If the gas company offered you money for your property, would you take it?

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—With so much (deserving) attention set on figuring out how to stop the massive Gulf oil gusher, you may have missed headlines highlighting other energy-related disasters across the country earlier this month. Within just six days of each other, natural gas well blowouts and explosions occurred, ranging from a 16-hour gusher of toxic liquid and methane from a well in a Pennsylvania state park to two separate explosions that killed three workers in Texas and a methane blast in West Virginia. Collectively, the incidents raise even more concerns among public health experts already wary of the energy-intensive and chemical-heavy method of natural gas extraction called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

Reading about the consequences of this form of natural gas drilling is one thing, but seeing the people and places across the country where fracking occurs—where people are sick, where animals lose their hair, where land at the base of national parks looks like the surface of Mars, and yes, where people can light their tap water on fire—is certainly another. You can see all that and more by watching Gasland, winner of this year's Sundance Documentary Special Jury Prize. Gasland premieres on HBO tonight at 9 p.m.

THE DETAILS: Natural gas drilling with fracking methods has been used for several years in methane-rich shale beds in places like Texas, Colorado, and Wyoming. And with lax environmental laws in parts of the East, companies are now setting up shop—hundreds of wells, with the potential for tens of thousands in the next few years if things continue unchecked—in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. (New York currently is under a natural gas drilling moratorium.)

Gasland director Josh Fox lives in Pennsylvania near the New York border, and when a local gas company offered him $100,000 to lease his land for possible drilling, he decided to investigate how natural gas drilling affected other states. And what he found wasn't pretty. He interviewed formerly healthy people who developed brain lesions, headaches, and breathing problems; heard numerous accounts of home faucets that can be set on fire because of high methane and propane levels in the aquifers near drilling sites; talked to a rancher with 24 wells on his land who is forced to feed his grass-fed beef tainted water; and uncovered the fact that in some states, if the majority of your neighbors lease and you don't want to, you still have to give up your land to the gas company for fracking.

So how is this all possible? How is this dangerous, unconventional form of drilling for natural gas happening in 34 states? "The industry worked a sweetheart deal with the last administration to exempt fracking chemicals used in the water from the Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act," says public health expert Conrad Volz, DrPH, MPH, director of the Center for Healthy Environments and Communities at the University of Pittsburgh. "Certainly, that's a problem."

Especially when scientists have found that the fracking chemicals mixed into clean water and blasted deep into the earth, causing a mini-earthquake that cracks the shale and allows the natural gas to seep up, contain up to 590 different chemicals. Those include known carcinogens, endocrine disruptors that cause hormonal diseases in humans, and neurotoxins. Some of that chemical-laced water stays below the surface, and some comes back to the surface, along with heavy metals and radioactive materials that occur naturally deep within the Earth in the shale.

That tainted, toxic water is then dumped into artificial ponds, where it has been documented to leak out or evaporate into local communities' water and air supplies. Sometimes, energy companies even spray it into the air so it evaporates faster.

Scientists are also studying the massive air pollution surrounding natural gas drilling sites. Methane and hazardous volatile organic compounds known as BTEX—benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene—are released at sprawling natural gas sites, many of them located on public lands (thanks to another loophole allowed during the last administration.)