Josh Fox didn't set out to be a documentary filmmaker. And in 2008, when Fox was canvasing for Barack Obama, hydraulic fracturing meant nothing to him. Things changed when Fox’s parents were offered nearly $100,000 to lease their Pennsylvania land for drilling rights. After seeing people light their contaminated well water on fire, Fox made a film called Gasland, which explores the impact of hydraulic fracturing on everyday Americans. It showcased at Sundance in 2010.
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This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the thing. My guest, Josh Fox didn't set out to be an Oscar nominated documentary filmmaker. His family happens to own a house in Milenville, Pennsylvania, in the Upper Delaware Valley. He tells about what happened there in his film The house was built in two when I was born. My parents and their hippie friends built it, and my family and my brothers and sisters and I grew pretty much the same way I did, little by little. There's a stream that runs down the property connects to the Delaware River. I've been learning more and more about how water is all connected. In nineteen that house happens to sit above a gigantic deposit of sedimentary rock known as the Marcellus Shale. In that shale are tiny bubbles of natural gas, And one day a natural gas company offered Josh's family a lot of money in exchange for drilling rights, like at least my land to this company, and I would receive a signing bonus of four thousand, seven hundred and fifty dollars an acre, having nineteen point five acres. That was nearly a hundred thousand dollars right there in my hand. Could it be that easy? Josh Fox's film gas Land is about the dangers of hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, a process of extracting natural gas from rock using pressure, water, sand, and chemicals. The environmental impacts of fracking can include contamination of groundwater, depletion of fresh water, and risks to air quality, all of which have long term effects on human health. Gas Land introduces us to people whose daily lives have been impacted by fracking, people like Pat Farnelli, who says there were days when four of her kids were out sick from school. For Nellie takes a stand for her community of Dimmock, Pennsylvania, and the pressure is put on it by companies like cabin Oil and Gas. Everywhere there's a gap in the trees, there's a well, there's like ten Sometimes it bubbles and hisses when it comes out. It's highly recommended. I won't drink it. When Cabot and them came in to get the weather and they were telling me it was like hey to drink I said, well, here, go ahead and drink it. And they wouldn't drink it. In the interest of full disclosure. I've met Josh Fox before, and I'm a supporter of the anti fracking movement. We've appeared on panels together. In his first film, gas Land, Fox explored the long term damage posed by fracking. In Gasland Part two, he details the fracking industry's attempts to undermine the growing anti fracking movement. Josh Fox is one of the most prominent public critics of fracking, though his background may come as a bit of a surprise. I had founded a company in Thailand called the International Wild Company. I was taken there for an avant garde theater festival right after I graduated at college, and then split with this American company. And I developed this relationship with actors in Thailand that I was fascinated with, and we made a play and that play ended up touring all over the country. And I said, let's keep this going and we'll develop international exchange between artists from all these different countries. And it actually worked. I was doing projects, working with actors, learning about their lives in different countries and and I did a lot of work in Southeast Asia and Japan and India and Indonesia, Germany, France, and I was making new plays based on people's lives. So in a way, it was a documentary type of undertaking. Where'd you grow up in Pennsylvania and then later in New York City? So I have your family in the business, your mother and father, you know, Um, my father's child Holocaust survivors. Um went to City College when it was free, so did my mom. Um. They're both shrinks, of course they are. Of course they are in different ways. My dad deals with developmental psychology for for kids, and my mother does had a private practice and then started to work with You're spending your life pulling the covers on other people because your parents were shrinks. Well, um, and there you know, both crazy. Um so, but they're wonderful, well, wonderful, intellectual, caring people who built this house in the year that I was born. What was their connection to that area? You know, at some point in time in the past. My dad was introduced to that area because he's a folk singer and his heroes were Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger and Dave van Wronk. You know, he was playing I think that this sort of Jewish summer camp circuit and my mother. Seriously, there are pictures of him, you know, and they're all those summer camps right there, so he knew the area. My mother, uh is the flip side from an Italian imigrant family. She was born in New York City. My dad was born in Kazakhstan when his family was fleeing Poland and fleeing the Nazis, and he was sort of born on the road, eventually landed in Pittsburgh, and I moved from Pittsburgh to I think the Bronx. I have two younger siblings, my brother Alex, who lives in Los Angeles, and my sister Oriana, who lives in London or either of them in the My my brothers and actress a wonderful actor, and my sister is a visual artist and painter and filmmaker who does these incredible um pieces film pieces about her life and about the history of feminist art. And so yeah, we were we all have a chip on our shoulder, I think because we had I won't go into it so specifically, but we did have a rough time during childhood because the family did break apart and things happen, but that the house um has been really the only consistent home for my whole life, and I always thought of it as sort of my twin because it was born at the same time. And every time I knew I had a brother or sister, they would add another room. And it was to sort of make it up as you go along where you go to high school. I went to high school actually write down the block from here, um Columbia Prep. During that time that you were in high school, you were Columbia Prep. Was it theater and film and media and things like them. I had been in public school, and I was doing really poorly. I was getting into fights every day and kind of failing, and my family was at a really rough moment when my parents were broken up and everybody was kind of losing their minds. I was in a I was in a public school called Wagner Junior High School, where there was two thousand kids and they were all between seventh and eighth and ninth grade. There was the option there to go to this private school, and when I showed up there, I was like, well, what happens here? You know? I was kind of amazed that they were actually teachers who were caring and wanted to educate me, and I ate it up like crazy. I took more history classes than any person in that school had ever taken. I became very, very active in learning about the world, and that was an amazing, lucky thing to have happened, the education that I received there and in college. When you went