Being concerned
with the fracking technique that some companies are planning to do around my
hometown, I immediately recognized Ben Affleck’s job in the movie.
What is fracking?
I first learn about it when a friend of mine that worked doing fracking for a gas company told me about the effects that he saw it had in the communities where they use this technique. Here's a graphic for you:
Wikipedia gives this definition:
Hydraulic fracturing is the propagation of fractures in a rock layer by a pressurized fluid. Some hydraulic fractures form naturally—certain veinsor dikes are examples—and can create conduits along which gas and petroleum from source rocks may migrate to reservoir rocks. Induced hydraulic fracturing or hydrofracturing, commonly known as fracing, fraccing, or fracking, is a technique used to release petroleum, natural gas (including shale gas, tight gas, and coal seam gas), or other substances for extraction.[1] This type of fracturing creates fractures from awellbore drilled into reservoir rock formations.
The first use of hydraulic fracturing was in 1947. However, it was only in 1998 that modern fracturing technology, referred to as horizontal slickwater fracturing, made possible the economical extraction of shale gas; this new technology was first used in the Barnett Shale in Texas.[1][2][3] The energy from the injection of a highly pressurized hydraulic fracturing fluid creates new channels in the rock, which can increase the extraction rates and ultimate recovery of hydrocarbons.
Proponents of hydraulic fracturing point to the economic benefits from vast amounts of formerly inaccessible hydrocarbons the process can extract.[4] Opponents point to potential environmental impacts, including contamination of ground water, risks to air quality, the migration of gases and hydraulic fracturing chemicals to the surface, surface contamination from spills and flowback and the health effects of these.[5] For these reasons hydraulic fracturing has come under scrutiny internationally, with some countries suspending or banning it.
Informació sobre
fracking en català
Today El País has an article explaining that amount of gas that can be found in Spain is similar to the one that you find in ND. Our population is 67 times bigger than the one in ND. They have been affected and silenced, how is fracking going to affect a population of 47 millions spanish citizens? Terrifing.Here's a documentary that illustrates some of the things my friend that used to work fracking told me about:
Today El País has an article explaining that amount of gas that can be found in Spain is similar to the one that you find in ND. Our population is 67 times bigger than the one in ND. They have been affected and silenced, how is fracking going to affect a population of 47 millions spanish citizens? Terrifing.Here's a documentary that illustrates some of the things my friend that used to work fracking told me about:
How is fracking portrait in the movie?
Almost nothing is
portrait in the movie, so fracking isn’t either. We hardly know anything about
the characters, we don’t see their faces a lot of times, we don’t hear them
speak, we don’t know what they are thinking and when we do hear them, they say
some very abstract things. Fracking is also vastly sketched during the almost 2
hours of the film.
In the movie we see
people that are very confused about what is going on. We see poor, uneducated
people not really knowing what to say when asked about the consequences of
fracking in their everyday life. We see a community that doesn’t even know what
is going on. We see a number of times the main character going to the rivers
taking samples of the water, taking samples of hair and soil. The main
character’s job is to take samples, we know he is a nature lover but when he
interviews his fellow citizens his face doesn’t move, he doesn’t even look at
them in the eyes, his life is so much under Olga Kurylenko’s skirts that he is
not even taking care of an important situation like that.
We should thank Terrence Malick for
incorporating the fracking problem in the movie and hopefully raising some
awareness.
Is the movie only a long perfume commercial?
“Le theme ne m’interesse pas, le jeu des acteurs ne m’intérrese pas,
(...) ce qui m’importe, ce sont les morceaux de films et la photographie, la
bande sonore et tous les moyens techniques qui font que le public se met à
hurler. Je trouve que c’est terriblement satisfaisant de parvenir à communiquer
une émotion de masse grâce à l’art cinématographique. Ce à quoi nous sommes
certainement parvenus avec Psychose. Le public n’était pas touché par un
message, ni par un exploit ni par le fait qu’il goütait le roman. C’était le
cinéma seul qui donnait aux gens de l’émotion.”
