Blinding Sciencehttp://www.good.is/An ongoing exploration of scientific progress and the nature of good and evil.Mon, 13 Feb 2012 12:56:22 -0800CakePHPhourly1en-us <![CDATA[How to Start Living Forever
]]> http://www.good.is/post/how-to-start-living-forever/ http://www.good.is/post/how-to-start-living-forever/

Why we need to start taking the long view

Tektites are jet-black glass beads, created when drops of molten rock cool. They look like shiny mouse droppings. Tektites are what's left over after a big meteor crashes into the earth and melts the material on its surface, evidence of the destruction. They were found in Chesapeake, lining the impact creator that formed that bay.

The tektites discovered on the Yucatan Peninsula in 1981 were cited as evidence of a huge meteoric strike-zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Three years before this, a geophysicist named Glen Penfield made an airborne magnetic survey of the Gulf's seafloor, just north of the Yucatan. He matched his data to some older maps his company had on file and found the same thing the tektites proved: A huge crater, 110 miles in diameter, had scooped out chunks of Mexico's southern and eastern flanks along the Caribbean.

Penfield worked for Petroloes Mexicanos, or Pemex, a state-owned oil company. Pemex wouldn't let him publish specific data, but Penfield was able to present his general findings at the Society of Exploration Geophysicists conference in 1981, the same year as the tektite evidence.

A generally accepted theory formed around Penfield's evidence and the tektites: A meteor 6-miles wide slammed into the earth just north of the Yucatan coast 65 million years ago, ending the dinosaur's reign. The meteor's impact created waves thousands of feet high, and was 20 million times more powerful than the most powerful atomic bomb. Sudden and violent events like this may make for good stories (though Deep Impact was pretty terrible), but most of the major changes our planet has experienced have happened another, much less cinematic way. Real significant change usually comes so slow it's hard to even notice.

There are two ways to look at the next million years we may or may not have on earth: the comet and the canyon. The comet represents a belief that the earth is shaped by single gargantuan events that we can't do anything about (except, maybe, if you call in Bruce Willis). The canyon represents slow, profound change over millions and millions of years. The comet is fatalism; the canyon, gradualism. The comet is the hare and the canyon is the tortoise. And even though it may not be flashy, like the tortoise, the canyon wins out every time. Now, more than ever, we need to remember the canyon when we think about how things change because we're shaping the earth, leaving it less habitable for ourselves, every day.

There were about 150 million gallons of oil in the Gulf on Independence Day. A number that big is hard to conceive—the slick is now larger now than most states, and has a greater surface area than the crater off the Yucatan. In all likelihood, we will still be watching this saga unfold in August, and the oil will be there long after summer's gone. But there are elections in November, and plenty of distractions until then. We are human and time moves faster for us than it does for our planet. The size and significance of what is happening in the Gulf is geologic. To comprehend the spill, to understand any very large occurrence on Earth, it helps to take the long view, the canyon view. Geologists start with a million years.

The canyon view is crucial at this moment because political cycles, news cycles, all human cycles, really, are so short. And the fact will remain, even as we watch the water blacken and the pelicans perish, and even once the spill is stopped, that we live in an oil-driven world. There's real danger in expecting anyone other than ourselves to make it otherwise. In his book Basin and Range, John McPhee writes, "If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years, you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time. And then in a way you do not live at all, but in another way you live forever."

In this sense, everything matters, especially the little things, because they echo through time and are the forces of real significant change. A single, disruptive event like the Deepwater Horizon spill isn't going to end oil drilling. There's simply too much money in it, too many economies that run off it. We can do every small thing in our short time on this planet to lessen our impact, though. We can start wondering what will be left behind long after we are gone, evidence of our species impact on earth. We can start asking ourselves what our tektites will look like.


 

]]>

Why we need to start taking the long view

Tektites are jet-black glass beads, created when drops of molten rock cool. They look like shiny mouse droppings. Tektites are what's left over after a big meteor crashes into the earth and melts the material on its surface, evidence of the destruction. They were found in Chesapeake, lining the impact creator that formed that bay.

The tektites discovered on the Yucatan Peninsula in 1981 were cited as evidence of a huge meteoric strike-zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Three years before this, a geophysicist named Glen Penfield made an airborne magnetic survey of the Gulf's seafloor, just north of the Yucatan. He matched his data to some older maps his company had on file and found the same thing the tektites proved: A huge crater, 110 miles in diameter, had scooped out chunks of Mexico's southern and eastern flanks along the Caribbean.

Penfield worked for Petroloes Mexicanos, or Pemex, a state-owned oil company. Pemex wouldn't let him publish specific data, but Penfield was able to present his general findings at the Society of Exploration Geophysicists conference in 1981, the same year as the tektite evidence.

A generally accepted theory formed around Penfield's evidence and the tektites: A meteor 6-miles wide slammed into the earth just north of the Yucatan coast 65 million years ago, ending the dinosaur's reign. The meteor's impact created waves thousands of feet high, and was 20 million times more powerful than the most powerful atomic bomb. Sudden and violent events like this may make for good stories (though Deep Impact was pretty terrible), but most of the major changes our planet has experienced have happened another, much less cinematic way. Real significant change usually comes so slow it's hard to even notice.

There are two ways to look at the next million years we may or may not have on earth: the comet and the canyon. The comet represents a belief that the earth is shaped by single gargantuan events that we can't do anything about (except, maybe, if you call in Bruce Willis). The canyon represents slow, profound change over millions and millions of years. The comet is fatalism; the canyon, gradualism. The comet is the hare and the canyon is the tortoise. And even though it may not be flashy, like the tortoise, the canyon wins out every time. Now, more than ever, we need to remember the canyon when we think about how things change because we're shaping the earth, leaving it less habitable for ourselves, every day.

