Tonight they packed out the Gunnedah town hall to experience the academy nominated documentary ‘Gasland‘. With local, state and federal politicians in attendance, film maker Josh Fox presented his expose of the desolation wrought by Coal Seam Gas mining on US heartland, which was both poignant and highly relevant to our local area.

Analogous to Big Tobacco, the film highlighted the duplicitous actions of mining companies when faced with evidence of animal deaths and human health degradation by exposure to toxic ground waters linked to cocktails of carcinogenic chemicals pumped into coal seams to release trapped gas. The film highlighted too, legal exemptions granted these companies for this resource exploitation.  We are rightly scared that all this will be repeated locally.

And it has. First evidence is emerging in Queensland of contaminated farm water as the gas industry attempts to expand exponentially, with State Government complicity, to exploit this apparent lucrative resource. But the continuing cost is, as ‘Gasland’ clearly showed, the destruction of quality of life, the land, and human health.