, well, if you think this is
Speaker 1: fine for my mother to drink, then you go ahead
Speaker 1: and drink it. And they wouldn't drink it. And then
Speaker 1: you know these folks, And I mean, I don't know
Speaker 1: how much experience you have Central Pennsylvania, upstate New York.
Speaker 1: It's not a particularly the garrulous type of a place.
Speaker 1: You know, there's a there's a quieter, less simple. It's
Speaker 1: not like in New York where people just talk talk
Speaker 1: talk talk, talk, talk talk. I wouldn't say it's simpler,
Speaker 1: but I would say it's it's less talking. So when
Speaker 1: people are coming forward and talking to it's just a
Speaker 1: different style. When people are coming forward and talking to me,
Speaker 1: you know they're taking the risk, they're doing something out
Speaker 1: of their comfort zone. Right. There was this sense that
Speaker 1: they didn't know what to do. But the normal life
Speaker 1: had completely been overthrown. And I remember one day I
Speaker 1: had gotten with Pat Fernelli and she had this jar
Speaker 1: of of weird yellowish brownish liquid. She said, take this.
Speaker 1: I said, well, what is it? She goes, We'll just
Speaker 1: take it um um. And she could never keep a secret.
Speaker 1: This Pat FERNELI that's what she's where. She's amazing. She said, well,
Speaker 1: some people they were working on the rickside and they
Speaker 1: told them to dump this. This is the produced water,
Speaker 1: it's the fract ware. They told them to dump it
Speaker 1: in their own stream. And these kids were from here
Speaker 1: and they wouldn't dump it in their own stream, so
Speaker 1: they took samples of it and quit and walked off
Speaker 1: the job. And I was like, wow, that's crazy. Where
Speaker 1: are these workers sit down down the road. So I
Speaker 1: went and I knocked on the door, and a guy
Speaker 1: who was about seventeen years old opened the door and
Speaker 1: he had chemical burns all over his face and hands.
Speaker 1: Says no, because I don't I don't pop in the
Speaker 1: door with the camera. I think it's rude. Albert Mazel's
Speaker 1: many years later confirmed this with me. Albert Mazel is
Speaker 1: a great documentary and he said, look, the whole process
Speaker 1: is a friendship. You get to know and then everyone
Speaker 1: else gets to know. I believe in and you can
Speaker 1: get the story and still be respectful of people and
Speaker 1: have decency for people and understand them. And I would
Speaker 1: rush rather make a connection based on I'm a human
Speaker 1: being and you're a human being, even if that means
Speaker 1: the gas industry is going to turn me down again
Speaker 1: and again and again and again. These were people who were,
Speaker 1: in my mind, just had done a valorous act. I
Speaker 1: was going to pop up at their door with a camera.
Speaker 1: I knocked on the door and I saw his and
Speaker 1: he didn't know obviously where who I was. He thought.
Speaker 1: I guess he thought it was somebody else, because he
Speaker 1: came to the door with the shirt off, had red
Speaker 1: burn all over his chest and on his face. And
Speaker 1: I said, oh, um, you know I'm I'm Josh. I'm
Speaker 1: making a film. Can we do an interview? And he said,
Speaker 1: all right, tomorrow. So I went And then the next
Speaker 1: day he didn't show off. And I'm sitting there parked
Speaker 1: across the street, calling the phone, calling the house, calling
Speaker 1: the house with somebody. No, he just chicken out. Understandably,
Speaker 1: he was getting death threats, he was getting stressed, to
Speaker 1: get beaten up by other guys on the rig and
Speaker 1: all this. But his grandmother answered the phone, and that's
Speaker 1: where this starts. To hear the phone calling gas. Then
Speaker 1: this weird voice saying they're afraid for their lives, and
Speaker 1: this guy handing me this jar of strange contaminated wars
Speaker 1: to get this tested. At that moment, my life completely changed.