to Colombia, No. I went to Oberlin College and in Oberland, Ohio for two years, and I couldn't stand the weather. I mean, it's just great. Uh theater. I went for theater um and I spent I've always had this competing interest in theater and music um. I played drums in a band that was in CBGB's played Scott in New York City, and I always didn't know if I was going to do music. I was going to do theater. At that time, I was acting. So I went to Oberlin. My stepbrother, who was a year ahead of me in school, had also gone to Oberlin, and I visited him for a weekend and I just saw this incredible place and I fell in love with it. But then realized, you know that the sun doesn't come out in Northeast Ohio between October and May. I was done with book learning for a while. I left to do something else. I wanted to be in the theater, and to me, the theater was always the place where you could explore the ideas of justice. I mean, there's really two kinds of place. There's comedy and they're about love, and there's drama and that's about justice. And specifically, what I learned was that, you know, there is no great play that isn't about specifically the politics of its time, and from Macbeth to Death of a Salesman, they're always concerned with this particular political situation at that moment if you go back and research them. So to me, there was something in working in drama that was always relevant about this whatever was happening right now. And it would be very, very frustrated going to the theater seeing things that weren't relevant, seeing things that weren't about um, the collision of the human experience and the human spirit with the moment right now. Like it felt like in the theater, what kinds of things did you do initially that that spoke about? Well? I did a play called Hurley Burley by David Rabe. This was the first second player ever directed. The first one was Glass Menagerie UM by Tennessee Williams and we atually we ended up, weirdly enough, premiering it on the same night as the LA riots started, and we had been inhabiting this sort of depraved Los Angeles world in Ohio, and then all of a sudden, LA was everywhere on the news, and it was a moment in time when we were performing this plane all these it was sold out like this, and everybody came in and we were seeing all these incredibly violent images and it wasn't that they had anything to do with the LA riots, but it was this feeling that you got that you could commune with some sensibility of culture that was in the air. And I think that made me aware of the power of what can happen when everyone's in one room together watching something that is reflective of what's happening right now. And then when did you think that picking up a camera and making a film was the next inevitable step for you? Well, in the theater, the fingers goes away. So I would obsessively videotape all my plays and try to do it in a way that you can actually watch it, and an adviser just agree with you, I don't think it necessarily goes away. Well, no, it never goes away. Well in the sense that I have people who their memories of some of the theater they've seen are greater than the films they've seen. Well, I think that the impact is less wide, but it's more deep. It's not memorialized, but it's but people do remember. Well, when you have to apply for grants to make a living, you gotta tape your place. So I got really fascinated with how this could work with cameras, and I did have a video camera. And a friend of mine named Morgan Jenness, who was Joe Papp's literary advisor for ten years at the Public Theater, she saw me up there and she goes, do you everything about making a movie? And I said, UM, yeah, but not really. It's too complicated, like you have to plan everything, and I don't like planning things difficult. I don't like planning every shot. Like from making a play, I'm in the room with new people, a certain kind of person to do that job. Well, there are other ways to make movies, but I didn't know that they existed. You know. John Cassavetti's used to just get his actors together with the script and then they would go and then they would improvise, and it would cut, and it would improvise. There was way, there are other ways. Mike Lead does the same thing, that there's an improvisational backdrop to their working process. But then she said, well, why don't you propose something to Jim McKay, who's a friend of mine who's a great filmmaker, and his partner Michael Stipe. And I'm proposed to make a film of a play that I directed where I didn't know them, she knew them. How old were you then? That was when I was thirty three or something, um, thirty two. Uh So it's pretty much theater acting up until that. In music, I was the director. I was stopped. I stopped acting. Actors are very particular people who never stopped being on fire, if you know what I mean. I just wanted to see and develop a vision of some kind of work. So I've developed a film called Memorial Day because I had this insane experience on a Memorial Day weekend in Ocean City, Maryland. Ocean City, Maryland being like a beach town where everyone just goes mad on this spring break or more of day weekend, and I was there Memorial Day weekend, two thousand four, four weeks after the Abu Grabe pictures came out in the media. And this is a holiday that is supposed to be about the victims of war, the costs of war are soldiers, and also the honor. Yeah, but I'm sitting here watching barbecues and you know, wet t shirt contests and people vomiting on the beach and weird, incredibly, what the troops died for. I was just in this weird place of being so obsessed with these photographs of sexualized torture for the camera, and then watching this girl's gone wild thing happening in Ocean City, where and men, anyone who whipped out a camera they would do the most lewd and disgusting thing that they possibly could. And I thought, what, this is a weird conversation happening. Nobody here is actually talking about the war. Nobody's talking about the soldiers. They're just celebrating the begning of summer. And then I found out that the folks who were the soldiers who were in Abu grab had gone to Virginia Beach the weekend before they shipped out, had done all the same photographs of just to their friends they pull their pants down. They took pictures of people naked while they were passed out. And then it was interesting because I thought, well, what we've done is we've just exported fraternity hazing to this prison in Iraq and not bothered to tell the Iraqis that this is the what what we're doing, and we're hazing them. And I felt like we were in a moment of extraordinary being disconnected in America to think that we're so far away and it were dropping bombs on this entire country and we're torturing their citizens. I wanted to draw that line closer. So I ended up making this feature film with the actors from documentary. Well, some of it's sort of guerrilla style, and we did shoot one scene which is a horrifying scene of of a rape that happens in the back of a van with all these people cheering on the actors, cheering on the people in the back, and we would shoot. We shot the whole thing in traffic, and there are people who are not actors, who are cars around our van as we're heading down the main Dragon Ocean city who actually started cheering on the scene as we were filming it. And then Um. We took three or four months off and