Ruffalo on terror watch list

It's crap like this that makes us mistrust government: actor Mark Ruffalo was added to a "terror alert watchlist" courtesy of Pennsylvania's Office of Homeland Security. Why? The best guess is that the office is unhappy that he helped to promote the documentary Gasland.

I mentioned Ruffalo (misspelling his name in the process) in passing when discussing the E.P.A.'s subpoenaing of Halliburton for details of its fracking operations. Ruffalo wrote that a group associated with Karl Rove had started running ads against the candidate for Congress Ruffalo supported, a man who introduced legislation to close the so-called "Halliburton Loophole" that exempted hydraulic fracturing from disclosure requirements mandated by the Safe Drinking Water Act. According to Ruffalo, Rove's group "has received significant funding from the oil and gas industry."

Gasland is a documentary about the controversial practice of "hydraulic fracturing," or "fracking," which is used to extract natural gas in many parts of the world. Fracking is thought to result in contamination of aquifers, though its advocates, including Halliburton (which developed the technique over fifty years ago), deny that that's the case. Gasland focuses on the firsthand experiences of several U.S. households who allowed natural gas companies to perform fracking on their properties; these households have all experienced severe contamination of their groundwater and indifference from state regulators. The U.S. is home to one of the largest suspected natural gas reserves in the world, making its extraction a highly profitable pursuit.

As I wrote in September, Gasland is a compelling film, and becomes the more so when I see behavior like that of the Pennsylvania Office of Homeland Security. Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection does not come off with the most credible image in the film, to put it mildly, and it's hard not to see the action by the state's Office of Homeland Security (admittedly, "reported" but not officially confirmed as far as I know) as a kind of indirect retribution for Ruffalo's support for the film.