Living In a Corporate World

By Brian Khaneyan 

One sad fact of life is that people will do incredibly atrocious things for money. For many people, money is the end-all and be-all, and nothing else matters. This idea is heightened even more when you can do these things behind the veil of a corporation. If you’re the CEO of a big corporation, your main goal isn’t to better the environment or to enhance the lives of others. The main goal is to appease the investors. This is done by making as much money possible, the cheapest way possible. This includes hiring PR firms to cover up the atrocious things the company has done, and strengthen the image of the company overall. If your company’s image is bad, and people dislike the practices of the company, then people will speak out and fight against it, and even boycott some of your goods. The altruistic or regretful image that the PR firm will lay out for the company is simply there to make sure that this doesn’t happen, so that the company can continue to make as much money possible. This week’s sources all talk about fracking, which is deep earth drilling through natural gas shales in order to release and contain these natural gasses for profit. The environmental implications of this drilling are horrendous as there are an incredible amount of toxic chemicals uses. Each of this week’s sources pose the same question and the answer to this question. Is it worth it to ignore the health of humans, our environment, and our communities in return for money and profit? The answer is obviously no, and we should stand up against this fracking by all means possible.

Gasland is a film by Josh Fox which seeks to answer this question, and show the effects of fracking on communities. While the movie has been met with some criticism and skepticism, the stories and images shown have a profound effect. The movie is shot in a documentary style, the camera follows Josh Fox around as he goes to different houses in rural areas. These homes and towns rely mostly on water  they get from wells, and consist of very small communities. However interwoven between these scenes are monologues with Josh as he talks about his home and the implications of fracking for him. One of the more effective uses of the camera were the scenes shot in his backyard. They use an open aperture to achieve a shallow depth of field. This means that the images will be incredibly crisp, and only part of the image will be in focus at one time, making the viewer focus on the green trees and leaves being shown and their beautiful detail. The open aperture allows great amounts of light to enter the camera, which gives the scenes a very dreamy and calm, beautiful feeling to them. This is how Fox gets you to feel for nature, and to feel for the hardships that it is going through due to fracking. On the other end, there are countless interviews with people who are incredibly lost and have no idea what to do. They seem as though they are hopeless, and are defeated in the fight against the fracking companies. Almost every person he interviews gives him their personal stories, and they talk about their day-to-day difficulties due to drinking contaminated water. This includes a woman who gets daily headaches, and multiple people who have to drive to the city or another location in order to get their water for the week or day. Fox shows the immense pain of both nature, and humans. He shows this suffering and then immediately presents us with the facts and information about the companies benefitting off of this suffering. If you asked the companies if they thought what they were doing was just and positive overall- they would definitely say it was. They would, and do, say that it is a win-win situation, the company can get gas, and the residents can get money for the land they have above the shale. Fox depicts this in a completely different way. He shows the suffering and then shows us the companies, telling us that these companies directly benefit from hurting human beings. This movie poses the question about whether we should allow this to happen, and gives us all the evidence as to why we shouldn’t. 

The answer to the question that Gasland proposes can be seen in Dear Governor Cuomo. This film focuses on a concert urging governor Cuomo to not introduce fracking in New York State. The movie answers the question “What should we do?” The answer is to make noise. This is the only way that people will listen. It is a musical protest documentary focused on the rally to insist that Governor Cuomo not lift the moratorium that New York State had on fracking. During the concert songs about the environment and preserving the environment were mainly performed in order to show how much both the celebrities and people care .As stated earlier, companies and individuals hate when people are making complaints about them. This is because it lessens their brand image and can affect their overall bottom line, money. Even more so than companies, public representatives have a much higher responsibility to do as the public wants. While we can boycott companies and expose the things they do all we want, they can still remain in business as some people will have to buy from them. This isn’t the case in politics. The people who vote are going to be the people who are in tune with politics, and know about the issues that are going on. If you make enough noise about something, then the politician has to listen. In this case, a very influential group of people including celebrities used their own status and platforms to make this noise. What choice did Governor Cuomo have really? Does he truly believe and understand that money he could earn from accepting fracking into NY State is not worth endangering human lives? Possibly. However one thing he knows for sure is that the bad publicity that he would receive if he were to lift the moratorium NY State had on fracking, then there would be an outburst of hate through the media and that is not a good thing for his political career. In any case, Dear Governor Cuomo shows us that there is something we can do, there is a lot we can do. 

An article, Gov. Andrew Cuomo To Ban Fracking In New York State, written by James Gerken in The Huffington Post speaks about how Governor Cuomo initiated a ban on fracking in December of 2014. This was in part due to the noise generated by the concert and movie. Cuomo made this decision mostly based on the science and research performed. He stated “I think it’s our responsibility to develop an alternative…or safe, clean economic development.” Interestingly enough, the DEC commissioner also stated that, “the prospects for fracking are uncertain and that the economic benefits are far lower than originally forecasted.” The DEC stands for the Department of Environmental Conservation. This means that the DEC does take into account whether the economic benefit outweighs the human suffering. For a government agency that is supposed to protect our environment, this is interesting, and gives us some insight into how they see things.

Raising Elijah is a book by Sandra Steingraber. Steingraber fell ill to breast cancer when she was only 20 years old. The reason for the cancer at a young age is most likely due to fracking that took place near her home. Her book details the journey of her raising her son, Elijah and instilling good moral values and answering difficult questions that a child can pose. The Chapter Bicycles on Main Street (and High-Volume Hydraulic Fracturing) explains the effects that fracking can have on communities and people. Towards of the end of the chapter, an energy company representative said, “The shale army has arrived, resistance is futile.” The term she uses, “shale army,” portrays the corporations as people who are coming to her town to invade and cause a war. She puts this quote at the end of the entire chapter that outlines the dangers and harms of fracking. However, she points out that resistance isn’t futile. We shouldn’t just stay behind while the companies are taking advantage of us, and harming our environment. She brings up the examples of Tiananmen Square, which illustrates that resistance is not futile. We must work to counteract these companies because we know that what they are doing is incredibly dangerous. This is done by going to meetings with representatives of the town like Steingraber did and telling them that this is not what we want. At the end of the chapter, Elijah asks referring to a park, “We shouldn’t wreck this place down, right Mom?” The values that Steingraber is instilling into her child create a strong moral character, but it’s more than that. This sentence serves to tell the reader that even a child can see that we shouldn’t allow the energy companies to profit off of our suffering, and that we should do something about it. 

Steingraber also wrote The Fracking of Rachel Carson, which outlines what Rachel Carson said about harmful substances and applies it to fracking. Steingraber uses Carson’s life and history to get closer to the reader and give the reader a sense of who she was. “Carson’s final speech… was delivered six months before her death. By then, her pelvis was pocked with tumors and she walked with great difficulty.” This is one way that we can humanize Carson, and that makes the overall message stronger. Carson said, “we act as though the evidence for harm in other animals does not apply to us.” This is just one way in which we try to rationalize the benefits we get from fracking, by completely ignoring the dangers.