trained with friends of mine who had been in Iraq, who were soldiers, who taught us everything about, you know, close quarters battle and how to dress and all the things. And we took the actress from that crazy debautched first a couple of weeks shoot and then we made ourselves into soldiers and then took that whole thing to Iraq in the second half of the films in Iraq. This is the first film that I've made. The film it got rejected from every film festival in the face of the planet, and then it got into a film festival called Sinta Vegas in Las Vegas, which just happened to be programmed by Trevor Groth, who also programmed Sundance, and he saw this and it started crazy and we had fifty people walk out in the first half hour of the movie. It was kind of a weird situation because they thought it was a beach movie and they end up in a torture movie and it was. It was kind of Jacket was a recruitment movie. Well it was. It got compared to Full Mettle Jacket by Robert blows his head off. Yeah, but it was. It was like I we got people stormed the box office and said, yes they did, Yes they did. They store in the box. I said, We're going to burn the casino down if you show this again. This is the box office. I don't even know what they were thinking. I'm not really sure. I think that it was holding a mirror up to a very very dark time in America, and people didn't want to accept it. It's hard to make a war movie that's not glorifying war. You know, there is a formula to war movies, even if it's the most anti war war movie. So what I wanted to do is make a war movie with no battle scenes and and just deal with some of the much more difficult moral questions that faced soldiers. What's the next time we do after that? Well, then is the second film? You mega? Actually, in two thousand and eight, I was at home in Pennsylvania because I had given the next Landville, had given the next two months to Barack Obama to campaign for him in the Pennsylvania primary. I felt that strongly about um and I watched him lose the Texas and Ohio primaries in March, and I said, you know what I'm given the next eight weeks to Barack Obama. I'm going home. I'm gonna go door to door. And when I was starting to go door to door, everyone was talking about gas drilling. So in in a map of Pennsylvania near the southern tier of New York, Milandville is ware way way up north towards the border. Yeah, it's right up in the northeast corner. So uh in two thousand and eight, right at this all the same time we got the letters in the mail in about February saying don't lease your land for natural gas drilling yet, because we can get you more money. And it was the Northern Wayne Property Owners Alliance that was saying, you know, join our property Owners Alliance and we will get you the best ghastlies. And the crisis was almost immediate. Learning what was happening when I was going canvas thing for Obama. People want to talk about Obama, and they want to talk about Hillary, but they really wanted to talk about gas. What's Obomba's position on gasts? What is this stuff about fratie? What's going on with this fractic So you were you conscious of and aware of hydraulic fracturing before that you would never even heard of it, never heard You would never even heard of it until two thousand when you started the canvas and people are bringing this up their piggyback, and that onto the conversation about the election. No one has heard about it. No one knows anything about it. But but fracting have been going on for years prior to about in other parts of the country. Well, yes, and no, not that we explained that, because a lot of people intimate that fracking is a process has been going on for decades. Distinguish if you would, what they're referring to to modern fractic This is a totally different type of thing from what you you might have called fracking fifty years ago. Okay, let me go back. When you're drilling an oiler gas well, Traditionally those are vertical wells. The well just goes straight down and you're trying to tap into an anticline or a dome of natural gas or oil. It's a pool that you kind of hit and you can suck it up. When you're talking about modern hydraulic fracturing, you're into a shale play or a tight sands formation, or any of the different formations you're talking about gas or oil is trapped in side of a rock, and then you have to drill horizontally along that rock. This is kind of amazing engineering that you can drill down and then torque that drill bit and sometimes go out up to two miles right um, and in some cases now they're experimenting with even now the gas. When you say it's it's embedded in these rocks and stuff with the and and and tight sand formations that so that people understand this, does it exist like kind of like the tar sands are words bubbles and pockets and pieces of it and you blow it all out of there? Or is it in the rock? Is there are big pools of it inside of a rock? Or how does it work? It's like Dr. Sanderstein Greber describes it as a frozen champagne pop. So that you have this spreading out of all these little bubbles all across the rock formation. But you do this by injecting high pressure water silica which they call sand, but it's actually silica which is different water, silica and chemicals and a mixture into that formation at such high pressure that you fracture the rock. You cause these mini earthquakes along that either vertical or horizontal well boar, and you're doing that with enormous pressure pressure that rivals the cluster bomb in some cases. And that in that mixture of water, is this fracking fluids? And then why are those fluids necessary? Why? And again I'm not assuming you know every detail of this. I don't want to hold you up with some geo physicists. But but when they have that, they talk about the proprietary nature of their list of chemicals, and they can't tell you what's really going into the ground. Why do they need this stuff to blow through the rock? What is what is it accomplish? There are nine different chemicals that we've identified. Many of them are proprietary and we don't know enough about them. But the ones that we do know a lot about our carcinogenic, their neurotoxins, their endocrine disruptors are very bad for people At different stages of the process. You need to have that liquid be at different viscosities. So to carry the sand down, the sand is propping open those cracks, if you will, um the s The sand is getting in there so that it opens up these cracks. Because when the pressures on these fissures are open. When when they turn off those FRAC pumps, a lot of it collapses back down and all that material is trapped inside the rocks with the sand is home. Sand is a prop and it holds open the cracks. But if you notice, if you go to the beach, water doesn't carry sand. The water won't bring it down. So you have to thicken that water with a viscosi fire, and that's one kind of chemical. So you have a chemical mixture there, and then the minute you do the frac you want that condition to be very very smooth and slippery and have no friction at all, so that there are another chemical and presto change though this whole mixture becomes like you know, the it was just this was subscribed to me as like the jet engine valves on a jet engine, you have to have that be very very lubricated in order for your plans to keep flying. So they have very intense lubricants and liquid fires that