Speaker 1: This voice on the phone was so full of terror
Speaker 1: and anxiety and worry and no nonsense, no bs, we
Speaker 1: are afraid for our lives because these kids wouldn't dump
Speaker 1: toxic waste in their own streams. And to me, that
Speaker 1: got me because I live right next or right and
Speaker 1: down the stream runs right through my property, and I thought,
Speaker 1: of course they wouldn't do it. But what's happening all
Speaker 1: over Pennsylvania right now? And this piqued my interest and
Speaker 1: I realized that this drilling was going on in thirty
Speaker 1: four days. And then I had to set aside everything
Speaker 1: else I was doing at that moment and go out
Speaker 1: on the road and try to try to do was
Speaker 1: this going to happen? You know, do a comparative study?
Speaker 1: Did all companies do this was all fracking like this? Was?
Speaker 1: Was this happening in every state like this? Also, as
Speaker 1: I said, I fell in love with my om and
Speaker 1: when I said, years old, and I wanted to get
Speaker 1: out there and see if it was still there that way.
Speaker 1: Did people from Cabin I would assume, with there's so
Speaker 1: much at stake. One thing that gas Land has proven
Speaker 1: is that that someone like you, or you particularly are
Speaker 1: someone who has your combination of skills and gets incredibly lucky.
Speaker 1: By the way, because these films aren't always take off.
Speaker 1: Not everybody is doing inconvenient truth. Not everybody is Davis
Speaker 1: Skuggenheim or you. Did they ever come to you and say, Josh,
Speaker 1: come on, let's sit down and talk. And did they
Speaker 1: ever try to seduce you? Exactly the opposite. I called
Speaker 1: up the rep, the press rep for Cabin, and I said, well,
Speaker 1: what's happening on these people's groundwater? And he goes, I
Speaker 1: have a book on my death right now from seven
Speaker 1: that shows that there is methane in groundwater in this
Speaker 1: part of Pennsylvania dating back that far. And I just said, well, like, really,
Speaker 1: is that really what you're saying there? Well, there are
Speaker 1: trace levels of methane and groundwater at very small quantities,
Speaker 1: but rarely to the point which you're well exploded spontaneously.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't think that footnotes about exploding. Well,
Speaker 1: well this was, well, this was but it was really
Speaker 1: like hitting a wall. And this was the beginning of
Speaker 1: my education that they were going to do anything possible,
Speaker 1: whatever you do, to to take not me, because I
Speaker 1: was nobody at that point. I was just a guy
Speaker 1: with a camera in the back. Yeah, to deny that
Speaker 1: you through what was going on to these people. For
Speaker 1: Josh Fox, his education about what he calls the truth
Speaker 1: has only deepened. More recently, he's taken his camera beyond
Speaker 1: his hometown coming up. Josh remembers visiting the BP oil spill,
Speaker 1: just seeing this entire ocean in the streaks of oil
Speaker 1: and feeling like a piece of meat fell out of
Speaker 1: the airplane. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to
Speaker 1: here's the thing. I'm Alec Baldwin. It was still two
Speaker 1: years before the BP spill. Josh Fox was canvassing door
Speaker 1: to door in Pennsylvania for then Senator Obama when he
Speaker 1: began hearing more and more about fracking. Before he could
Speaker 1: even think about making the documentary gas Land, he had
Speaker 1: a lot of science to learn. You have to be
Speaker 1: a fast study, and you know that's all it is.
Speaker 1: But I will say this. No one was reporting on
Speaker 1: this at that level. There was no Josh Fox in Wyoming.
Speaker 1: Who else was out there? Deb Anderson filmmaker in New Mexico.
Speaker 1: She made a film called Split a State. It really
Speaker 1: focused on issues of the Mountain West, though there was
Speaker 1: no one who was making a film about this invasion
Speaker 1: of the northeast of this huge So what was happening
Speaker 1: in the New Mexico here it was a lot smaller.
Speaker 1: Same yeah, well saing, same thing, but less media attention.
Speaker 1: I mean, if you're destroying the rocky mountains and and
Speaker 1: and the deserts of New Mexico, and there's one house
Speaker 1: per square mile in some of those places, and CNN
Speaker 1: doesn't down the street drinking the water from Vegas, ain't
Speaker 1: showing up with a rep exactly. So there were people
Speaker 1: investigating this, Amy Mall and already c was reporting on it.
