The Gary Null Blog

Josh Fox speaks during a press conference for the Safe Drinking Water act on Capitol Hill, February 17, 2011.

Kris Connor/Getty Images

One afternoon in early April, Josh Fox sits in a café near his Brooklyn home and unfurls a peculiar map of the United States. Featuring a series of red overlapping blobs stretching from Colorado to New York, it resembles one of those Cold War maps depicting the blast radii of Soviet missiles. But it’s decades more current than that. With a sweeping hand gesture, Fox explains that the red blobs mark nearly two dozen vast stores of natural gas that energy firms seek to open for drilling in the near future.

As he’s done nearly every day in the 15 months since premiering his documentary Gasland at Sundance, the 39-year-old filmmaker describes his map as a visual recipe for environmental apocalypse.

“Drilling the red areas means the annihilation of the American Dream,” says Fox, who minus his thick-black frames is a dead ringer for a young Lenny Bruce. “We can stop them from turning the country into an archipelago of unlivable toxic industrial zones, but the Gulf Spill reminds us you never know how much time is on the clock.”