Before an impressive-sized, and seemingly impressed, audience last evening at the Aero Theatre, Santa Monica, a panel of Culver City experts and two documentary films sought to educate the curious and re-energize the committed to a global effort to put the brakes on the disputed drilling technique known as fracking for its perceived dangers to mankind.
Seated on stage beneath the huge theatre curtain, City Councilwoman Meghan Sahli-Wells and activist/organizer Paul Ferrazzi earned favorable reviews for their cogent, informative responses and presentations.
Two anti-fracking documentaries that have swept young filmmaker Josh Fox into the Oscar-nominee limelight in the last two years – the 18-minute warmup, “The Sky Is Pink,” and his much better known “Gasland” – formed the spine of the program.
Several organizations helped pull together the evening, and they had their say from the stage.
The core question, a prickly one, is whether the passionate anti-fracking activists won converts to their movement through their two main pitches:
• The potential perils caused by a feared overloaded form of drilling that could explode already shaky grounds, in Culver City and adjacent properties, and
• The financially, emotionally pro-fracking gas and oil industry is so powerful and ubiquitous that those on the other side seeking to ban or control the method must constantly replenish their ranks, to grow and also to replace supporters who wear out or become discouraged.
The crowd was a mix of activists and newcomers, although they could not have been entirely new, judging from the arcane questions they posed for the panel.
Did the films and the panelists change or provoke hearts and minds?
For now, that must serve as a rhetorical question.
One other Culver City elected official was in the audience, Prof. Pat Siever of the School Board.
(To be continued)
