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Josh Fox — the director of Gasland — grew up in Milanville, Pennsylvania. One day not too long ago he received a letter in the mail telling him that natural gas drilling was coming to his doorstep: A Halliburton-designed technology could unlock the rich reserve of natural gas underneath the ground in the Catskills/Poconos region. See the Video
Why were they coming now? Well, for starters, in 2005, the Bush administration exempted the natural gas industry from the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Right-to-Know Act, to name a few — and production was ramping up! The local provider was offering Fox something like $5,000 an acre to drill on his property. (Fox owned 20 acres).
Why would someone offer him $100,000 in cash? Fox started investigating. And what he found shocked him. In towns out west, where this technique called hydraulic fracturing (or fracking) was used, people were getting sick. Mysterious ailments, cancer, that sort of thing. Fox (and many others) believed the chemicals in fracking (chemicals Haliburton declined to identify, calling them "proprietary") were seeping into the water table, threatening to permanently taint the supply. Fox set off on a cross-country research tour.
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Fossil Fuel
