GasLand

This movie was very informative. I live above the Marcellus Shale in NYS and drilling hasn't started yet but there's a lot of support for it, primarily because our rural areas are financially strapped and lots of cash is being promised by the drilling companies. I think this movie should be required viewing before anyone signs a gas lease. If our groundwater and the environment becomes contaminated, it has the potential to not only harm those living in the region but the entire watershed, which involves millions of people in NYC, Philadelphia, NJ and DC. New York and Pennsylvania better get it right or there will be massive amounts of people facing potentially life threatening illnesses.

I liked the way Mr. Fox laid out the film. He used interviews, visits to drilling sites and he didn't grandstand to get the viewer's attention. I get the impression that this is his first film and he's to be commended for such a comprehensive and informative documentary. He's performed a great service to the region; I just hope it's viewed by many. Those who see it need to become proactive and write their elected representatives to assure that safeguards are required and that they are enforced - or the drilling should not be done.

Thank you Mr. Fox.

This film is a much needed warning about the unsafe conditions around hydraulic fracturing. Anyone who doesn't see that clearly is obviously making money on hydraulic fracturing! Can we learn nothing from the current poisoning of the ocean due to unsafe practices in oil drilling? These companies only concern is profit- at all cost. As this film demonstrates and the current events show- poisoning the world around them is an acceptable risk for maximum profit. If not, why would they continue to campaign for the hydraulic fracturing (or Fracking) of the Marcellus Shale? (and the rest of the United States...)

Fracking is especially dangerous for New York City because the city gets its water from the Adirondacks. Currently, fracking is not allowed in the NYC watershed part of the Marcellus Shale which stretches from upstate NY to Tennessee. In addition to the problems with toxic chemicals injected into the ground with fracking, the Marcellus Shale is radioactive so that waste from fracking contains low levels of radioactivity.

I would love to see those reviewers trying to debunk this film drink the water coming from the faucets of so many homes shown in the film. Water that is flammable straight from the sink! Authorities defending fracking as harmless refuse to drink the water offered them in the film and so would those narrow minded negative reviewers. (Or should I say profiteering propagandists... what's your day rate for writing these reviews?)

Wind and sunlight is free and can be harnessed to produce the energy we need to keep the world moving without poisoning our water and air. Let's suck it up and make a change! It will take money and time and mean less profit for some but there is a bigger picture to consider.

Call Albany and ask them to not poison New York's drinking water by supporting the Englebright/Adabo bill. The number is 518-455-2800.

Give the operator your zip code and she'll transfer you to your senator's office

Tell them you'd like him or her to advocate for the Englebright/Adabo bill. The deadline is June 25th or close to it!

Politicians constantly use the word terrorism as a license to do whatever they want. I believe those politicians who support this behavior are actually accomplices to some of the most outrageous terrorist activity against the American people! If the Taliban were poisoning our water would we not do something about it? But when a corporation poisons the water government heads look the other way? for the almighty dollar? WAKE UP! STAND UP! DO SOMETHING!

This is perhaps one of the most shocking and disturbing films I've seen and the fact that it's all real is even more terrifying. The film follows Josh Fox who has been offered a vast amount of money by those who wish to drill on his land for natural gas. Concerned about the after effect he goes in search of some details.

What he finds is so utterly disturbing and sad and that being huge amounts of people whose health and welfare have been effected by natural gas drilling in their back yard. The industry is enormous and the amount of gas sites are in the hundreds of thousands some are even on 'public land'. People across much of the central USA have them in their back yards, tanks, drills, containers and various other pieces of industry, small to some comparison but still a blot on the landscape. But aesthetics are far from the worse of concerns.

The drilling for gas creates water contamination with a huge cocktail of chemicals seeping into drinking wells, streams and lakes. What was for years safe, whole areas are so full of chemical concoctions that in some instances if you hold a lit flame to a water source it erupts into flames. People have become sick due to the high quantities of dangerous and hazardous chemicals, pets and farm animals lose their hair and yet the companies involved do tests and say the water is safe to drink.

Watching these people is distressing, living on the land, with generations of history they are now powerless to do anything as the companies refuse to acknowledge the issue. They would also unlikely to sell up as no-one would buy a property with a great big well in the back yard, let alone if they knew the issues that come with it. That the US government, thanks to Dick Cheney, signed a law that made the companies exempt from the Clean Water Bill among others is shocking, had it been otherwise, this may not be happening.

