Gasland Themes

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The documentary ‘Gasland” is a telling tale of the terrible consequences of natural gas mining in the US. The filmmaker, Josh Fox, travels around the country visiting different homes that are in very close proximity of natural gas drilling sites after receiving a $100,000 offer from a natural gas company to use his land as a drilling site . The film focuses on how the drilling sites not only leave ugly scars on the land, but also the horrendous health problems people get from drinking the contaminated groundwater.
In this film, there are two main points that Fox is arguing. The first point that he shows really well is, the process of drilling for natural gas is not as great as the gas companies say it is. The whole process from start to finish …show more content…

The first connection is the idea of environmental injustice. As we learned earlier in class, a lot of times people of color or lower economic backgrounds get the brunt of environmental unfriendly practices. This is clearly seen in the film, the people that Fox interviewed lived in what looked like poorer communities and in some cases rundown houses and they were the ones who had the wells in their yards. This is similar to the article on environmental injustice in Warren County by Eileen McGurthy where lower class African Americans are fighting against having a toxic waste dump put in their back yards. This is the idea of “I don’t want it in my backyard” that is seen with many different instances. If you are wealthy, you can buy your way out of a situation like a natural gas well in your area, but when you are poor and have no monetary power there is not much you can do. Another way that this film connects to concepts we have talked about in class is the idea that America is always wanting to produce more, more and much more. Many times in the film you see miles upon miles of different drilling sites just covering the landscape. Throughout the course we have read articles that have talked about how America is constantly wanting to produce more, a good example of this is the dust bowl. One of the reasons the dust bowl happened was because we did not know when to

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