There were about 150 million gallons of oil in the Gulf on Independence Day. A number that big is hard to conceive—the slick is now larger now than most states, and has a greater surface area than the crater off the Yucatan. In all likelihood, we will still be watching this saga unfold in August, and the oil will be there long after summer's gone. But there are elections in November, and plenty of distractions until then. We are human and time moves faster for us than it does for our planet. The size and significance of what is happening in the Gulf is geologic. To comprehend the spill, to understand any very large occurrence on Earth, it helps to take the long view, the canyon view. Geologists start with a million years.

The canyon view is crucial at this moment because political cycles, news cycles, all human cycles, really, are so short. And the fact will remain, even as we watch the water blacken and the pelicans perish, and even once the spill is stopped, that we live in an oil-driven world. There's real danger in expecting anyone other than ourselves to make it otherwise. In his book Basin and Range, John McPhee writes, "If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years, you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time. And then in a way you do not live at all, but in another way you live forever."

In this sense, everything matters, especially the little things, because they echo through time and are the forces of real significant change. A single, disruptive event like the Deepwater Horizon spill isn't going to end oil drilling. There's simply too much money in it, too many economies that run off it. We can do every small thing in our short time on this planet to lessen our impact, though. We can start wondering what will be left behind long after we are gone, evidence of our species impact on earth. We can start asking ourselves what our tektites will look like.


 

]]> Ryan Bradley Thu, 8 Jul 2010 06:00:00 PDT <![CDATA[Sex, Lies, and Nature Documentaries]]> http://www.good.is/post/sex-lies-and-nature-documentaries/ http://www.good.is/post/sex-lies-and-nature-documentaries/

The natural world on film has never looked better. Which, in a way, is a pity.

It's 1928 and Schenectady, New York, is culturally relevant: It's home to the first television station in the world. Across the continent, Mickey and Minnie Mouse make their first film appearance. That same year, a Scottish biologist named Alexander Fleming discovers Penicillin and alters the course of history. Frederick Griffith inadvertently proves the existence of DNA and does the same. In France, a young scientist, the son of the Prime Minister, screens his film at the Académie des sciences. The audience, scientists all, is outraged. This is a medium reserved for penny arcades and darkened theaters, not halls of science. Worse still, the film was actually entertaining. The young scientist recalled one crying out, "Cinema is not to be taken seriously!" before storming out of the theater. The young scientist's name is Jean Painlevé, and though it was one of his first films, it was far from his last. He was just 26.

Soon Painlevé formed the Institute of Scientific and Technical Cinema, where he would make Lymph Glands of the Frog, New Research on Amoebas, and Operation on the Upper Palate, among other genre classics. But this 1928 short that sent a collective shudder through the Académie was called L'Oeuf D'Épinoche. It focused on the egg of the stickleback, a tiny scaleless creature related to the pipefish. After it was screened, a journalist from Le Vingtieme siecle questioned the film's validity. "How can we be sure that what we see on the screen is documentary truth?" he wrote. "When an actor is in front of the camera, he transforms himself, he modifies his behavior ... So, are we sure that the stickleback's egg itself is not disturbed, modified, or distorted by the camera and the lights?" Since Painlevé film on sticklebacks' eggs first appeared on movie screens, an awful lot of people—scientists, journalists, folks who love Werner Herzog—have been asking the same exact question: "How can we be sure that what we see on screen is the documentary truth?"??

Let's fast-forward 65 years. It's 1993 and television, Mickey, Minnie, and Penicillin are everywhere. DNA was everywhere before 1928, but now we know it's everywhere. The jury's still out on those nature films, though. That year, David Quammen writes this in a column for Outside magazine: "[T]he mass marketing of video nature, carries an ambivalent mix of implications ... People witness amazing processes and behaviors that they never otherwise could, and as witnesses they acquire, maybe, a certain vested concern for the preservation of wild places and wild beings. The negative implications are less patent and more complicated. Among them: People are lulled, pandered to, hypnotized, and misled ... Worst of all, they are enticed to believe that nature as they have seen it—concocted expertly from flickering photographic images—represents nature as it exists. Of course, it doesn't. Images can lie, even photographic images."

?Quammen goes on to cite Charles Siebert's 1983 essay, "The Artifice of the Natural." In it, Siebert argues that nature documentaries are more telling as objects of human creation than studies of the natural world. The nature documentary, he says, is like a city: "fast-paced, multi-storied, and artificially lit." Nature is the antithesis: slow, earthly, camera-shy. But one thing is certain: Nature, or our version of it, sells. Television was just getting started when sticklebacks came on the silver screen. Mickey and Minnie went on to spawn an empire that just spent millions on the nationwide release of Oceans, itself a re-edit of the largest nature documentary project ever (BBC and Discovery's co-produced $20-million epic, Planet Earth) which itself spawned another multi-million-dollar series, Life, which just completed a successful run on Discovery.

The point is, we're a long way from 1928 and outrage over stickleback eggs. We've grown up. Now we're outraged about beetle sex.

??
Last month, The Guardian featured a story on animal rights on film, which used as an example a furious response to a BBC documentary featuring a pair of copulating beetles. The particular problem, people thought, was television presenter Bill Oddie's narration of the encounter. "He crash-lands on top of a likely looking lady," Oddie begins. "There's a bit of luck! One thing's for sure: this boy is horny!" The article goes on to interview Brett Mills, a lecturer in film studies. Mills gets to the heart of the matter. "We can never really know if animals are giving consent," he tells The Guardian. "But they do often engage in forms of behaviour which suggest they'd rather not encounter humans." While we may never really know if the beetle sex as depicted by the BBC and described by Oddie is consensual, we can be fairly certain that animals would rather not participate in moving pictures. In fact, I think it's pretty safe to say that animals would much rather be left alone. Which brings me to the octopus. And the cameraman.

