Summary Of The Film Gasland: Negative Side Effects Of Fracking

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The documentary I chose to do my movie report on is called Gasland. Gasland is a film that exposes the negative side effects that fracking has on the environment and human health. Within the film, Josh Fox is offered $100,000 from a natural gas company that was interested in his land so that they can access the shale beneath it. He then decided to do his own research on the drilling process of fracking and conducts interviews of families of communities located near drilling sites and gas wells and with representatives of some gas companies.
In her article “Constitutional law and fracking”, Pamela S. Evers states that “fracking is the process of extracting natural gas from layers of shale formations through the combined use of vertical and
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This pumping not only harms water supplies but also increases the chance of earthquakes around drilling sites due to blasting of shale. “In Oklahoma in particular, there has been a documented and undisputed rise in the number of earthquakes in close proximity to oil and gas wells and fracking operations” according to Walter H. Boone in his article “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On”. Fracking allows for the United States to be its own supplier of natural gas. This can be seen an economic advantage to most, but in some eyes fracking has only a short term benefits with long term consequences. Daniel F. Twomey claims in his article, Fracking: Blasting the Bedrock of Business, that fracking “wells have the potential for boom and bust cycles in the context of natural resource extraction.” When a drilling site opens it brings plenty of workers and jobs to a town. Although employment is increased, towns must adjust for the increase in population and cannot recover the sunk costs doing so. Twomey also explains that the contamination of the water supplies poses threat to some industries such as