Gaslands Part II

The movie Gaslands: Part II highlights the many problems with fracking for natural gas in the United States. It starts by showing the support of politicians and President Barack Obama himself. Gradually, the movie starts to show the wrongs that the oil companies are committing while fracking. The natural gas is so profitable that the injustice seems like a minor setback in the quest for the end results. Throughout the movie, it shows how families are affected, and just how spread out these families are throughout the country, which goes to show the extent to which the country is affected. The Marcellus Shale is a huge natural gas reserve that has parts in 34 different states and covers a large percentage of the country. Hydraulic fracturing is a process used to get the most out of the reserves, otherwise known as fracking. When fracking, the oil companies force water and chemicals into the ground to push out as much of the natural gas that can be. As the oil companies were making these oil wells, they didn’t take proper precautions to prevent leakage into the groundwater of the places they were in. As a result, the groundwater was highly contaminated in places such as Dimock, Pennsylvania (where the filmmaker lives). Obviously, polluting groundwater that people use to drink breaks many environmental rules set by the government and the Environmental Protection Agency. The people of Dimock and other areas (Pavillion, Wyoming, parts of Arkansas, and multiple places across Texas were the spots highlighted in the movie) had water that was not only undrinkable because of such high toxin content, but could be lit on fire because of the extreme amounts of gas in it. When the EPA was brought in to evaluate however, they declared the water “clean”, even though they had results that were released afterwards that obviously said the water was extremely dangerous to drink. The operation was just too profitable to make the oil companies stop. The control over the EPA was a