are down in there. Plus you have biosides you have down in the ground what's called anaerobic bacteria, and anaerobic bacteria exists without oxygen. It does certainly some cases, it's never ever been to the surface. You don't know what it's gonna do to you. It's also going to corrode your pipes. And if you're drilling a five to ten million dollar well, you certainly don't want it to rush. So as an anti corrosive device alone, they have to kill every living thing down there are corrosion inhibitors, the bio size, there's cross linkers, there are all these different chemicals that change the viscossi, the mixtures you're going down there, not taking any chances when they go down there, of course not. And you know, Haliburton has said, oh, we're developing non toxic fracking fluids. Well they're not there yet. Chesapeake, the largest natural gas coming, the second largest natural gas company Americas, has said, very honestly, there's no such thing as non toxic fracking fluids. And the reason why is if you're spending ten million dollars on one hole and that whole is eight inches wide, you don't want it to get gummed up. Their priorities are not about protecting groundwater or keeping this situation non toxic. That couldn't be further from their priorities. Their priorities to get the gas out of the ground and make their money. Now, you're going door to door in two thousand and eight with Obama, and you come to people's houses and they are some of them, to whatever degree, are introducing you to the the natural gas issue while you're campaigning for Obama, when you get bitten by this. So I want you to talk about the moment you decided this was something you were going to get engaged with, and then also talk about the moment when you came across because because in my mind, I see Josh Fox going door to door even before maybe he's even decided to make a film, and people are saying, oh yes, let me show you the cisterns of water I've got to have, and oh yes, methane does come out of my sake. And then I'm waiting for the next guy to tall you see, do you get the funk off my property? I want to blow your head off because I want natural gass. Like, did you confront both all of a sudden. No, that didn't happen. Early on in my area there was no drilling. So when I'm going door to door, there was no drilling. There's just leasing happening. You know, we received those offers and I want to know what was this, because the gas industry comes and they basically just say, Hey, it's no big deal. It's just free money. It's a fire hydrent in the middle of your field. We probably won't even drill. You don't even know we're there, exactly right. Well, you'll never check, you'll never know we're here. And it's just free money. And call mailbox money. And in neighbors of mine had looked into it, and they said, but this is called hydraulic fracturing, and they're all these chemicals involved. And look at these pictures of land scarring in Wyoming. And I had fallen in love with Wyoming when I was twenty two years old. I took I took off across the country when the Knicks lost the championship in and I never looked back. And um, so this, this whole film is John Stark's fault. I just found this incredible, magical state of Wyoming, the Grand Tetons, the Big Horn Mountains, the Flaming Gorge, the um the incredible planes that look like lunar or Martian surfaces. I just spent all my time in Wyoming, camping out and doing just falling in love with the landscape, and I saw these pictures of Wyoming just destroyed to spoiled gas wells everywhere. So this was from who from people in the miling who started to do some investigatory where they were just my neighbors. One of my neighbor was a glass artist. She made these little glass sculptures and she had happened to have a biochemical degree from Columbia University, and so she had been out there. She did all the research. Factor you're on the internet looking at pictures of Wyoming, but I don't know these people, No, they had There was a presentation. She did a small presentation. I thought it was gonna be about twelve folks, you know, twelve people hanging out. It was four people. I've never seen as many people in one place in the Upper Delaware. But I watched her presentation. Her name is Barbara Arundel, and she was totally didn't know how to use the microphone. She would be, you know, well, frackings, chemicals are So I just thought, oh my god, this person needs help, needs a little media help, you know, say that all right, Well, I just thought I'd make a five minute video for her of her presentation, and I wanted to find out, well, what's who's really telling the truth here? Is this the gas industry or is this this person Barbara Arundel I've never met before, or or neither. Yeah, I just wanted to get to the bottom of this. But I realized I was not sleeping. I couldn't sleep. I was completely terrified because when you when you live in the woods, when when it's that important, when you have a stream and you know, you travel the world, you see how fragile these systems. Were you terrified or were you angry? I was. I was terrified at first. What I did was friends, mindset, go to Dimmick, go to p A. It's only sixty miles away. And I had started to interview people, thinking all right, maybe I'll make a documentary. Everyone made one of mine. Been shooting. I shot with Barbara. I got her presentations she did. Five hour into shooting. I did. When you went to Dimmick first, That's where I went first. And when I arrived there, that's when I was changed. Um. There were Haliburton trucks swarming all over the landscape. People were reporting their children were getting sick there. They were under siege, and they were under siege and they were completely terrified. Um and they had sold leases. Now again people in the Milanville area had been leasing, but there wasn't as much fracking. Now you're seeing another evolution. You go to to Dimmick and this is there further down the road. We had joined this Northern Waine property durs Alliance. We were. My father was very interested, obviously in the money. It was a lot of money, even just for twenty acres. It was in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand dollars just for signing, and then royalties there was you know, we're not rich people. There wasn't. So I went to Dimmick, said, may maybe it's not gonna be so bad. But when I got there, I arrived and right on the corner of this place called Carter Road, Norma Fiarentino. She lived in a trailer. Her water well spontaneously combusted on New Year's Day, just blew up. Everybody was at I guess church or a hangover party or whatever. She came home and the concrete casing from her well was all over the front yard. It was everywhere. It was like six inch concrete casing. And then never started talking do you notice something funny and going out with your water. Oh yeah, my my washing machine stopped up. The water turn black. Oh my driveway is bubbling. And then people discovered that they could light their water on fire, um, and that something drastically had gone wrong, and all of a sudden they said, don't drink the water anyway. All of these people, this is important to because this is to me, this is among the biggest problems, and that is something like this happens. You know, you're you're well blows up while you're at church, and where do you go? Who do you turn to? Well, the first thing they did was talk