Speaker 1: A brom Lust Garden in pro public, it was starting
Speaker 1: to report on it, Laura Legier at Grant Times. There
Speaker 1: were people who were doing this absolutely, and certainly Gasland
Speaker 1: was caught up in a wave of consciousness that happening
Speaker 1: about fracking across the North. So as you move through
Speaker 1: your endemic and you see the cabin. It's it's a
Speaker 1: whole other thing going on there. And when do you
Speaker 1: decide you're gonna make a movie? When do you When?
Speaker 1: When does the movie gas Land become real? And and
Speaker 1: again I'm not trying to be glib, but I'm always
Speaker 1: fascinated by film finance, especially about these kinds of advocacy
Speaker 1: things with these kinds of issues. Is it another phone
Speaker 1: called to Michael Stipe? Where did the money come from?
Speaker 1: There was no money, really, I mean it was really
Speaker 1: about three or four thousand knowledge for the first cross
Speaker 1: country road trip. And I had my own cameras, and
Speaker 1: I was lucky enough to have Matt Sanchez, who's the
Speaker 1: editor and cinematographer, who had a little bit better camera
Speaker 1: than mine, and he said, here, just take this one
Speaker 1: on the road with you. You know, I don't like
Speaker 1: raising money. I don't like the idea of it. I've
Speaker 1: never been I just made a movie about that, and
Speaker 1: I'm scrappy like that. I just want to get into
Speaker 1: the driver's seat and go, whether that's a driver's seat
Speaker 1: in a theater rehearsal hall or actually a driver's seat
Speaker 1: as it wasn't with gas And and I, you know,
Speaker 1: I love sleeping in the back of my car on
Speaker 1: the roadside in New Mexico. That weird. I'm not weird.
Speaker 1: That's not weird. That's America. That's the way we should be.
Speaker 1: If you go out and listen. Let me tell you something.
Speaker 1: I paid an guy on TV for six and a
Speaker 1: half year. Some kind of guy was weird. He was
Speaker 1: That guy was weird. Everybody loves that guy. Everybody loves that. No,
Speaker 1: it's not. It's fantastic. I wouldn't do it in the northeast.
Speaker 1: But if you're out there in the rocky mountain West Albuquerque,
Speaker 1: New Mexico's in this bowl. And when you come down
Speaker 1: out of those mountains on if you in the middle
Speaker 1: of the night, this warm air just starts rushing at
Speaker 1: you and you you descend down there for forty five minutes.
Speaker 1: You're just on a down and anywhere along that road
Speaker 1: that sound good to Crystal, just pull off. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I could tell you if I was looking at the map. Um,
Speaker 1: but you have studied the geography of feeling of it.
Speaker 1: I don't know. There's something fundamental linked in my mind
Speaker 1: between you know, being in the backyard, being in a
Speaker 1: stream and p a being out there in those rocky
Speaker 1: mountain lands. The guy playing the banjo is more who
Speaker 1: you are than Mike Wallace. Yeah, for sure. Okay, let's
Speaker 1: talk about that. Yeah. I have friends of mine who
Speaker 1: don't criticize the advocacy of the film. They don't even
Speaker 1: really criticize the filmmaking it. So, but one friend of
Speaker 1: mine said, Josh Fox, the filmmaker is very fond of
Speaker 1: Josh Fox the performer. Was it your goal to be
Speaker 1: in the film and playing your banjo? And like, I
Speaker 1: didn't like being Was that your goal? No? I didn't
Speaker 1: like being in a out of that change, Well, I
Speaker 1: made the first five minutes or ten minutes, and I
Speaker 1: did the voice over myself, just to explain stuff for people.
