Michael J. Fitzgerald has been a journalist for five decades, working as a writer and editor for newspapers, magazines and web publications. In 2014 he published his first novel, "The Fracking War," followed in 2015 with "Fracking Justice." In 2018, he published "The Devil's Pipeline." He has written a weekly column, "Write On" for the daily 'Finger Lakes Times' newspaper in Geneva, NY for 14 years, He contributes stories to the Contra Costa Pulse newspaper in Richmond, CA. He also writes essays on Substack under the title Write On and On.
VALOIS, New York, USA - Seamus McGraw's 2011 book The End of Country takes a very literary look at what has happened - and is happening - to Pennsylvania's rural countryside and towns as natural gas companies have taken over and begun their destructive 'hydrofracking' process.
I say literary, because in many parts, this tome reads as smoothly as a novel, even though like any novel dealing with uncomfortable material, it is hard read in spots.
What McGraw is able to do effectively in this book isn't just to show what greedy bastards (and liars, oh the lies) the people representing these environmental destruction teams are. He also shows how the many thousands of dollars dangled in front of very poor people changed the people themselves, pitting neighbor against neighbor.
And in the end, it's obvious that though some people are richer in dollars, the entire communities are much poorer for allowing this earth-destroying technology on their land.
McGraw's book is an important one, well worth reading. And if Hollywood has any cojones, it would make the basis for an excellent movie script. It's a real life thriller with all the elements of a good film: danger, big money, greed, tragedy and a small dose of triumph.
There's even the death of beloved dog - at the hands of the gas company doing drilling on the land of one of the main characters.
On the cover of the book, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. wrote: "Deeply personal, sometimes moving, sometimes funny, The End of Country lays out the promise and the perils faced not just by the people of one small Pennsylvania town but by our whole nation."
WATKINS GLEN, New York, USA - The movie Gasland should not be listed in the documentary section of videos on Netflix or at video stores. Instead, it might better be placed alongside all those disaster movies like Armageddon, The Day After Tomorrow, and The Day After.
Those movies, of course, were works of fiction.
Gasland is not, which makes it sooooo much more frightening. And kind of sickening, too.
It's a tale of an out-of-control gas drilling industry, greed, corporate (and government) corruption and real suffering. The real suffering is not on the part of the corporations or gas drilling industry, of course. It's the people who live where the gas drilling - frequently referred to as 'fracking' - are having their well-water and air poisoned.
If the air you breathe and the water you drink make you sick, that's suffering.
Gasland is the work of independent filmmaker Josh Fox, who lives in the Delaware River basin near where gas drilling companies are getting ready to frack the countryside. In the process, the movie makes it obvious the ground water will be polluted with enough cancer-causing chemicals to make it unsafe to even use to wash a car. Fox had been approached by a gas company, wanting to lease his land to drill.
He had questions. And he made a movie about the answers.
The science is simple. Millions of gallons of water, laced with hundreds of nasty sounding chemicals, are injected into the ground (where shale rock formations exist) to create mini-earthquakes which release natural gas. The gas, in turn, is captured by the drilling companies, and sold as a product. The problems? Jaysus, where to begin?
The gas doesn't all go back up neatly into the collection wells, sometimes it bubbles up right through the ground, poisoning steams and water wells.
The water pumped in - under huge pressures - is toxic and remains so. It too leaches into ground water and even if most of it is recaptured, it has to be trucked away and disposed of. Check your local wastewater facilities and see if fracking water is being dumped there. If it is, try to stop it. Municipal wastewater facilities can't possibly deal with the toxic chemicals in the water. So the chemicals just come out and enter the water system. Your water system.
And what are those toxic chemicals?
Hard to say, exactly.
In 2005, President George Bush, at the urging of (wait for it, here it comes) Vice President Dick Cheney, signed a bill that exempted gas companies from the various environmental laws that would have required them to disclose what they were pumping into the ground.
It was called the Halliburton loophole, a paean to Cheney's years as CEO of that company. Halliburton is big in the gas drilling industry. Very big.
Various agencies and individuals have analyzed fracking water samples and discovered why the gas companies wanted the exemption so much. The toxic-chemical stew is soooooo awful, so ridden with cancer causing chemicals, it should never be used.
Never.
As soon as the 2005 federal law was signed, it touched off of wild rush to drill across the U.S., the results of which are documented very well in the movie.
Gasland is a must-see movie:Where else can you watch people light the water coming out of their kitchen taps on fire.
CANTON, Pennsylvania, USA - A blowout at a natural gas well in Bradford County sent families packing and pollution officials scrambling to figure out the dimensions of a spill of well-related chemicals.
The well started leaking highly toxic fracking fluid into nearby Towanda Creek (noted for its trout fishing) and as a precaution, families living nearby were evacuated.
The fracking system for extracting natural gas from deep in shale rock formations, so far, is being studied in New York. Currently, it is not allowed in New York State, but is in many others around the nation.
The full story from the Elmira Star-Gazette can be read here:
And in the end, it's obvious that though some people are richer in dollars, the entire communities are much poorer for allowing this earth-destroying technology on their land.
