Balm for the souls of New Mexicans who've been battling, with mixed results, against the latest land- and water-wrecking scourge upon our region: There's a film showing today and tomorrow on the Discovery Channel's Planet Green network called Split Estate.

It ran last weekend and is scheduled for 9 p.m. today and 1 p.m. Oct. 23. Cable channel 113 will be one place to find it.

Created by Santa Fean Debra Anderson, narrated by another Santa Fean, actress Ali MacGraw, and supported in part by Santa Fe's McCune Foundation, it's a documentary horror story: How, if you don't own both the surface and mineral rights to your land, you're a sitting duck for gas and oil exploiters whose mineral-rights ownership allows 'em to tromp in and trash your land — and, for good measure, to mess up your water with the new hydraulic fracturing technology that's put scenic Northern New Mexico in their sights.

"Fracking," which might have been only a subplot to the film, stole the spotlight this week with a bizarre scene Anderson couldn't have guessed would become pivotal: In her cinematic wanderings around the northern part of our state and into Colorado, she got an on-camera interview with a public-relations person for our neighbor state's oil and gas association.

The subject was fracking fluid: What's in it besides water to be forced down holes at high pressure to bring up the gas and oil?

Well, that's proprietary information, says the spokeswoman — but then she goes on to say that she's "had fracking fluid taken right out of a fracking truck. I've had it in my mouth. I've tasted it, and I'm just fine ..."

Healthwise, maybe — but for saying so, she got fired. Or was it just a spur-of-the-moment resignation? She first claimed that the words were dubbed into her mouth, but then allowed as how she might have said something like what Anderson has her saying, lips and sound so perfectly synchronized, it couldn't have been faked.

As for her precipitous departure, the petro-execs now are clamming up about it.

Why such a big fuss? If the stuff is harmless, why shouldn't their person have made such a claim? In fact, why didn't she chug a beaker of the stuff on camera, kinda like our long-ago ambassador to Spain diving into the sea to show there was no danger after the U.S. accidentally dropped A-bombs into the water?

So now we've got drama: What is Big Petroleum really trying to hide? It was bad enough that they were leaking gas into neighbors' streams that folks could ignite by lighting a match. And locking surface-rights owners off their property?

That's bad enough PR. But Split Estate's people couldn't have bought better publicity for the show than the flap in The Denver Post over the gas-person's firing, and the paper's report that fracking-fluid compounds can leach into groundwater and interfere with neurological, cardiovascular, respiratory and immune systems.

Oal-bidness boy Vice President Dick Cheney pushed what's known as the "Halliburton Loophole" into the 2005 energy law exempting frack-juice from the Safe Drinking Water Act.

But when a nurse in Durango got gravely sick last year after merely treating a gas-patch worker seemingly soaked in fracking fluid, Colorado was quick to pass statewide drilling rules demanding disclosure of what's in the stuff. Since Congress is considering the same, maybe that was cause enough for the corporate types to punt the loose-lipped lady ...

But there she is, dressed in red, sounding sincere for Anderson's cameras — and about to appear on a small screen near you.

The clearest message of Split Estate is: Don't buy one. But all too many New Mexicans and other Westerners have — so such groups as Drilling Santa Fe are fighting a rear-guard action on behalf of land — and water — that won't be the same once oil and gas companies start asserting their partial ownership. Caveat emptor.