Speaker 1: Who am I going to call you? I didn't know you,
Speaker 1: you know, I didn't know Debra Winger, I didn't know
Speaker 1: Morgan Freeman. Well, what I'm saying is this that I
Speaker 1: did it because I was. I was working on it
Speaker 1: late at night, and friends of mine were like, hey,
Speaker 1: that's pretty good. But when we first started cutting the footage,
Speaker 1: we cut ones that had me in them, and we
Speaker 1: cut ones that had none of me, And it was
Speaker 1: just more traditional kind of mash up documentary, and we
Speaker 1: screened those both. We would screen both parts, and we
Speaker 1: screened four different segments, and the ones that I was in,
Speaker 1: people like better Better. People laughed. It was more human,
Speaker 1: it was more alive, and people my friends were saying,
Speaker 1: you have to be in this, so I said, okay,
Speaker 1: but I'm gonna be also you being a resident in
Speaker 1: a native of the area, So it's your story, that's
Speaker 1: what they said. It's your story. You know. A lot
Speaker 1: of the voiceovers will be recorded at three and four
Speaker 1: o'clock in the morning and I'm at home alone and
Speaker 1: I'm thinking about the memories of being in these places
Speaker 1: and this is you know, this was the best couch
Speaker 1: that I slept on in America, you know, um. And
Speaker 1: that's that informs the situation. It makes it human, and
Speaker 1: it makes it alive for me, and I get able
Speaker 1: to be interested in working on it as a human story.
Speaker 1: When is the film finished? About that? I mean not really,
Speaker 1: but when when when do you lock that picture? And
Speaker 1: you said, I'm done, the movie is done? What year? Uh,
Speaker 1: the day before the Sundance Film Festival and when did you? Okay?
Speaker 1: So that literally before we finished it. We when to Sundance. Yes,
Speaker 1: we applied to Sundance with a rough cut, and to
Speaker 1: our total joy and astonishment, we got in. And then
Speaker 1: we had eight weeks to finish. You know, you're in.
Speaker 1: Now you've got to finish by car. When we cut
Speaker 1: an they're half an hour out of it. We added
Speaker 1: a whole third act to it, and then um, we
Speaker 1: were We worked on it until the last were in Sundance. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you went to Sundance And how was that for you?
Speaker 1: I was totally nauseous. I had elevation sickness. Um, there
Speaker 1: were publicists talking talking to you. Your movie was eventually
Speaker 1: nominated for an Academy Award. At okay, aside from your
Speaker 1: elevation sickness, described as a as a filmmaker, not as
Speaker 1: a person with a bed with a weak stomach. What
Speaker 1: happened with Sundays, Um, Well, I met the most incredible
Speaker 1: filmmakers and people. I started appreciate who documentarians were. They
Speaker 1: knew how to tell a story, They cared about the world.
Speaker 1: They were not motivated by igo being in a film.
Speaker 1: They were motivated by fixing some huge and they film
Speaker 1: and they like and they accepted me. That must have
Speaker 1: been great. That was amazing. That was totally exhilarating, and
Speaker 1: the audiences loved the film. We went to Sundance thinking, Okay,
Speaker 1: it's this mountain decline. We brought ten people and we
Speaker 1: would go to these cocktail parties where we were trying
Speaker 1: to explain hydraulic fracturing to people in Hollywood cocktail part people.
Speaker 1: His eyes were just glaze over. You know, it's a
Speaker 1: horzon a well board and they're these chemicals and the
Speaker 1: injected the ground. People are like next, you know. And
Speaker 1: then by the end of the festival we started overhearing
Speaker 1: people on the little Sundance Plus going around the mountain,
Speaker 1: uh them explaining hydraulic fracturing trees and they go sideways
Speaker 1: into the rocks. You're not gonna believe, Jerry, could we
Speaker 1: get Brad Pitt to play Fox? Exactly? Look thinking like
Speaker 1: I don't care. So we knew something had happened. And
Speaker 1: HBO picked up the film and I thought, this is amazing.
Speaker 1: This is going to go into forty million homes around America.
Speaker 1: And being having been a theater director, producer in my
Speaker 1: whole life, that thought, the thought that I didn't have
Speaker 1: to sell tickets, which is always very hard to give
Speaker 1: people to leave the house and sit down. On this
Speaker 1: particular day, it was another great believable that we were Sudance.
Speaker 1: But at the same time I wanted to make sure
Speaker 1: that we were touring to the grassroots. I toured to
Speaker 1: two to sleep in cars. Well, that part of it,
Speaker 1: but also I just felt like I wanted there were
Speaker 1: Once you start, there's a lot of places to go.