to their neighbors to see if they were all, you know, having the same problems along this one road, and they were different kinds of problems, but similarly with their water. I think they called the Pennsylvania Department of Environment Protection first, and their first complaints were the d E P and Cabot Oil and Gas. The drilling company would show up arm in arm, basically in cabins. So for those people that haven't seen the original gas Land let alone, the sequel, Cabint is the company that was the major player in the northern Pennsylvania in that area, so they would complain. And when d EP came from p A, they came with cabint reps. Interesting that they would come together and they would say, oh, your water is fine, and then they would go and get them a glass of water to drinks. All right, well, if you think this is fine for my mother to drink, then you go ahead and drink it. And they wouldn't drink it. And then you know these folks, And I mean, I don't know how much experience you have Central Pennsylvania, upstate New York. It's not a particularly the garrulous type of a place. You know, there's a there's a quieter, less simple. It's not like in New York where people just talk talk talk talk, talk, talk talk. I wouldn't say it's simpler, but I would say it's it's less talking. So when people are coming forward and talking to it's just a different style. When people are coming forward and talking to me, you know they're taking the risk, they're doing something out of their comfort zone. Right. There was this sense that they didn't know what to do. But the normal life had completely been overthrown. And I remember one day I had gotten with Pat Fernelli and she had this jar of of weird yellowish brownish liquid. She said, take this. I said, well, what is it? She goes, We'll just take it um um. And she could never keep a secret. This Pat FERNELI that's what she's where. She's amazing. She said, well, some people they were working on the rickside and they told them to dump this. This is the produced water, it's the fract ware. They told them to dump it in their own stream. And these kids were from here and they wouldn't dump it in their own stream, so they took samples of it and quit and walked off the job. And I was like, wow, that's crazy. Where are these workers sit down down the road. So I went and I knocked on the door, and a guy who was about seventeen years old opened the door and he had chemical burns all over his face and hands. Says no, because I don't I don't pop in the door with the camera. I think it's rude. Albert Mazel's many years later confirmed this with me. Albert Mazel is a great documentary and he said, look, the whole process is a friendship. You get to know and then everyone else gets to know. I believe in and you can get the story and still be respectful of people and have decency for people and understand them. And I would rush rather make a connection based on I'm a human being and you're a human being, even if that means the gas industry is going to turn me down again and again and again and again. These were people who were, in my mind, just had done a valorous act. I was going to pop up at their door with a camera. I knocked on the door and I saw his and he didn't know obviously where who I was. He thought. I guess he thought it was somebody else, because he came to the door with the shirt off, had red burn all over his chest and on his face. And I said, oh, um, you know I'm I'm Josh. I'm making a film. Can we do an interview? And he said, all right, tomorrow. So I went And then the next day he didn't show off. And I'm sitting there parked across the street, calling the phone, calling the house, calling the house with somebody. No, he just chicken out. Understandably, he was getting death threats, he was getting stressed, to get beaten up by other guys on the rig and all this. But his grandmother answered the phone, and that's where this starts. To hear the phone calling gas. Then this weird voice saying they're afraid for their lives, and this guy handing me this jar of strange contaminated wars to get this tested. At that moment, my life completely changed. This voice on the phone was so full of terror and anxiety and worry and no nonsense, no bs, we are afraid for our lives because these kids wouldn't dump toxic waste in their own streams. And to me, that got me because I live right next or right and down the stream runs right through my property, and I thought, of course they wouldn't do it. But what's happening all over Pennsylvania right now? And this piqued my interest and I realized that this drilling was going on in thirty four days. And then I had to set aside everything else I was doing at that moment and go out on the road and try to try to do was this going to happen? You know, do a comparative study? Did all companies do this was all fracking like this? Was? Was this happening in every state like this? Also, as I said, I fell in love with my om and when I said, years old, and I wanted to get out there and see if it was still there that way. Did people from Cabin I would assume, with there's so much at stake. One thing that gas Land has proven is that that someone like you, or you particularly are someone who has your combination of skills and gets incredibly lucky. By the way, because these films aren't always take off. Not everybody is doing inconvenient truth. Not everybody is Davis Skuggenheim or you. Did they ever come to you and say, Josh, come on, let's sit down and talk. And did they ever try to seduce you? Exactly the opposite. I called up the rep, the press rep for Cabin, and I said, well, what's happening on these people's groundwater? And he goes, I have a book on my death right now from seven that shows that there is methane in groundwater in this part of Pennsylvania dating back that far. And I just said, well, like, really, is that really what you're saying there? Well, there are trace levels of methane and groundwater at very small quantities, but rarely to the point which you're well exploded spontaneously. I mean, I don't think that footnotes about exploding. Well, well this was, well, this was but it was really like hitting a wall. And this was the beginning of my education that they were going to do anything possible, whatever you do, to to take not me, because I was nobody at that point. I was just a guy with a camera in the back. Yeah, to deny that you through what was going on to these people. For Josh Fox, his education about what he calls the truth has only deepened. More recently, he's taken his camera beyond his hometown coming up. Josh remembers visiting the BP oil spill, just seeing this entire ocean in the streaks of oil and feeling like a piece of meat fell out of the airplane. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing. I'm Alec Baldwin. It was still two years before the BP spill. Josh Fox was canvassing door to door in Pennsylvania for then Senator Obama when he began hearing more and more about fracking. Before he could even think about making the documentary gas Land, he had a lot of science to learn. You have to be a fast study, and you know that's all it is. But I will say this. No one was reporting on this at that level. There was no Josh Fox in Wyoming. Who else was out there? Deb Anderson filmmaker in New Mexico. She made a film called Split a State. It really focused on issues of the Mountain West, though there was no one who was making a film about this invasion of the northeast of this huge So what was happening in the New Mexico here it was a lot smaller. Same yeah, well saing, same thing, but less media attention. I mean, if you're destroying the rocky mountains and and and the deserts of New Mexico, and there's one house per square mile in some of those places, and CNN doesn't down the street drinking the water from Vegas, ain't showing up with a rep exactly. So there were people investigating this, Amy Mall and already c was reporting on it. A brom Lust Garden in pro public, it was starting to report on it, Laura Legier at Grant Times. There were people who were doing this absolutely, and certainly Gasland was caught up in a wave of consciousness that happening about fracking across the North. So as you move through your endemic and you see the cabin. It's it's a whole other thing going on there. And when do you decide you're gonna make a movie? When do you When? When does the movie gas Land become real? And and again I'm not trying to be glib, but I'm always fascinated by film finance, especially about these kinds of advocacy things with these kinds of issues. Is it another phone called to Michael Stipe? Where did the money come from? There was no money, really, I mean it was really about three or four thousand knowledge for the first cross country road trip. And I had my own cameras, and I was lucky enough to have Matt Sanchez, who's the editor and cinematographer, who had a little bit better camera than mine, and he said, here, just take this one on the road with you. You know, I don't like raising money. I don't like the idea of it. I've never been I just made a movie about that, and I'm scrappy like that. I just want to get into the driver's seat and go, whether that's a driver's seat in a theater rehearsal hall or actually a driver's seat as it wasn't with gas And and I, you know, I love sleeping in the back of my car on the roadside in New Mexico. That weird. I'm not weird. That's not weird. That's America. That's the way we should be. If you go out and listen. Let me tell you something. I paid an guy on TV for six and a half year. Some kind of guy was weird. He was That guy was weird. Everybody loves that guy. Everybody loves that. No, it's not. It's fantastic. I wouldn't do it in the northeast. But if you're out there in the rocky mountain West Albuquerque, New Mexico's in this bowl. And when you come down out of those mountains on if you in the middle of the night, this warm air just starts rushing at you and you you descend down there for forty five minutes. You're just on a down and anywhere along that road that sound good to Crystal, just pull off. I don't know. I could tell you if I was looking at the map. Um, but you have studied the geography of feeling of it. I don't know. There's something fundamental linked in my mind between you know, being in the backyard, being in a stream and p a being out there in those rocky mountain lands. The guy playing the banjo is more who you are than Mike Wallace. Yeah, for sure. Okay, let's talk about that. Yeah. I have friends of mine who don't criticize the advocacy of the film. They don't even really criticize the filmmaking it. So, but one friend of mine said, Josh Fox, the filmmaker is very fond of Josh Fox the performer. Was it your goal to be in the film and playing your banjo? And like, I didn't like being Was that your goal? No? I didn't like being in a out of that change, Well, I made the first five minutes or ten minutes, and I did the voice over myself, just to explain stuff for people. Who am I going to call you? I didn't know you, you know, I didn't know Debra Winger, I didn't know Morgan Freeman. Well, what I'm saying is this that I did it because I was. I was working on it late at night, and friends of mine were like, hey, that's pretty good. But when we first started cutting the footage, we cut ones that had me in them, and we cut ones that had none of me, And it was just more traditional kind of mash up documentary, and we screened those both. We would screen both parts, and we screened four different segments, and the ones that I was in, people like better Better. People laughed. It was more human, it was more alive, and people my friends were saying, you have to be in this, so I said, okay, but I'm gonna be also you being a resident in a native of the area, So it's your story, that's what they said. It's your story. You know. A lot of the voiceovers will be recorded at three and four o'clock in the morning and I'm at home alone and I'm thinking about the memories of being in these places and this is you know, this was the best couch that I slept on in America, you know, um. And that's that informs the situation. It makes it human, and it makes it alive for me, and I get able to be interested in working on it as a human story. When is the film finished? About that? I mean not really, but when when when do you lock that picture? And you said, I'm done, the movie is done? What year? Uh, the day before the Sundance Film Festival and when did you? Okay? So that literally before we finished it. We when to Sundance. Yes, we applied to Sundance with a rough cut, and to our total joy and astonishment, we got in. And then we had eight weeks to finish. You know, you're in. Now you've got to finish by car. When we cut an they're half an hour out of it. We added a whole third act to it, and then um, we were We worked on it until the last were in Sundance. Yeah, and you went to Sundance And how was that for you? I was totally nauseous. I had elevation sickness. Um, there were publicists talking talking to you. Your movie was eventually nominated for an Academy Award. At okay, aside from your elevation sickness, described as a as a filmmaker, not as a person with a bed with a weak stomach. What happened with Sundays, Um, Well, I met the most incredible filmmakers and people. I started appreciate who documentarians were. They knew how to tell a story, They cared about the world. They were not motivated by igo being in a film. They were motivated by fixing some huge and they film and they like and they accepted me. That must have been great. That was amazing. That was totally exhilarating, and the audiences loved the film. We went to Sundance thinking, Okay, it's this mountain decline. We brought ten people and we would go to these cocktail parties where we were trying to explain hydraulic fracturing to people in Hollywood cocktail part people. His eyes were just glaze over. You know, it's a horzon a well board and they're these chemicals and the injected the ground. People are like next, you know. And then by the end of the festival we started overhearing people on the little Sundance Plus going around the mountain, uh them explaining hydraulic fracturing trees and they go sideways into the rocks. You're not gonna believe, Jerry, could we get Brad Pitt to play Fox? Exactly? Look thinking like I don't care. So we knew something had happened. And HBO picked up the film and I thought, this is amazing. This is going to go into forty million homes around America. And being having been a theater director, producer in my whole life, that thought, the thought that I didn't have to sell tickets, which is always very hard to give people to leave the house and sit down. On this particular day, it was another great believable that we were Sudance. But at the same time I wanted to make sure that