The octopus is crawling away from the cameraman, who we can only assume is there but we do not see. We see the octopus, in all sorts of bizarre situations, fleeing the scene. Always fleeing the scene. First we're in a studio, and the octopus is white on black. Then we're outside, and the octopus is cornered among rocks. Then it's falling off a window sill; then it's crawling over a crib, across a baby doll. Then the octopus is perched in a tree, then it's falling out of the tree. Finally the octopus is, mercifully, in a tank of water. But the scene is still bizarre and horrific, for the octopus is crawling over a human skull. The octopus is always crawling, as frantically as an octopus can crawl, away from the cameraman. The film is The Octopus, and it is more a work of cinematic surrealism than nature documentary. The cameraman is Painlevé, who by this time had more or less left the scientific community and been embraced by the art world. Fernand Leger, Marc Chagall, and Man Ray were all admirers.

After this transition, Painlevé said something really interesting, something that Quammen and Siebert and critics and film nerds would find fascinating and maybe outrageous maybe simply just honest. He said, basically, "I'm a filmmaker, so I lie." He took the same footage he had from the natural world and he produced two cuts, one for science, one for mass consumption. He sped up, slowed down, and generally jazzed up the popular versions of his films (sometimes they were literally soundtracked with jazz music). The Octopus—with its skull and baby and bizarre scenarios—is pure entertainment, made to horrify and amaze and, just maybe, after it's shocked you and sucked you in, educate. While Painlevé was spurned by his scientific peers, by the early 1930s he was embraced throughout France. "The science films of Jean Painlevé," wrote one critic, "bring to mind the enchantment of Shakespeare and allow one to glimpse the exhilaration of the mathematician lost in the silent music of infinitesimal calculations." By the time he died in 1989, Painlevé had made more than 200 films, including some of the first work in television for that same Mickey and Minnie empire.

In 2001, in a stroke of genius, the San Francisco Film Festival screened eight of Painlevé's films and had Yo La Tengo perform a live original score. They called the project "The Sounds of Science," and it appears on a recently released Painlevé anthology, put out on DVD by Criterion last year. It ended up being the company's best selling product in 2009. For a title, Criterion found inspiration from a collection of essays about the filmmaker (this columnist found it inspiring and essential, too). The name is perfect, and says everything about truth and lies and nature on film while saying almost nothing. It's taken from a phrase Painlevé was fond of repeating: la science est une fiction. Science is fiction.?????????????

Fiction, in this situation, is the perfect word. It comes from facere, which means "to make." So if science, and film, are fictions—that is, man- (and woman)-made—can we ever get nature right? Or can we just entertain ourselves with more and more impressive highlight reels from the natural world? Discuss amongst yourselves while I go outside and look at something real and true like a tree. Or maybe I'll get lucky and find two beetles going at it.

Image of Painlevé courtesy of The Criterion Collection

]]>

The natural world on film has never looked better. Which, in a way, is a pity.

It's 1928 and Schenectady, New York, is culturally relevant: It's home to the first television station in the world. Across the continent, Mickey and Minnie Mouse make their first film appearance. That same year, a Scottish biologist named Alexander Fleming discovers Penicillin and alters the course of history. Frederick Griffith inadvertently proves the existence of DNA and does the same. In France, a young scientist, the son of the Prime Minister, screens his film at the Académie des sciences. The audience, scientists all, is outraged. This is a medium reserved for penny arcades and darkened theaters, not halls of science. Worse still, the film was actually entertaining. The young scientist recalled one crying out, "Cinema is not to be taken seriously!" before storming out of the theater. The young scientist's name is Jean Painlevé, and though it was one of his first films, it was far from his last. He was just 26.

Soon Painlevé formed the Institute of Scientific and Technical Cinema, where he would make Lymph Glands of the Frog, New Research on Amoebas, and Operation on the Upper Palate, among other genre classics. But this 1928 short that sent a collective shudder through the Académie was called L'Oeuf D'Épinoche. It focused on the egg of the stickleback, a tiny scaleless creature related to the pipefish. After it was screened, a journalist from Le Vingtieme siecle questioned the film's validity. "How can we be sure that what we see on the screen is documentary truth?" he wrote. "When an actor is in front of the camera, he transforms himself, he modifies his behavior ... So, are we sure that the stickleback's egg itself is not disturbed, modified, or distorted by the camera and the lights?" Since Painlevé film on sticklebacks' eggs first appeared on movie screens, an awful lot of people—scientists, journalists, folks who love Werner Herzog—have been asking the same exact question: "How can we be sure that what we see on screen is the documentary truth?"??

Let's fast-forward 65 years. It's 1993 and television, Mickey, Minnie, and Penicillin are everywhere. DNA was everywhere before 1928, but now we know it's everywhere. The jury's still out on those nature films, though. That year, David Quammen writes this in a column for Outside magazine: "[T]he mass marketing of video nature, carries an ambivalent mix of implications ... People witness amazing processes and behaviors that they never otherwise could, and as witnesses they acquire, maybe, a certain vested concern for the preservation of wild places and wild beings. The negative implications are less patent and more complicated. Among them: People are lulled, pandered to, hypnotized, and misled ... Worst of all, they are enticed to believe that nature as they have seen it—concocted expertly from flickering photographic images—represents nature as it exists. Of course, it doesn't. Images can lie, even photographic images."

?Quammen goes on to cite Charles Siebert's 1983 essay, "The Artifice of the Natural." In it, Siebert argues that nature documentaries are more telling as objects of human creation than studies of the natural world. The nature documentary, he says, is like a city: "fast-paced, multi-storied, and artificially lit." Nature is the antithesis: slow, earthly, camera-shy. But one thing is certain: Nature, or our version of it, sells. Television was just getting started when sticklebacks came on the silver screen. Mickey and Minnie went on to spawn an empire that just spent millions on the nationwide release of Oceans, itself a re-edit of the largest nature documentary project ever (BBC and Discovery's co-produced $20-million epic, Planet Earth) which itself spawned another multi-million-dollar series, Life, which just completed a successful run on Discovery.

The point is, we're a long way from 1928 and outrage over stickleback eggs. We've grown up. Now we're outraged about beetle sex.