Speaker 1: So about two fifty cities. Um, yeah, it took a
Speaker 1: year and a half. It was crazy, but you know, um,
Speaker 1: when we want to win, I want to win. I
Speaker 1: don't want to see this happen to debate. I want
Speaker 1: to win. Well, what do you is winning? Well, I
Speaker 1: think it's going to take a while, but I think
Speaker 1: we have to get off of fossil fuels. And what
Speaker 1: the fracking is is it represents another fifty years of
Speaker 1: being addicted to fossil fuels. Fracking for gas and fracking
Speaker 1: for oil is the new frontier for the oil companies.
Speaker 1: What this means is they can get at all this
Speaker 1: oil and gas that they couldn't get out before. Never
Speaker 1: mind that it's completely toxifying the landscape, never mind that
Speaker 1: it's going to destroy all of these incredible, these areas
Speaker 1: that we love. If you know, the oil and gas
Speaker 1: industry has least more land than the total land mass
Speaker 1: of California and Florida combined. I don't doubt these companies
Speaker 1: don't like to be told no. And we've decided that
Speaker 1: what's appropriate to do in America is this uh developing
Speaker 1: world exploitation model. What we've been doing everybody else. Now
Speaker 1: we're saying to us, let's just do it in Pennsylvania. Look,
Speaker 1: there's always been an area that the fossil fuel industry,
Speaker 1: whether it was coal or oiler gas, always been a
Speaker 1: population of people that was considered expendable in the face
Speaker 1: of oil and gas. And in West Virginia talked to
Speaker 1: the people their history of coal. It's like, how did
Speaker 1: our coal get in underneath their mountains? And so what
Speaker 1: we've done here with fracking and talking about shale place
Speaker 1: in thirty four states more land leased than the entire
Speaker 1: land area of California and Florida combined. We've just enlarged
Speaker 1: the area of people who are now considered expendable. The
Speaker 1: people who are now considered expendable, or people who drink
Speaker 1: water in New York City because they wanted to drill
Speaker 1: in the New York City watershed. It's three quarters of Pennsylvania,
Speaker 1: it's half of Ohio. Are they drilling in the New
Speaker 1: York City watership? They are not. New Yorkers stopped the
Speaker 1: largest industry in the history of industry, and so far
Speaker 1: have persuaded Governor Andrew Cuomo to take a step back
Speaker 1: off of the cliff and not allow this fracking is
Speaker 1: going to stay off the cliff. The more New Yorkers
Speaker 1: learn about fracking, the less they like fracking. If you're
Speaker 1: a politician, if you're going to open the state up
Speaker 1: to the largest fossil phil extraction in the history of
Speaker 1: this state, your initials are going to be on those
Speaker 1: chemicals and they don't biodegrade. They're gonna be down there
Speaker 1: for hu They're gonna be down there for thousands, and
Speaker 1: you will be known as that. If I was the
Speaker 1: governor right now, I would be jumping up and down
Speaker 1: because I actually have a chance to make history. Because
Speaker 1: if Andrew Cuomo decides, you know what, we're gonna reject
Speaker 1: this proposal and we're gonna move vigorously in the direction
Speaker 1: of renewable energy. Do you know what a ripple effect
Speaker 1: that would have across the world. Do you know all
Speaker 1: of a sudden that Andrew Cuomo would be an international leader.
Speaker 1: I just got a report the other day that was
Speaker 1: just today, just before walking over here, the Energy Information
Speaker 1: Administration mapped out forty one countries that have shale. We
Speaker 1: cover this in Gasland to how this has spread internationally.
Speaker 1: When did you know that you were going to have
Speaker 1: a Gasland too? And why the Gulf spill. We premiered
Speaker 1: Gasoline one on HBO June. I was going on all
Speaker 1: the media, news shows and everything. I was always in
Speaker 1: makeup and and the story right before me was always
Speaker 1: the Gulf spill. So I had this very bizarre experience
Speaker 1: of being the guy who was always following the golf spill,
Speaker 1: and I thought, I got to get down there. I
Speaker 1: have to film this, I have to see what's going on.