There is some powerful stuff in this: the list of trucks it takes to actually make a natural gas well or the list of long complex chemical compounds used and found. There is the third generations farmer who is at a loss of what to do seeing the land around him change in the worse way possible. It is relentless, with person after person speaking about the effects, illness's, chemical clouds, explosions in the middles of the night and more that they now suffer. Independent tests show that water samples are so full of chemicals or that air samples are so dangerously over the recommended levels it's hard to imagine the ongoing consequences.

The film does at last show a glimmer of hope that being a small selection of activists and politicians making a stand and trying to stop what has happened in many parts of the US happening in those untouched. Near the end we see a congressional hearing in which some of the big companies spokespeople are brought down in a few simple questions, their denial that there is a risk, blatant lies which are not received well.

There is mention that despite the US setting there is relevance to Australia, indeed world wide. You can only hope that more people will see this film. My only gripe is the camera work, which at times is so bad, it's like a 5yr old was operating the camera. Otherwise this is powerful, shocking and moving stuff.

More of my review at my site iheartfilms.weebly.com

This documentary shows how corporate greed, without any concern for anything other than making a profit, is destroying one of the most beautiful landscapes in the world: the United States.

As another reviewer said, it's not about gas as in gasoline, but about how oil and gas companies are polluting the environment through a process called hydraulic fracturing, used in the extraction of natural gas.

The film is filled with unmistakable and undeniable evidence that this process is in fact forever altering not only the landscape in several states, but also their wild life as well as the health of regular individuals permanently. The images and testimonies shown will blow you away and you'll come out with a very different awareness level on what it means to be "enviromentally conscious".

I found it really gut-wrenching and I guarantee you you won't be able to get through to the end of it without wanting to go and do something about it.

We've seen in a number of different films how powerful industries will do anything to protect their interests and keep people quiet about their lies and methods for keeping the general public deceived about what they really do. What's really striking here is that is happening for real, in congress, and not in a movie.

The other aspect I found really positive is that the filmmaker tried hard to remain as objective as possible, which is more than I can say about any Michael Moore documentary.Everyone is given a chance to tell their part of the story and the audience is left to decide what to make of everything being said and shown.

I highly recommend it. You'll need a strong constitution to get through it; it's not for the faint of heart. But it'll be a very rewarding experience and hopefully one that will make you cringe every time you see a gas drill across your front yard.

Throughout this documentary I kept thinking about the endless whining Republicans engage in when they're asked to protect the environment, as if money is vastly more important than anything that's ever existed on the Earth.

These pollution scenarios can be laid at the feet of the Bushes, Cheneys, Limbaughs, Becks, Hannitys, Palins, Blankenships and other greediots who treat nature like a dumping ground, often citing "God's plan" as an excuse. How do people get so sick in the head that they think money is more important than life itself? These are the same parasites who keep claiming that global warming is a hoax, or the ozone hole was never a problem. Will we ever get that garbage out of the human gene pool?

The message in this film is a powerful one, and goes well beyond the specific issue of "fracking" to cover any enterprise that disturbs nature on a large scale. The sheer footprint of drilling operations on the physical landscape is another depressing angle, almost as bad as the water and air pollution. You can easily see these rigs and access roads in satellite photos. The rapidity of their deployment is changing the map daily. Thanks, Bush & Cheney for your "wise use" loopholes that may never be fully closed.

The human flood seems destined to grow until it consumes every possible acre that can satiate gluttony (temporarily). Wind turbines are no exception, even though they wear a "green" mantle. Future plans for endless construction will turn non-industrialized acreage into an old curiosity. That's "progress" by the standard growthist definition. Leave no "productive" land untouched. I can see national parks being ringed by the sights and odors of drilling rigs, leaving no real place to escape to. It's already encroaching on the Tetons.

The only weakness of this documentary was the shaky, often poorly focused camera work, though it worked to exaggerate the grim mood and some of it seemed intentional. Pro cameraman or not, Mr. Fox had guts in making this piece and is to be highly commended.

Still, I was left with the sick feeling that legislation will never fully decontaminate these activities because so many people are basically evil.