??
Last month, The Guardian featured a story on animal rights on film, which used as an example a furious response to a BBC documentary featuring a pair of copulating beetles. The particular problem, people thought, was television presenter Bill Oddie's narration of the encounter. "He crash-lands on top of a likely looking lady," Oddie begins. "There's a bit of luck! One thing's for sure: this boy is horny!" The article goes on to interview Brett Mills, a lecturer in film studies. Mills gets to the heart of the matter. "We can never really know if animals are giving consent," he tells The Guardian. "But they do often engage in forms of behaviour which suggest they'd rather not encounter humans." While we may never really know if the beetle sex as depicted by the BBC and described by Oddie is consensual, we can be fairly certain that animals would rather not participate in moving pictures. In fact, I think it's pretty safe to say that animals would much rather be left alone. Which brings me to the octopus. And the cameraman.

The octopus is crawling away from the cameraman, who we can only assume is there but we do not see. We see the octopus, in all sorts of bizarre situations, fleeing the scene. Always fleeing the scene. First we're in a studio, and the octopus is white on black. Then we're outside, and the octopus is cornered among rocks. Then it's falling off a window sill; then it's crawling over a crib, across a baby doll. Then the octopus is perched in a tree, then it's falling out of the tree. Finally the octopus is, mercifully, in a tank of water. But the scene is still bizarre and horrific, for the octopus is crawling over a human skull. The octopus is always crawling, as frantically as an octopus can crawl, away from the cameraman. The film is The Octopus, and it is more a work of cinematic surrealism than nature documentary. The cameraman is Painlevé, who by this time had more or less left the scientific community and been embraced by the art world. Fernand Leger, Marc Chagall, and Man Ray were all admirers.

After this transition, Painlevé said something really interesting, something that Quammen and Siebert and critics and film nerds would find fascinating and maybe outrageous maybe simply just honest. He said, basically, "I'm a filmmaker, so I lie." He took the same footage he had from the natural world and he produced two cuts, one for science, one for mass consumption. He sped up, slowed down, and generally jazzed up the popular versions of his films (sometimes they were literally soundtracked with jazz music). The Octopus—with its skull and baby and bizarre scenarios—is pure entertainment, made to horrify and amaze and, just maybe, after it's shocked you and sucked you in, educate. While Painlevé was spurned by his scientific peers, by the early 1930s he was embraced throughout France. "The science films of Jean Painlevé," wrote one critic, "bring to mind the enchantment of Shakespeare and allow one to glimpse the exhilaration of the mathematician lost in the silent music of infinitesimal calculations." By the time he died in 1989, Painlevé had made more than 200 films, including some of the first work in television for that same Mickey and Minnie empire.

In 2001, in a stroke of genius, the San Francisco Film Festival screened eight of Painlevé's films and had Yo La Tengo perform a live original score. They called the project "The Sounds of Science," and it appears on a recently released Painlevé anthology, put out on DVD by Criterion last year. It ended up being the company's best selling product in 2009. For a title, Criterion found inspiration from a collection of essays about the filmmaker (this columnist found it inspiring and essential, too). The name is perfect, and says everything about truth and lies and nature on film while saying almost nothing. It's taken from a phrase Painlevé was fond of repeating: la science est une fiction. Science is fiction.?????????????

Fiction, in this situation, is the perfect word. It comes from facere, which means "to make." So if science, and film, are fictions—that is, man- (and woman)-made—can we ever get nature right? Or can we just entertain ourselves with more and more impressive highlight reels from the natural world? Discuss amongst yourselves while I go outside and look at something real and true like a tree. Or maybe I'll get lucky and find two beetles going at it.

Image of Painlevé courtesy of The Criterion Collection

]]> Ryan Bradley Tue, 11 May 2010 15:00:00 PDT <![CDATA[On Fracking and Human Folly]]> http://www.good.is/post/on-fracking-and-human-folly/ http://www.good.is/post/on-fracking-and-human-folly/



Sometimes it makes sense to split the earth open—and sometimes it doesn't.

Anthony Ingraffea lives on 70 acres of woodland outside Ithaca, New York. He bought the land decades ago to hunt and fish and enjoy in the same way anyone enjoys wild spaces. Ingraffea is a fly-fisherman, and a tributary to the Trenton Black River runs through his woods. It's not full of trout, but there are more than enough to keep him busy.

One day a man came to his door and told Ingraffea that if he signed these papers agreeing to lease his land, Columbia Gas Company would pay him five dollars per acre per year and cut him in on part of the profits if they found anything. By anything the man meant natural gas. This was back in 1997.

The man described how they would get through the Devonian shale beneath Ingraffea's 70 acres using a method called hydraulic fracturing, and that it was very safe and the impact on the surface of his land would be minimal. Ingraffea didn't buy the woods with the small trout stream for the Devonian shale or natural gas reserves, so he was surprised—but not for the reasons the man at his door that day might have thought. Ingraffea has his Ph.D. in rock fracture mechanics and knows all about Devonion shale. He also knows all about hydraulic fracturing: He's been teaching courses on fracture mechanics at Cornell since 1977. He's also spent decades as the principle investigator for projects with NASA, the Gas Research Institute, the US Army Corps of Engineers, and Northrop Grumman; he's taught the government and plenty of industries just what hydraulic fracturing is and how to do it. And suddenly, this man from a gas mining company was at his front door, telling him about the thing he'd spent his career on, asking if he would give his land over to it. "I'm not going to sign today," Ingraffea told the man, "I'm going to think about this."

Hydraulic fracturing has a totally excellent nickname: fracking. You may have heard of it, and not just because it's slang used in Battlestar Gallatica. Fracking is a contentious, fiercely debated issue that will either—depending on who you're talking to—usher in a new era of natural gas-based energy independence or wreak untold devastation on the environment. Lawsuits are springing up in Pennsylvania and Colorado over fracking, and a film shown at Sundance this year took on the topic. Just last month the Environmental Protection Agency launched a massive national study into the practice.