Speaker 1: And our first free weekend was right after the premiere
Speaker 1: was July fourth weekend. So Matt, myself and another camera
Speaker 1: Alex Tyson, and I went down to the Gulf and
Speaker 1: we managed I don't know how it happened. Where it
Speaker 1: was the fourth of July because it was a Sunday.
Speaker 1: We got this sort of unprecedented clearance from f a
Speaker 1: A to fly at any altitude we wanted over the
Speaker 1: oil spill, and they had previously been restricting flights the
Speaker 1: three thousand feet and above, and from three thousand feet
Speaker 1: you can't see anything. Why do you think I don't
Speaker 1: know the so that actually we were all in total shock.
Speaker 1: It was four months into the catastrophe, and it was
Speaker 1: fourth of July weekend, and it was a Sunday, and
Speaker 1: we just got lucky. And you'll see these pictures in
Speaker 1: Gasline too. When you watch gas Too, you'll see pictures
Speaker 1: of the Gulf that you've never seen before, the whole
Speaker 1: surface for fifty mile Street with oil. To answer your question, though,
Speaker 1: what spurred me on was it was clear that BP
Speaker 1: was running the show. The oil come in the face
Speaker 1: of the largest catastrophe in American history in terms of environment,
Speaker 1: the oil company itself was in charge. Why do you
Speaker 1: think that happened? Why do you think Obama allowed? How
Speaker 1: does it feel to be the guy who actually his
Speaker 1: introduction to this very issue. He might not even be
Speaker 1: here now if he hadn't gone canvassing for Barack Obama.
Speaker 1: How did he feel that Barack Obama completely abandoned his
Speaker 1: responsibilities to British Petroleum to police what happened in the Gulf.
Speaker 1: I was in shock, and that was the question, though,
Speaker 1: if this is what's happening with the largest, most visible
Speaker 1: catastrophe in the face of the Earth, and they're keeping
Speaker 1: the press out, and they're keeping the media out, and
Speaker 1: we're seeing things that no one has seen on television,
Speaker 1: and we're just just because we showed up, Well, what's
Speaker 1: gonna happen with fracking? And why is it that this
Speaker 1: is the order? It's not all of a sudden it
Speaker 1: started to get rearranged. In my mind, I thought, well,
Speaker 1: is there is there something above the government? Is there
Speaker 1: something influencing the government to such a degree that this person,
Speaker 1: this this man that I was so passionate and supporting
Speaker 1: UM has now all of a sudden turned over the
Speaker 1: office to the all companies. Could there not be a
Speaker 1: greater moment to rally support around getting us off of
Speaker 1: fossil fuels and starting down the road to save climate
Speaker 1: change in the BP Oils Bill. And I was absolutely
Speaker 1: dismayed and confused and horrified and in shock. We got
Speaker 1: off that little airplane and none of us could talk
Speaker 1: for hours. We were just we were nonverbal. I mean,
Speaker 1: having seen the Gulf in the state that you even
Speaker 1: to show it in the gas lane too. You see
Speaker 1: it only for a few moments, but having absorbed that
Speaker 1: we're in a plane having to wear gas masks, because
Speaker 1: it stands out most to you from the whole BP experience.
Speaker 1: You're down there, the people you met on the ground,
Speaker 1: the planes, the dispersed into this, that that the flying over.
Speaker 1: What's one thing that really stood just seeing the Gulf
Speaker 1: in that state, Just seeing this entire ocean in the
Speaker 1: streaks of oil and feeling like a piece of meat
Speaker 1: fell out of the airplane. At that moment, I felt
Speaker 1: like I have to look at this other layer here.
Speaker 1: I'm only seeing the tip of the iceberg, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm seeing the ground contamination of war contaminage, the stories
Speaker 1: of the families. What's happening at the level of government.
