Big, fracking mess
February 10, 2026 3:50 PM
Gasland has been screened in community centers, in theaters, to the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and last Thursday, it was screened to an audience of nearly a hundred students at StFX. This single camera documentary has garnered worldwide recognition for its quality and for its warning of unregulated growth by the petroleum and natural gas industry.
The current search for fossil fuels is much like the student’s end of the month search for money after rent and other bills have been paid. Your bank account is empty, your wallet is in the same state and you begin to exert energy in the search for money in the places you would not normally look, like between the cushions of the couch.
Like a bank account at the end of the month, at present much of the world’s reserves of easily exploitable fossil fuels have been tapped. This has led to ever deeper drilling for oil in oceans and the development of methods to harvest oil from the tar sands in Alberta. With these unconventional techniques come greater risks of environmental catastrophes.
Like these riskier methods of drilling for oil, natural gas companies have begun to take more gambles with the environment with the unconventional method of hydraulic fracturing. Gaslands is an American cross-continental investigation of how this method of mining natural gas is endangering the environment, people’s health, and precious water supplies.
Hydraulic Fracturing, or fracking, is a decades old technique that was too expensive to implement until energy prices reached new peaks in the last decade. Hydraulic fracturing takes millions of liters of water, mixed with a chemical soup of toxic agents and pumps it into shale rock formations containing natural gas. These pressurized chemicals break the shale rock and allow the natural gas to flow through the created crack to the surface.
Concerns range from the amount of fracking fluid that is not recovered and the contamination of water supplies with methane. It is this build up of methane that leads to homeowners being able to ignite their tap water.
The visual of a man turning on his tap and igniting the built up methane is spectacular and inspires the documentary’s tag line “Can you light your water on fire?”
As the fracking method has become more prevalent in the exploitation of natural gas, government regulators have either been unable or unwilling to prove that fracturing can lead to these negative outcomes.
In fact, injecting chemicals near water sources, normally illegal under the Clean Water Act in the U.S., is permissible if done by companies exploring for fossil fuels. This is one of the many trade offs that consumers make in order to ensure access to cheap energy.
Even more disconcerting is the unwillingness of companies to disclose exactly what chemicals are present in the fracking fluid.
Atlantic Canada is currently being explored for its large reserves of natural gas which have until recently been too expensive to exploit. PetroWorth Resources, a drilling company, currently holds the rights to almost a million acres of land to be explored in Atlantic Canada, with a bulk of this in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.
This has brought the controversies documented in Gasland home for many in Canada. New Brunswick has seen exploratory wells being drilled and community protests. Cape Breton residents have begun to lobby the government to prevent drilling around Lake Ainsilie by sending a petition to Halifax. Quebec’s oil and gas lobby has even gone as far as suing anti-fracturing groups for libel.
Stephanie Merrill, the Conservation Council of New Brunswick’s freshwater protection co-ordinator has been involved with organizing communities faced with new natural gas developments. Merrill’s work has also included community screenings of Gasland and a recent fact finding trip to Arkansas to view fracturing sites.
She stated that, “Screening Gasland is a great way of engaging people about the very heavy and widespread issue of natural gas development; an issue that is now occurring here at home. Gasland is an effective documentary because it represents people who we can identify with and often, personal case studies provide the best source of information to others.”
Communities in Atlantic Canada are following the examples of those in the U.S. and are coming together and demanding stricter regulation, and in some cases moratoriums.
Merrill spoke on this as well. “Over the past year, New Brunswickans have been awakening to the potential of large scale natural gas development. Industry has become ever present and landowners are asking tough questions and demanding our government take environmental and community concerns seriously.”
“A groundswell has begun and many communities have begun to rally together; a grassroots organization with representatives from dozens of communities, Citizens for Responsible Resource Development, has formed in response. As exploration for lucrative shale plays, where natural gas is found, increases across the province, this organization, and the Conservation Council of New Brunswick will continue to provide support and information to communities who find themselves negotiating with gas companies.”
The lack of options for people who have had their wells contaminated or have seen their health deteriorate is one of the main themes of the documentary. During the discussion after the documentary, students relayed their own experiences of not being able to get information from the government.
If there is economic development from the selling of drilling rights, the question is, who will reap the gains? Mineral rights are much different in Canada than from those in the U.S. Landowners in Canada do not own the energy reserves that may be under their properties and may only be compensated for damages done to the property.
Further questions that must be asked and has made headlines in New Brunswick, is that of where the water for fracturing comes from and where does it go for treatment afterwards? In New Brunswick, bulk water shipments are being transported from Moncton’s municipal water supply and brought to fracturing sites in rural New Brunswick.
Will Nova Scotia see the use of hydrofracturing? There are concerns that PetroWorth may start with explorations using conventional methods and move towards the use of hydrofracturing in the Lake Ainslie area.
Anne Levesque of the Council of Canadians in Cape Breton points to PetroWorth’s use of the hydrofracturing method in New Brunswick and a deleted statement from their website which was purported to have read "High powered frac stimulation will make onshore Eastern Canada the new frontier for oil and gas exploration."
Tracy Barron, a communication advisor for the Nova Scotia Department of Energy explained the current state of drilling at Lake Ainslie as “The application from PetroWorth is for an exploratory well, which is a standard drilling operation. Their application does not include the use of hydraulic fracturing.”
However, Barron did acknowledge that PetroWorth could apply to use the unconventional method of hydraulic fracturing.
Not surprisingly, Gasland’s Oscar nomination has not been met with enthusiasm from those that represent energy interests in the U.S. America’s Natural Gas Alliance (ANGA) has called Gasland’s nomination “a deeply disappointing development” in a press release issued on Jan. 25.
Citing that federal regulators have disproven claims made within the documentary the press release goes on, "The stakes are too high to allow our energy choices to be influenced by the gross and deliberate misrepresentations by this filmmaker who knew the facts and chose to ignore them. We hope that viewers will seek out the truth for themselves and cast a skeptical eye on this deeply flawed film."
While the documentary stays on its message, there is a plethora of information online from community groups, industry and government officals. For those who wish to be informed, there are opportunities to attend meetings and information sessions organized by government, environmental groups and presentations given by the gas companies themselves.