Fracking (and I'm going to continue to call it that, because the word is awesomely onomatopoetic) works like this: find a crack in the rock and shoot water, some sand, and other chemicals into the crack to make it bigger until you hit something useful, like natural gas. Ingraffea would probably balk at my over-simplification, but that's the point: This is not an easy thing to describe. In the current debate between the drill-baby-drillers (or frack-baby-frackers) and the not-in-my-backyard treehuggers the lines are black and white. It's "disrupting the environment is bad" versus "extraction and enterprise are good." But with fracking, nuance matters. Which is why, when Ingraffea told the man he'd think about signing those papers back in 1997, he really thought about it.

Ingraffea is the professor you want to have. He's brilliant and energetic and passionate about what he does. At the start of each course he tells his students that, "As an engineer you have a responsibility to the truth, but also to society. You take an oath to inform the public of any dangers to them." He gives them examples of engineers who should have known better, who might have known that their calculations were off or their structures were weak, but were too afraid of losing their jobs to say anything. He likes to use the example of NASA and the space shuttles Columbia and Challenger.

When fracking knocked on his front door that day, he knew it was also coming to his neighbors' doors, to his whole community around Ithaca. "I looked at my situation and said: Crap, I know a lot about what's going on here and I know that what's being told to the public is not the complete story. If I don't say something, I'm just like one of my bad examples." So, like a true professor, he made a PowerPoint lecture about it.

In fracking, the actual splitting of the rock is only one part of a very large, very complex process. Ingraffea uses that word throughout his lecture: "large" (also "big," "huge," "immense," "giant"). Focusing on the fracking itself to determine the safety of a given mining operation, he says, is like looking at a generator to find out if an engine is good or bad. Yeah, it's a key part of the process, but it's also just that: one part of a very (you guessed it) big process. In order to hydraulically fracture, a company has to use certain chemicals—hydrochloric and citric acid, ammonium persulfate, dimethylformamide, petroleum distillate, potassium chloride. See a full list of chemicals being used in New York operations here. These chemicals have to be brought to a well, stored on site, properly injected, responsibly used, cleaned out of the earth in a flowback process, stored on the site again, eventually transported off, then finally disposed of. If all of this is done in an environmentally safe way and nothing goes wrong, fracking is safe. But there's an awful lot of room for error there, especially the human kind. As Ingraffea puts it: "Statistically, the safest part of the process is injecting those chemicals five thousand to ten thousand feet. The first line of defense is rock, and I like rock. It's protecting the groundwater. I'd bet on rock any day. Before that, and after, humans are protecting the groundwater from those chemicals. I don't trust humans."

"There's a misplaced concern," Ingraffea continues. "Everyone's looking at the lowest probability event as the thing they're most concerned about. Now, will it have the highest impact if something goes wrong? Sure. But the mining companies are happy to have the EPA focus on the process that is statistically safest. The other thing people don't understand is that these mining operations are ongoing experiments. When these operations come to land-owners and present a lease, they don't say, 'your property is going to be part of an ongoing experiment.'"

What Ingraffea means by this is pretty simple: Every time you puncture a hole in the earth and shoot chemicals at high speed into it, you are faced with a new challenge. So when the mining industry says, "We've done this successfully in Colorado or West Virginia or Pennsylvania, so we can do the same here in New York," that's just not true. What was learned in one place is not guaranteed to work in the next. "Mother Nature owns the stuff down there, and it's as good as we can guess to get it," Ingraffea says.

The last myth Ingraffea likes to dispel is the myth of energy independence. There is no question that the United States has a ton of natural gas sitting under it—500 trillion cubic feet is the latest estimate in the Marcellus shale surrounding Ithaca. But this 500 trillion cubic feet represents a 20-year supply of the stuff at our current rate of consumption, and natural gas only accounts for 23 percent of our total energy needs. The kicker is that to get all this gas would take 50 years. So every year on average that's one fiftieth of twenty-three percent of a 20 year supply. It's not insignificant, but it's no silver bullet for our short-term energy needs. Rather, Ingraffea suggests we use natural gas as a way to wean ourselves off coal, the dirtiest fuel we burn. But this, he says, points to the largest myth of all, the myth that "somebody's in control." We have, he says, "No national energy strategy, no oversight to maintain the standard of living while decreasing our impact on the environment, which should be the cornerstone of any energy policy." 

Ingraffea took his PowerPoint presentation to the local chapter of Trout Unlimited (he's a member); he presented it to the League of Women Voters, the Sierra Club, and in public meetings with the the gas companies, who wanted to lease the land around Ithaca for their operations. It wasn't that he was campaigning against Columbia Gas, and he certainly wasn't campaigning against fracking, which, after all, he had spent his career working on. It was just that, as a professor and engineer, he had a responsibility to make sure all the information was out there, and then let folks decide for themselves. Still, people at the meetings accused him of pushing his opinion rather than the facts. One guy said he should go home and turn off the gas in his house if that's the way he felt about things. Another guy came up to him after one meeting and said, "I've been a steward of the land, and my father has too, and now that we have the opportunity to make some money off it we're going to do it." Ingraffea shrugged and remembered that oath he took, the one about informing the public to any danger.

The day after the man from Columbia Gas came to his door another man came calling, this one from the Nature Conservancy, asking if he would sell his land to them. He did. "So now the land can never be leased, even though all the land around it has been, and all that gas around it will be taken. Probably the gas under my woods will be taken, too. But the land is forever wild. I feel good about that."

]]>



Sometimes it makes sense to split the earth open—and sometimes it doesn't.

Anthony Ingraffea lives on 70 acres of woodland outside Ithaca, New York. He bought the land decades ago to hunt and fish and enjoy in the same way anyone enjoys wild spaces. Ingraffea is a fly-fisherman, and a tributary to the Trenton Black River runs through his woods. It's not full of trout, but there are more than enough to keep him busy.