Speaker 1: Why hasn't there been anybody helping us? Where is our
Speaker 1: government that's supposed to protect Americans from foreign uh invaders? Right? That, that,
Speaker 1: to me was when I wanted to make this new
Speaker 1: film and say, because this film was about investigating the
Speaker 1: government and our government's reaction to this crisis, we had
Speaker 1: now all of a sudden, one of the most popular
Speaker 1: environmental issues of the last however, long a brand new controversy,
Speaker 1: huge movement sweeping across America. Where was the president? Where
Speaker 1: was the governor? Where was you? Why do you think
Speaker 1: what I mean? I can go old John muron people,
Speaker 1: and I could go well Henry David throw on people,
Speaker 1: and I can talk about how this is just my
Speaker 1: idea of you know, this land as your land. I mean,
Speaker 1: I can really get going on that whole thing of like,
Speaker 1: I don't know why people are not more outraged. The
Speaker 1: other day they announced that Santa No Free nuclear power
Speaker 1: plant closed. And I have worked in the anti nuclear
Speaker 1: movement Oyster Creek. I mean, I've been down in Toms
Speaker 1: River all the time and Millstone and Indian Point all
Speaker 1: this stuff, and santao Free is going to close. Like
Speaker 1: to fix Santare was six million was the bill where
Speaker 1: California in southern California. I've heard a lot about this
Speaker 1: because Santino Fres closing And when are people going to
Speaker 1: realize that, you know, we need to have I don't
Speaker 1: like to use the word Manhattan Project because that speaks
Speaker 1: like the destructive and war and negativity. When are they
Speaker 1: going to have the Apollo project of renewable energy. Well,
Speaker 1: I hope that santain A free isn't replaced by a
Speaker 1: natural gas firepower plant. Well, that's what they're talking that's
Speaker 1: what they're talking about. They've got to which I understand here,
Speaker 1: is that we were on the track. We are a
Speaker 1: big we have been on the track to replace this
Speaker 1: with wind and solar. We have more wind energy in
Speaker 1: North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas, just those three states, and
Speaker 1: just the wind to run everything in the United States
Speaker 1: of America, including our fleet of three million cars. And
Speaker 1: and what what we're seeing here now is okay, here's
Speaker 1: the line here. We're going on the progress of human history.
Speaker 1: We're going moving over towards renewable energy, and fracking is
Speaker 1: now cutting in fracking, and shail gas is making I
Speaker 1: think this is what they say in the film the
Speaker 1: Last Gasp of the fossil fuel industry. However, if you
Speaker 1: look at what's happened with climate change, and anybody in
Speaker 1: New York knows this from whether irene hits you upstate
Speaker 1: and flooded away your town, or whether you watch the
Speaker 1: New York City subway fill up with the Atlantic Ocean
Speaker 1: after Sandy, we can't afford to do fifty more years
Speaker 1: of fossil fuels, and certainly not frat gas because frat gas.
Speaker 1: Here's the third big lie of the gas industry. They
Speaker 1: have said for many, many decades that gas burns cleaner
Speaker 1: than coal, so it's less C O two into the
Speaker 1: atmosphere than coal, so it's better for power generation. Well
Speaker 1: that's true, but it's like the witches in Macbeth. They
Speaker 1: only tell you half of what's true. Like you've probably
Speaker 1: played Macbeth. I know you played at the public theater,
Speaker 1: and so what what does Macbeth here? He only really
Speaker 1: hears half of the sentence, right, He's like, Oh, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna be the king. He doesn't find out, you know,
Speaker 1: he's gonna have to kill all his friends, his wife's
Speaker 1: gonna go crazy and commits suicide. He's gonna be dead
Speaker 1: in three days. They leave that part out, so the
Speaker 1: gas industry says we burned cleaner than coal, But they
Speaker 1: leave out the part where the methane leakage field measurements
Speaker 1: are showing between five and nine percent total methane leaking
Speaker 1: up into the sky out of these gas fields. It
Speaker 1: was estimated at corneal between three point six and seven
Speaker 1: point nine. Anything over two percent leakage means that frack
Speaker 1: gas is worse than coal for climate change because methane
Speaker 1: leaking in the atmosphere. Methane is a hundred and five
Speaker 1: times more potent at trapping heat than carbon dioxide is.
Speaker 1: So methane in the atmosphere you have to admit a
Speaker 1: hundred and five times more CEO to the fuel we're
Speaker 1: chasing in order to get off of gas. Oil is
Speaker 1: even worse. It's worse for climate change in the short
Speaker 1: in the twenty year time frame. And all we have
Speaker 1: left is this twenty year time frame to solve this problem. Now,
Speaker 1: Gasland too. When did you finish Gaslane two? Um? Basically
Speaker 1: a week before premiered at the tray Back and Film Festival.