we were touring to the grassroots. I toured to two to sleep in cars. Well, that part of it, but also I just felt like I wanted there were Once you start, there's a lot of places to go. So about two fifty cities. Um, yeah, it took a year and a half. It was crazy, but you know, um, when we want to win, I want to win. I don't want to see this happen to debate. I want to win. Well, what do you is winning? Well, I think it's going to take a while, but I think we have to get off of fossil fuels. And what the fracking is is it represents another fifty years of being addicted to fossil fuels. Fracking for gas and fracking for oil is the new frontier for the oil companies. What this means is they can get at all this oil and gas that they couldn't get out before. Never mind that it's completely toxifying the landscape, never mind that it's going to destroy all of these incredible, these areas that we love. If you know, the oil and gas industry has least more land than the total land mass of California and Florida combined. I don't doubt these companies don't like to be told no. And we've decided that what's appropriate to do in America is this uh developing world exploitation model. What we've been doing everybody else. Now we're saying to us, let's just do it in Pennsylvania. Look, there's always been an area that the fossil fuel industry, whether it was coal or oiler gas, always been a population of people that was considered expendable in the face of oil and gas. And in West Virginia talked to the people their history of coal. It's like, how did our coal get in underneath their mountains? And so what we've done here with fracking and talking about shale place in thirty four states more land leased than the entire land area of California and Florida combined. We've just enlarged the area of people who are now considered expendable. The people who are now considered expendable, or people who drink water in New York City because they wanted to drill in the New York City watershed. It's three quarters of Pennsylvania, it's half of Ohio. Are they drilling in the New York City watership? They are not. New Yorkers stopped the largest industry in the history of industry, and so far have persuaded Governor Andrew Cuomo to take a step back off of the cliff and not allow this fracking is going to stay off the cliff. The more New Yorkers learn about fracking, the less they like fracking. If you're a politician, if you're going to open the state up to the largest fossil phil extraction in the history of this state, your initials are going to be on those chemicals and they don't biodegrade. They're gonna be down there for hu They're gonna be down there for thousands, and you will be known as that. If I was the governor right now, I would be jumping up and down because I actually have a chance to make history. Because if Andrew Cuomo decides, you know what, we're gonna reject this proposal and we're gonna move vigorously in the direction of renewable energy. Do you know what a ripple effect that would have across the world. Do you know all of a sudden that Andrew Cuomo would be an international leader. I just got a report the other day that was just today, just before walking over here, the Energy Information Administration mapped out forty one countries that have shale. We cover this in Gasland to how this has spread internationally. When did you know that you were going to have a Gasland too? And why the Gulf spill. We premiered Gasoline one on HBO June. I was going on all the media, news shows and everything. I was always in makeup and and the story right before me was always the Gulf spill. So I had this very bizarre experience of being the guy who was always following the golf spill, and I thought, I got to get down there. I have to film this, I have to see what's going on. And our first free weekend was right after the premiere was July fourth weekend. So Matt, myself and another camera Alex Tyson, and I went down to the Gulf and we managed I don't know how it happened. Where it was the fourth of July because it was a Sunday. We got this sort of unprecedented clearance from f a A to fly at any altitude we wanted over the oil spill, and they had previously been restricting flights the three thousand feet and above, and from three thousand feet you can't see anything. Why do you think I don't know the so that actually we were all in total shock. It was four months into the catastrophe, and it was fourth of July weekend, and it was a Sunday, and we just got lucky. And you'll see these pictures in Gasline too. When you watch gas Too, you'll see pictures of the Gulf that you've never seen before, the whole surface for fifty mile Street with oil. To answer your question, though, what spurred me on was it was clear that BP was running the show. The oil come in the face of the largest catastrophe in American history in terms of environment, the oil company itself was in charge. Why do you think that happened? Why do you think Obama allowed? How does it feel to be the guy who actually his introduction to this very issue. He might not even be here now if he hadn't gone canvassing for Barack Obama. How did he feel that Barack Obama completely abandoned his responsibilities to British Petroleum to police what happened in the Gulf. I was in shock, and that was the question, though, if this is what's happening with the largest, most visible catastrophe in the face of the Earth, and they're keeping the press out, and they're keeping the media out, and we're seeing things that no one has seen on television, and we're just just because we showed up, Well, what's gonna happen with fracking? And why is it that this is the order? It's not all of a sudden it started to get rearranged. In my mind, I thought, well, is there is there something above the government? Is there something influencing the government to such a degree that this person, this this man that I was so passionate and supporting UM has now all of a sudden turned over the office to the all companies. Could there not be a greater moment to rally support around getting us off of fossil fuels and starting down the road to save climate change in the BP Oils Bill. And I was absolutely dismayed and confused and horrified and in shock. We got off that little airplane and none of us could talk for hours. We were just we were nonverbal. I mean, having seen the Gulf in the state that you even to show it in the gas lane too. You see it only for a few moments, but having absorbed that we're in a plane having to wear gas masks, because it stands out most to you from the whole BP experience. You're down there, the people you met on the ground, the planes, the dispersed into this, that that the flying over. What's one thing that really stood just seeing the Gulf in that state, Just seeing this entire ocean in the streaks of oil and feeling like a piece of meat fell out of the airplane. At that moment, I felt like I have to look at this other layer here. I'm only seeing the tip of the iceberg, you know, I'm seeing the ground contamination of war contaminage, the stories of the families. What's happening at the level of government. Why hasn't there been anybody helping us? Where is our government that's supposed to protect Americans from foreign uh invaders? Right? That, that, to me was when I wanted to make this new film and say, because this film was about investigating the government and our government's