One day a man came to his door and told Ingraffea that if he signed these papers agreeing to lease his land, Columbia Gas Company would pay him five dollars per acre per year and cut him in on part of the profits if they found anything. By anything the man meant natural gas. This was back in 1997.

The man described how they would get through the Devonian shale beneath Ingraffea's 70 acres using a method called hydraulic fracturing, and that it was very safe and the impact on the surface of his land would be minimal. Ingraffea didn't buy the woods with the small trout stream for the Devonian shale or natural gas reserves, so he was surprised—but not for the reasons the man at his door that day might have thought. Ingraffea has his Ph.D. in rock fracture mechanics and knows all about Devonion shale. He also knows all about hydraulic fracturing: He's been teaching courses on fracture mechanics at Cornell since 1977. He's also spent decades as the principle investigator for projects with NASA, the Gas Research Institute, the US Army Corps of Engineers, and Northrop Grumman; he's taught the government and plenty of industries just what hydraulic fracturing is and how to do it. And suddenly, this man from a gas mining company was at his front door, telling him about the thing he'd spent his career on, asking if he would give his land over to it. "I'm not going to sign today," Ingraffea told the man, "I'm going to think about this."

Hydraulic fracturing has a totally excellent nickname: fracking. You may have heard of it, and not just because it's slang used in Battlestar Gallatica. Fracking is a contentious, fiercely debated issue that will either—depending on who you're talking to—usher in a new era of natural gas-based energy independence or wreak untold devastation on the environment. Lawsuits are springing up in Pennsylvania and Colorado over fracking, and a film shown at Sundance this year took on the topic. Just last month the Environmental Protection Agency launched a massive national study into the practice.

Fracking (and I'm going to continue to call it that, because the word is awesomely onomatopoetic) works like this: find a crack in the rock and shoot water, some sand, and other chemicals into the crack to make it bigger until you hit something useful, like natural gas. Ingraffea would probably balk at my over-simplification, but that's the point: This is not an easy thing to describe. In the current debate between the drill-baby-drillers (or frack-baby-frackers) and the not-in-my-backyard treehuggers the lines are black and white. It's "disrupting the environment is bad" versus "extraction and enterprise are good." But with fracking, nuance matters. Which is why, when Ingraffea told the man he'd think about signing those papers back in 1997, he really thought about it.

Ingraffea is the professor you want to have. He's brilliant and energetic and passionate about what he does. At the start of each course he tells his students that, "As an engineer you have a responsibility to the truth, but also to society. You take an oath to inform the public of any dangers to them." He gives them examples of engineers who should have known better, who might have known that their calculations were off or their structures were weak, but were too afraid of losing their jobs to say anything. He likes to use the example of NASA and the space shuttles Columbia and Challenger.

When fracking knocked on his front door that day, he knew it was also coming to his neighbors' doors, to his whole community around Ithaca. "I looked at my situation and said: Crap, I know a lot about what's going on here and I know that what's being told to the public is not the complete story. If I don't say something, I'm just like one of my bad examples." So, like a true professor, he made a PowerPoint lecture about it.

In fracking, the actual splitting of the rock is only one part of a very large, very complex process. Ingraffea uses that word throughout his lecture: "large" (also "big," "huge," "immense," "giant"). Focusing on the fracking itself to determine the safety of a given mining operation, he says, is like looking at a generator to find out if an engine is good or bad. Yeah, it's a key part of the process, but it's also just that: one part of a very (you guessed it) big process. In order to hydraulically fracture, a company has to use certain chemicals—hydrochloric and citric acid, ammonium persulfate, dimethylformamide, petroleum distillate, potassium chloride. See a full list of chemicals being used in New York operations here. These chemicals have to be brought to a well, stored on site, properly injected, responsibly used, cleaned out of the earth in a flowback process, stored on the site again, eventually transported off, then finally disposed of. If all of this is done in an environmentally safe way and nothing goes wrong, fracking is safe. But there's an awful lot of room for error there, especially the human kind. As Ingraffea puts it: "Statistically, the safest part of the process is injecting those chemicals five thousand to ten thousand feet. The first line of defense is rock, and I like rock. It's protecting the groundwater. I'd bet on rock any day. Before that, and after, humans are protecting the groundwater from those chemicals. I don't trust humans."

"There's a misplaced concern," Ingraffea continues. "Everyone's looking at the lowest probability event as the thing they're most concerned about. Now, will it have the highest impact if something goes wrong? Sure. But the mining companies are happy to have the EPA focus on the process that is statistically safest. The other thing people don't understand is that these mining operations are ongoing experiments. When these operations come to land-owners and present a lease, they don't say, 'your property is going to be part of an ongoing experiment.'"

What Ingraffea means by this is pretty simple: Every time you puncture a hole in the earth and shoot chemicals at high speed into it, you are faced with a new challenge. So when the mining industry says, "We've done this successfully in Colorado or West Virginia or Pennsylvania, so we can do the same here in New York," that's just not true. What was learned in one place is not guaranteed to work in the next. "Mother Nature owns the stuff down there, and it's as good as we can guess to get it," Ingraffea says.

The last myth Ingraffea likes to dispel is the myth of energy independence. There is no question that the United States has a ton of natural gas sitting under it—500 trillion cubic feet is the latest estimate in the Marcellus shale surrounding Ithaca. But this 500 trillion cubic feet represents a 20-year supply of the stuff at our current rate of consumption, and natural gas only accounts for 23 percent of our total energy needs. The kicker is that to get all this gas would take 50 years. So every year on average that's one fiftieth of twenty-three percent of a 20 year supply. It's not insignificant, but it's no silver bullet for our short-term energy needs. Rather, Ingraffea suggests we use natural gas as a way to wean ourselves off coal, the dirtiest fuel we burn. But this, he says, points to the largest myth of all, the myth that "somebody's in control." We have, he says, "No national energy strategy, no oversight to maintain the standard of living while decreasing our impact on the environment, which should be the cornerstone of any energy policy." 