Speaker 1: We work up until the last minute, and you know
Speaker 1: we will make technology you can do. Have you got
Speaker 1: a gas Land three in you? UM? I don't think
Speaker 1: it's gas Land three. I don't think that. I spent
Speaker 1: fifteen years working with this international theater company about globalization.
Speaker 1: I'll probably spend the next fifteen years working on is
Speaker 1: just a sustainability or maybe forty years I don't know,
Speaker 1: depending on how long I feel like I've struck on
Speaker 1: something that is the core of who I am. This
Speaker 1: is not about fracking. It's not about franking. Thank you
Speaker 1: for saying. This is about who we are the most
Speaker 1: important thing you know this is about. It isn't how
Speaker 1: would I how would you work on fracking for five years?
Speaker 1: This isn't about frank. This is about our democracies. But
Speaker 1: this is about who we are as Americans, who are
Speaker 1: as citizens of the world. This is about is how
Speaker 1: you serve your country. I know this is radio, but
Speaker 1: I have to pull this card out. It says Marcella's
Speaker 1: patriots for land rights, don't tread on me. And it's
Speaker 1: the snake with the drilling rig going down to the
Speaker 1: middle of it. This is the card of somebody who's
Speaker 1: adamantly against the gas industry. His name is Craig Stevens.
Speaker 1: He's a sixth generation landowner. Says in the back of
Speaker 1: his card. These aren't environmentalists. It doesn't matter if you're
Speaker 1: a red person or a blue person, or in a
Speaker 1: red state or a blue state. If your private property
Speaker 1: rights are being destroyed by the gas industry, you don't
Speaker 1: have to be an environmentalist. If your civil rights are
Speaker 1: being if your civil rights and human rights are being
Speaker 1: destroyed by multinational corporation is bearing down, you don't need
Speaker 1: to be a tree ugger. This is not what this
Speaker 1: is about. You can see Josh Fox's newest film, gas Land,
Speaker 1: Part two on HBO and learn more about his upcoming
Speaker 1: tour this fall with the film on our website. As
Speaker 1: you see in his films and here in this podcast,
Speaker 1: Josh travels most places with a banjo. Let's have it?
Speaker 1: What are we gonna have? I think I'm gonna play
Speaker 1: an old bar song from eighteen fourteen, and I was
Speaker 1: with Pete Seeger two nights ago. Introduced Pete Seeger and
Speaker 1: he said, Yo, I know that song you're gonna play.
Speaker 1: That's That's an old bar song. Was the biggest hit
Speaker 1: of eighteen fourteen, and they liked it so much. The
Speaker 1: guy to sing it twice in the bar and then
Speaker 1: clip clop, clip clop all the way up and down
Speaker 1: the East Coast. They sold the lyrics and you know
Speaker 1: that song. It became the national anthem. If a bar
Speaker 1: song can become the national anthem, you're always just kind
Speaker 1: of in the position just making up America as we
Speaker 1: go along, and that's what I love about doing this.
Speaker 1: It's not about fracking. It's about making up the next
Speaker 1: version of Mary and letting it not be Exxon Mobile
Speaker 1: and Shell and Chevron and these people who who come
Speaker 1: to you with the see and leave you with the see. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I want to see that happen. That's I know,
Speaker 1: you say, oh, where's the outrage? But what I'm seeing
Speaker 1: out there And as we go along and tour of
Speaker 1: the film and we meet these people, this is incredible
Speaker 1: outpouring actually of love and support and of of you know,
Speaker 1: when people backs up against the wall, something comes out
Speaker 1: and it's remarkable to witness. So if you're not seeing
Speaker 1: that in your daily life and go somewhere where we're
Speaker 1: showing gasuner, the protesting, the fracking, um, you'll find it.
Speaker 1: It's pretty remarkable. It's so I've been hanging out there
Speaker 1: so long. B B b U o H. This is
Speaker 1: Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing. M