Gasland (Documentary Review)
Monday, May 2nd, 2011
One documentary every human being should be forced to view is Gasland. This is the story of who, what, when, where, how and why countries (including Australia) are sacrificing their land and water supplies for a quick kill in the energy market. Here’s a hint: GREED.
Fracking: Drill down 8000 feet all over the countryside and pump vast quantities of fresh water mixed with over 500 chemicals to fracture the underlying rock and release gas deposits. No, I mean VAST quantities of fresh water (in a world suffering rising water shortages) and I mean a soup of 500 chemicals (including a large number of serious carcinogens and other killers). Half that soup rises to the surface and the other half becomes a part of your countries long-term geological water supply.
The second insidious part of that business model is that contaminated victims have to prove the harm was caused by the fracking AND they have to fight it in court AND the corporation, if found at fault, simply pays out the last man standing. And where are the environmental regulators on all of this? They’re gagged by governments who pass special laws that allow these large energy companies immunity to our existing environmental safeguards. Where does it ever make sense to give multinational corporations immunity to pollute without being monitored?
A rational person would think the President of the United States of America would watch this documentary and hit a red fucking button and the world would stop on it’s what-the-fuck axis. But no… apparently Power comes in an idiot suit and Presidents are less powerful than corporate lobby groups. And now this insidious cluster-fuck of environmental ass-pumping has arrived in Australia. To the echo of ‘almost silence’. The only sad faces bleeting on our doorstep are the farmers who stand to lose their businesses to the corporate onslaught.
I don’t want to get into a synopsis here… if you watch Gasland you’ll see how water faucets can be ignited, how animals and land are contaminated and how devastating these greedy industrialists are being with the world’s future. It’s all about short-term cash. It’s also about chasing the fallacy that everything in the world is an economic problem – the High Lord Economics is as flawed as the sacrifice of virgins to a Sun God we now know to be an insentient ball of gas on the horizon.
So this makes me mad. This is exactly why I went through the MBA program – to understand globalisation, corporations and the true enemy of life on this planet. And at some point we’re all going to have to stand up and say ‘Stop the fuck here, bastards.’ If they aren’t fracking our water into poison or chugging the rainforests for cheap hardwoods then they’re scooping the oceans with their lucky dip mentality.
But the really crap part about all of these HUGE issues is that the corporations (a) have people willing to work for them to achieve these goals, and (b) know that by dividing and conquering and using the law against us then they win by the default of centralised power. How does the average community fight against hundreds of millions of dollars to sweet talk and cajole our politicians? Power corrupts.