Ingraffea took his PowerPoint presentation to the local chapter of Trout Unlimited (he's a member); he presented it to the League of Women Voters, the Sierra Club, and in public meetings with the the gas companies, who wanted to lease the land around Ithaca for their operations. It wasn't that he was campaigning against Columbia Gas, and he certainly wasn't campaigning against fracking, which, after all, he had spent his career working on. It was just that, as a professor and engineer, he had a responsibility to make sure all the information was out there, and then let folks decide for themselves. Still, people at the meetings accused him of pushing his opinion rather than the facts. One guy said he should go home and turn off the gas in his house if that's the way he felt about things. Another guy came up to him after one meeting and said, "I've been a steward of the land, and my father has too, and now that we have the opportunity to make some money off it we're going to do it." Ingraffea shrugged and remembered that oath he took, the one about informing the public to any danger.

The day after the man from Columbia Gas came to his door another man came calling, this one from the Nature Conservancy, asking if he would sell his land to them. He did. "So now the land can never be leased, even though all the land around it has been, and all that gas around it will be taken. Probably the gas under my woods will be taken, too. But the land is forever wild. I feel good about that."

]]> Ryan Bradley Mon, 26 Apr 2010 10:30:00 PDT <![CDATA[Good, Evil, and the Cline]]> http://www.good.is/post/good-evil-and-the-cline/ http://www.good.is/post/good-evil-and-the-cline/
An introduction to Blinding Science, GOOD's new science column.The first thing a new columnist gets stuck on is the name. I thought of calling this column "The Cline." My editor thought this name might be too esoteric, and we decided to go with something a lot better—the title you now see. But I still want to tell you about the cline.

First, I should mention an evolutionary biologist named Julian Huxley. The cline was his idea—along with UNESCO, the World Wildlife Fund, national parks in East Africa, and the enforced sterilization of the poor. This story, Huxley's story, is full of seemingly conflicting, messy details like this. But then, so is science and everything else.

Huxley was an early student of wildlife ecology, conservation, and management. He ran the London Zoo and worked for the British Army Intelligence Corps during the first World War. Throughout the mid-20th century Huxley traveled the world and was curious about everything in it. "If I am to be remembered," he wrote at the end of his life in a two-volume, thousand-page autobiography, "I hope that it will not be primarily for my specialized scientific work, but as a generalist; one to whom ... nothing human, and nothing in ... nature, was alien." Huxley is interesting because he did so many things, but he's fascinating because he was uncomfortably outspoken about one big thing. Not the cline, but eugenics.

Huxley came from good stock. His grandfather, a famous biologist, championed Darwin immediately following the publication of Origin of the Species. His brother Aldous wrote Brave New World. His father was a famous writer, too. Julian and a family friend named H.G. Wells wrote a book together called The Science of Life. It was, perhaps, this well-bred existence that led Huxley, in 1941, to declare that "The lowest strata are reproducing too fast ... they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilisation." Soon enough, Huxley found himself president of the British Eugenics Society. Here's where things get complicated: enter, the cline.

Huxley's greatest scientific achievement was the publication, in 1942, of Evolution: The Modern Synthesis. As the title suggests, Huxley didn't offer new findings so much as put together the old ones that still made sense to form one brilliantly written survey of evolutionary science and its working theories, from Darwin to present day. There were, however, a few original ideas in Evolution, appearing in the form of two important new words: one was clade; the other, cline. A clade is a group consisting of a single common ancestor, a single branch on the evolutionary tree. A platypus is a good example of a clade, because nothing else in existence is quite like it; but birds are all on a clade, too—they all spring from one common winged ancestor who took to the sky about 150 million years ago. A cline is, basically, a gradual change in the characteristics of a single species spread across many environments. The best example of this is us: People sure look different, but does it have to do with where we—or our ancient ancestors—are from? And what does this mean in terms of the species' evolution?

Huxley struggled with these questions. When it came to evolutionary theory, Huxley believed in progress without a goal. That is, evolution marches forward, just like time, but not necessarily upward. Not always. Evolution favors survivors above all else, otherwise, why would the alligator, nautilus, and coelacanth still be around and unchanged for hundreds of millions of years? Finding purpose in evolution's progress was, according to Huxley, bunk. But Huxley went a step further: Complex and intelligent organisms could actually alter the course of evolution. Huxley described how organisms could settle new lands that might have been hostile, unreachable, even inconceivable before. With new traits—like, say, opposable thumbs and a bigger brains—particularly bold members of such a species could strike out for brave new worlds or better still, change the environment around them rather than adapting to it. And yet, the control over environment came at great cost. Anyone who had lived through two World Wars knew this terrible truth all too well.

The end of the second World War was not a great time to be a eugenicist. The practice, nicely summarized by Huxley earlier (selective breeding to "improve" a species) played no small part in the controlled murder of at least five million Jews. Huxley, though, did not distance himself from the field. Instead, he produced a statement calling for the word 'race' to be replaced with 'ethnic group.' "Catholics, Protestants, Moslems [sic] and Jews are not races," he wrote, and no one ethnic group was inferior to another. He titled his statement "The Race Question." By decade's end Huxley was president of the Eugenics Society in England.* But Huxley had begun to sour on the field. He soon coined a new term, this one even more powerful than "cline.?"

It was the early 1960s, and Huxley was busy establishing parks in Africa and saving other important pieces of the planet through UNESCO. The word he came up with addressed evolution, but not in a scientific, Darwinian sense. Huxley had come to believe that humans were unique among species in our intellect, certainly, but also because we didn't have to worry about our species survival, really. We could choose to improve things—the world around us, for example. We could, in other words, transcend what it is to be, from Huxley's experience, human. He called this idea transhumanism.

Why are Huxley and the cline important? Because the man struggled with the differences of the world and attempted to catalog its messiness, and his word struggles to describe how some of these differences, this messiness, came about. The story of Huxley's life, the evolution of his own philosophy—beginning with eugenics, ending in transhumanism—shows how science (and scientists) can perpetuate evil, even while trying to make the world a better place. At the end of his life, Huxley realized that the choice to make things better, and in that sense better ourselves, was more powerful than anything else we could do. We could do good, and that was enough.

