This weekend I finally got around to watching FrackNation, Irish filmmaker Phelim McAleer’s 2013 documentary about hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) and its enemies the world over.
Going in I knew the film to be on “my side”: that is, pro-fracking and pro-free enterprise. The film itself is more than anything an indictment of 2010’s award-winning GasLand, the documentary that caused mass hysteria over fracking in the first place. Well, if not mass hysteria then hysteria among enough of the right people to encourage moratoriums on fracking in many parts of the U.S. FrackNation argues that such bans are unnecessary, and, like so much public policy, harmful to those it intends to protect.
Featured prominently in the film are parts of Northeast Pennsylvania, quite close to my old stomping grounds of upstate New York. If any area of the country needs some new development it’s there, and while some areas have benefited from fracking thus far, it has hardly been universal, mostly due to the meddling of politicians and so-called activists of the GasLand variety. My hometown of Binghamton, New York, is one of those places where the GasLand folks have triumphed, and its status as burned-out industrial wasteland has remained intact. Our politicians, like most politicians, love to “stand up” to “big oil,” even when the oil in this case is natural gas. And never mind any potential economic benefits, the political benefits are too great.
Politics aside, I think the most interesting aspect of the film is the way it was funded. It really was a “grassroots” (to use an overused phrase) effort. More than 3,000 “executive producers” are listed at the film’s end, all of whom pledged money through a Kickstarter campaign McAleery and his associates began in 2012.
FrackNation is worth your time. The actual run time of the film is just over an hour: my kind of documentary. It’s entertaining and informative, and thought provoking if not thought changing. Or one can hope.