reaction to this crisis, we had now all of a sudden, one of the most popular environmental issues of the last however, long a brand new controversy, huge movement sweeping across America. Where was the president? Where was the governor? Where was you? Why do you think what I mean? I can go old John muron people, and I could go well Henry David throw on people, and I can talk about how this is just my idea of you know, this land as your land. I mean, I can really get going on that whole thing of like, I don't know why people are not more outraged. The other day they announced that Santa No Free nuclear power plant closed. And I have worked in the anti nuclear movement Oyster Creek. I mean, I've been down in Toms River all the time and Millstone and Indian Point all this stuff, and santao Free is going to close. Like to fix Santare was six million was the bill where California in southern California. I've heard a lot about this because Santino Fres closing And when are people going to realize that, you know, we need to have I don't like to use the word Manhattan Project because that speaks like the destructive and war and negativity. When are they going to have the Apollo project of renewable energy. Well, I hope that santain A free isn't replaced by a natural gas firepower plant. Well, that's what they're talking that's what they're talking about. They've got to which I understand here, is that we were on the track. We are a big we have been on the track to replace this with wind and solar. We have more wind energy in North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas, just those three states, and just the wind to run everything in the United States of America, including our fleet of three million cars. And and what what we're seeing here now is okay, here's the line here. We're going on the progress of human history. We're going moving over towards renewable energy, and fracking is now cutting in fracking, and shail gas is making I think this is what they say in the film the Last Gasp of the fossil fuel industry. However, if you look at what's happened with climate change, and anybody in New York knows this from whether irene hits you upstate and flooded away your town, or whether you watch the New York City subway fill up with the Atlantic Ocean after Sandy, we can't afford to do fifty more years of fossil fuels, and certainly not frat gas because frat gas. Here's the third big lie of the gas industry. They have said for many, many decades that gas burns cleaner than coal, so it's less C O two into the atmosphere than coal, so it's better for power generation. Well that's true, but it's like the witches in Macbeth. They only tell you half of what's true. Like you've probably played Macbeth. I know you played at the public theater, and so what what does Macbeth here? He only really hears half of the sentence, right, He's like, Oh, I'm gonna be the king. He doesn't find out, you know, he's gonna have to kill all his friends, his wife's gonna go crazy and commits suicide. He's gonna be dead in three days. They leave that part out, so the gas industry says we burned cleaner than coal, But they leave out the part where the methane leakage field measurements are showing between five and nine percent total methane leaking up into the sky out of these gas fields. It was estimated at corneal between three point six and seven point nine. Anything over two percent leakage means that frack gas is worse than coal for climate change because methane leaking in the atmosphere. Methane is a hundred and five times more potent at trapping heat than carbon dioxide is. So methane in the atmosphere you have to admit a hundred and five times more CEO to the fuel we're chasing in order to get off of gas. Oil is even worse. It's worse for climate change in the short in the twenty year time frame. And all we have left is this twenty year time frame to solve this problem. Now, Gasland too. When did you finish Gaslane two? Um? Basically a week before premiered at the tray Back and Film Festival. We work up until the last minute, and you know we will make technology you can do. Have you got a gas Land three in you? UM? I don't think it's gas Land three. I don't think that. I spent fifteen years working with this international theater company about globalization. I'll probably spend the next fifteen years working on is just a sustainability or maybe forty years I don't know, depending on how long I feel like I've struck on something that is the core of who I am. This is not about fracking. It's not about franking. Thank you for saying. This is about who we are the most important thing you know this is about. It isn't how would I how would you work on fracking for five years? This isn't about frank. This is about our democracies. But this is about who we are as Americans, who are as citizens of the world. This is about is how you serve your country. I know this is radio, but I have to pull this card out. It says Marcella's patriots for land rights, don't tread on me. And it's the snake with the drilling rig going down to the middle of it. This is the card of somebody who's adamantly against the gas industry. His name is Craig Stevens. He's a sixth generation landowner. Says in the back of his card. These aren't environmentalists. It doesn't matter if you're a red person or a blue person, or in a red state or a blue state. If your private property rights are being destroyed by the gas industry, you don't have to be an environmentalist. If your civil rights are being if your civil rights and human rights are being destroyed by multinational corporation is bearing down, you don't need to be a tree ugger. This is not what this is about. You can see Josh Fox's newest film, gas Land, Part two on HBO and learn more about his upcoming tour this fall with the film on our website. As you see in his films and here in this podcast, Josh travels most places with a banjo. Let's have it? What are we gonna have? I think I'm gonna play an old bar song from eighteen fourteen, and I was with Pete Seeger two nights ago. Introduced Pete Seeger and he said, Yo, I know that song you're gonna play. That's That's an old bar song. Was the biggest hit of eighteen fourteen, and they liked it so much. The guy to sing it twice in the bar and then clip clop, clip clop all the way up and down the East Coast. They sold the lyrics and you know that song. It became the national anthem. If a bar song can become the national anthem, you're always just kind of in the position just making up America as we go along, and that's what I love about doing this. It's not about fracking. It's about making up the next version of Mary and letting it not be Exxon Mobile and Shell and Chevron and these people who who come to you with the see and leave you with the see. Yeah, and I want to see that happen. That's I know, you say, oh, where's the outrage? But what I'm seeing out there And as we go along and tour of the film and we meet these people, this is incredible outpouring actually of love and support and of of you know, when people backs up against the wall, something comes out and it's remarkable to witness. So if you're not seeing that in your daily life and go somewhere where we're showing gasuner, the protesting, the fracking, um, you'll find it. It's pretty remarkable. It's so I've been hanging out there so long. B B b U o H. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing. M