Thought on Gasland

I don't often watch documentaries because they depress me. Yep, I'm a coward in that regard. I know I'll probably learn something, but what's the cost going to be to my emotional well-being?

However, in a fit of highmindedness, I recorded the documentary Gasland a month or two ago, and finally watched it today. The film, aired by HBO, is a subdued and sometimes quirky look at the apparent effects of natural gas extraction by means of hydraulic fracturing. (Should you choose to perform a Web search on that term, be advised that Google brings up three sponsored links. hydraulicfracturing.com is a site managed by Chesapeake Energy; energytomorrow.org is sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute, as evidenced by a series of TV ads they're currently running against a purported $80 billion in energy taxes; and bjservices.com is the site of a company providing "Reliable Fracturing Services for Shale Oil & Gas Operators-Since '81." Also, the first E.P.A. page on the topic is virtually inaccessible due to what my browser reports is too many redirects.)

Although I have as much compassion as the next for the little guy (or gal) getting screwed by the big corporation, faux-victimization movements like the Tea Party (if that can be characterized as a single movement) have made me wary of advocacy by camera: it's altogether too easy to tell a compelling story that is nevertheless not accurate. However, it's hard to argue with the image of a flame bursting from a kitchen tap. The reassurances from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection official who appeared on camera were terribly mealymouthed and formulaic, lacking all credibility.

You should watch Gasland if you can. The proven natural gas reserves in the United States, and the exemption from oversight of extraction by hydraulic fracturing that was enshrined into law by the George W. Bush administration under the auspices of former Vice President Cheney, combine to make this an issue that must be examined far more thoroughly and openly than it has been. The potential consequences of ignoring this issue are simply too great to risk. Our watersheds and our health are at stake.

While watching the film, I wondered about a group of people who weren't interviewed, who weren't even mentioned on camera. I'm not speaking of the executives of various energy companies, whose refusal to be interviewed was noted more than once. No, rather, I'm speaking of the shareholders of these companies.

Shareholders don't set the companies' policies. Yet a basic truth about our publicly held corporations is that corporate executives are responsible to shareholders. As shareholders, our chief -- usually our only -- expectation of those executives is that they should deliver a profit. As long as they don't engage in criminal activities to make that profit, we don't care how the executives do their jobs.

Should we?

I don't have a clue about how to make a car, much less how to make money by making cars. Yet if I were a shareholder of a car company, I think I'd feel better knowing that my company didn't make a car that would explode if struck hard enough at just the right spot, as the Ford Pinto did. I think I'd feel better if I knew the company's executives owed me as a shareholder not only a profit, but also a promise that they would not engage in practices that they knew were harmful to the environment or to human life.

I'm an idealist, I know. I don't want to contemplate how unlikely it is that other individual shareholders would feel the same way, much less institutional shareholders like state pension funds. Yet it strikes me that holding executives responsible for a company's actions without acknowledging the role that the unbridled profit motive plays -- in other words, without taking into account the impatience and profit-hungriness of shareholders that drive these executives to irresponsible, environmentally devastating actions -- simply invites us to keep making the same mistakes, over and over again. As long as company shareholders place profit above all else and don't give a damn about the damaging effects of their companies' activities -- effects whose costs, economic and otherwise, we all must bear -- I don't see how we're going to avoid further Gaslands.

UPDATE: Perhaps unsurprisingly, Halliburton plays a big part in hydraulic fracturing (I believe it even claims to be the process' originator). The 2009 Congress pushed the E.P.A. to revisit its 2004 study that purported to show hydraulic fracturing's lack of harmful consequences; Congress acted largely in response to anecdotal evidence of the kind featured in Gasland. As a result of heightened public awareness of fracking's possible dangers, Halliburton launched its own hydraulic fracturing Web site.