In this column, I hope to explore scientific progress and the nature of good and evil. A large theme, this, and one that will probably lead me to conclude that I've bitten off more than I could chew and ended up less certain of what constitutes good and evil than I am now. But that, to me, is kind of an exhilarating prospect.

* Huxley eventually turned his back on eugenics entirely, the most eloquent denial of the field may be from that multi-volume autobiography—he doesn't mention the field once.

Illustration by Will Etling.

]]>
An introduction to Blinding Science, GOOD's new science column.The first thing a new columnist gets stuck on is the name. I thought of calling this column "The Cline." My editor thought this name might be too esoteric, and we decided to go with something a lot better—the title you now see. But I still want to tell you about the cline.

First, I should mention an evolutionary biologist named Julian Huxley. The cline was his idea—along with UNESCO, the World Wildlife Fund, national parks in East Africa, and the enforced sterilization of the poor. This story, Huxley's story, is full of seemingly conflicting, messy details like this. But then, so is science and everything else.

Huxley was an early student of wildlife ecology, conservation, and management. He ran the London Zoo and worked for the British Army Intelligence Corps during the first World War. Throughout the mid-20th century Huxley traveled the world and was curious about everything in it. "If I am to be remembered," he wrote at the end of his life in a two-volume, thousand-page autobiography, "I hope that it will not be primarily for my specialized scientific work, but as a generalist; one to whom ... nothing human, and nothing in ... nature, was alien." Huxley is interesting because he did so many things, but he's fascinating because he was uncomfortably outspoken about one big thing. Not the cline, but eugenics.

Huxley came from good stock. His grandfather, a famous biologist, championed Darwin immediately following the publication of Origin of the Species. His brother Aldous wrote Brave New World. His father was a famous writer, too. Julian and a family friend named H.G. Wells wrote a book together called The Science of Life. It was, perhaps, this well-bred existence that led Huxley, in 1941, to declare that "The lowest strata are reproducing too fast ... they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilisation." Soon enough, Huxley found himself president of the British Eugenics Society. Here's where things get complicated: enter, the cline.

Huxley's greatest scientific achievement was the publication, in 1942, of Evolution: The Modern Synthesis. As the title suggests, Huxley didn't offer new findings so much as put together the old ones that still made sense to form one brilliantly written survey of evolutionary science and its working theories, from Darwin to present day. There were, however, a few original ideas in Evolution, appearing in the form of two important new words: one was clade; the other, cline. A clade is a group consisting of a single common ancestor, a single branch on the evolutionary tree. A platypus is a good example of a clade, because nothing else in existence is quite like it; but birds are all on a clade, too—they all spring from one common winged ancestor who took to the sky about 150 million years ago. A cline is, basically, a gradual change in the characteristics of a single species spread across many environments. The best example of this is us: People sure look different, but does it have to do with where we—or our ancient ancestors—are from? And what does this mean in terms of the species' evolution?

Huxley struggled with these questions. When it came to evolutionary theory, Huxley believed in progress without a goal. That is, evolution marches forward, just like time, but not necessarily upward. Not always. Evolution favors survivors above all else, otherwise, why would the alligator, nautilus, and coelacanth still be around and unchanged for hundreds of millions of years? Finding purpose in evolution's progress was, according to Huxley, bunk. But Huxley went a step further: Complex and intelligent organisms could actually alter the course of evolution. Huxley described how organisms could settle new lands that might have been hostile, unreachable, even inconceivable before. With new traits—like, say, opposable thumbs and a bigger brains—particularly bold members of such a species could strike out for brave new worlds or better still, change the environment around them rather than adapting to it. And yet, the control over environment came at great cost. Anyone who had lived through two World Wars knew this terrible truth all too well.

The end of the second World War was not a great time to be a eugenicist. The practice, nicely summarized by Huxley earlier (selective breeding to "improve" a species) played no small part in the controlled murder of at least five million Jews. Huxley, though, did not distance himself from the field. Instead, he produced a statement calling for the word 'race' to be replaced with 'ethnic group.' "Catholics, Protestants, Moslems [sic] and Jews are not races," he wrote, and no one ethnic group was inferior to another. He titled his statement "The Race Question." By decade's end Huxley was president of the Eugenics Society in England.* But Huxley had begun to sour on the field. He soon coined a new term, this one even more powerful than "cline.?"

It was the early 1960s, and Huxley was busy establishing parks in Africa and saving other important pieces of the planet through UNESCO. The word he came up with addressed evolution, but not in a scientific, Darwinian sense. Huxley had come to believe that humans were unique among species in our intellect, certainly, but also because we didn't have to worry about our species survival, really. We could choose to improve things—the world around us, for example. We could, in other words, transcend what it is to be, from Huxley's experience, human. He called this idea transhumanism.

Why are Huxley and the cline important? Because the man struggled with the differences of the world and attempted to catalog its messiness, and his word struggles to describe how some of these differences, this messiness, came about. The story of Huxley's life, the evolution of his own philosophy—beginning with eugenics, ending in transhumanism—shows how science (and scientists) can perpetuate evil, even while trying to make the world a better place. At the end of his life, Huxley realized that the choice to make things better, and in that sense better ourselves, was more powerful than anything else we could do. We could do good, and that was enough.

In this column, I hope to explore scientific progress and the nature of good and evil. A large theme, this, and one that will probably lead me to conclude that I've bitten off more than I could chew and ended up less certain of what constitutes good and evil than I am now. But that, to me, is kind of an exhilarating prospect.

* Huxley eventually turned his back on eugenics entirely, the most eloquent denial of the field may be from that multi-volume autobiography—he doesn't mention the field once.

Illustration by Will Etling.

]]> Ryan Bradley Mon, 12 Apr 2010 16:00:00 PDT