Can Citizen Science Save Us From Environmental Disasters?

During the rush-hour commute on Tokyo’s trains, it’s easy to spot riders gaming on their phones, sorting sweets in Candy Crush or mustering armies in Clash of Clans. But Kevin Hemphill, a geeky ex-pat, played a different game on his iPad, flipping through images of forests and meadows in Pennsylvania that had been cleared. Tapping the screen, he marked the location of ponds and transmitted the data to a nonprofit halfway across the globe.
Through the web-based FrackFinder, a project of the nonprofit SkyTruth, Hemphill, nostalgic for his childhood home in the Rust Belt of Ohio, pored over the images of the Keystone State. He was looking for evidence of hydraulic fracturing. Better known “fracking,” it’s the process of blasting chemicals, sand and water into underground rock layers to dislodge natural gas — a controversial method of energy extraction that’s brought jobs to the region while potentially putting locals’ health at risk. In a uniquely digital “citizen science” effort, Hemphill and hundreds of volunteers around the world have plotted Pennsylvania’s energy infrastructure, creating a detailed map that can be shared with activists, regulators and academics.
Biologists have long relied on group expeditions to study wildlife populations, but FrackFinder brings the process online, giving anyone with a keyboard the chance to participate. As users click through FrackFinder, SkyTruth’s team hopes the abstract science of environmental exploitation becomes tangible. Their pictures, shot from aircraft and 400-mile high satellites, clearly depict the damage that can be hard to visualize, and even harder to reverse.
“We can look at not just one township or county or state. We’re able to look at changes across entire regions over decades. That’s almost like having access to a time machine,” says David Manthos, SkyTruth’s program coordinator. “It’s the region-wide perspective we offer that you just can’t get from one place on the ground.”
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Geologist John Amos founded the nonpartisan Skytruth, which collects satellite images of potential eco-hazards, in 2001, moving it to tiny Shepherdstown, W.V., two years later. A former consultant for a natural resources exploration firm, Amos put similar tracking tools into the hands of conservationists, as a way to atone for his past “disservice to the planet.” But for nearly a decade, SkyTruth remained a one-man shop. Few donors could see how SkyTruth’s aerial imagery might help the environmental movement. That all changed in April 2010, when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. BP and the Coast Guard estimated 1,000 barrels of oil were gushing out each day, but after studying photos of a vast, shimmering pool of oil on the ocean’s surface, he and oceanographer Dr. Ian MacDonald calculated the spill was more than 20 times worse than officials claimed. After publishing a critical blog post, the federal government quickly revised its numbers upward.
Now a 12-person staff, SkyTruth has used their planetary perspective to create the first repository of mountaintop-removal mining sites in Appalachia; to film flaring over North Dakota’s Bakken oil fields by equipping a high-altitude hydrogen balloon with a camera; and to track unregulated commercial fishing in the world’s most remote waters. After wrapping up in Ohio, FrackFinder will launch in its third state, West Virginia, early this year. Analyses of other states will likely follow.
How is this data used? FrackFinder’s crowdsourced analysis confirmed the exact location of 1,400 active wells and 7,835 wastewater ponds, allowing a team of public health researchers at Johns Hopkins to verify a list of drilling permits provided by the state. Guided by that knowledge, paired with extensive medical records, the university epidemiologists proved that asthmatics were 1.5 to 4 times more likely to have an attack near the drilling, and mothers were 40 percent more likely to give birth prematurely near the most active sites. The researchers weren’t able to pinpoint why locals sickened — maybe sleeplessness from noisy, earth-shaking vibrations, stress from dropping home values or the chemicals themselves — but SkyTruth’s data helped them prove a point.
Surprisingly, crowdsourcing the information is actually harder for SkyTruth than sifting through the images themselves. But the team continues to invest in citizen science because they know the value of the public’s involvement. “It actually puts an image of what’s going on in the world in front of citizens, so they can see for themselves,” Manthos explains. “What kinds of regions are being developed? Is it all forest, rural land or a little of the suburbs? We’re exposing people, up close and personal, to these images. That’s a formative process, and they can draw their own conclusions.”
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Hemphill, for example, says he used to support fracking as a reasonable way to bring much-needed economic growth to Northern Appalachia’s struggling towns. His support persisted, even as he analyzed nearly 5,000 images of Pennsylvania’s scarred terrain. “Wow, they’re really tearing up the earth,” he thought, almost disinterestedly. But because of his exposure to the issue through FrackFinder, he began paying more attention to relevant news stories, reading, for instance, that some homeowners could set the contaminated water in their kitchen sink on fire. Eventually, he turned against the unconventional drilling method for good.
The process influenced Hemphill in another way, too, by reaffirming his faith in technology’s possibilities beyond our social media addictions and diversionary entertainment. “People are on the internet a lot. What do you have to show for so many hours of your life?” he asks. “Especially for millennials, where does it go from here? It’s not a guaranteed thing that we all will just watch Netflix forever. The internet needs to go beyond that now.”
Hemphill imagines closing our Tetris-stacking apps, halting the Instagram scroll and doing something meaningful online. With just a few clicks, he still believes, the Earth can be improved.

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This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st-century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future-forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.

These 10 Documentaries Will Change How You See America

Documentary films are known for sparking social change. (Case in point: Who wants to eat at McDonalds after seeing Super Size Me or Food, Inc.? What parent suggests visiting SeaWorld after seeing Blackfish?) Though 2014’s nonfiction films weren’t massive box office hits, they pointed out injustice and lifted our eyes to the doers making a difference. Here are the 10 must-see documentaries that inspired us to action.

10. The Great Invisible

BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 still darkens the coastline along the Gulf of Mexico in the form of altered ecosystems and ruined lives. Named best documentary at the SXSW Film Festival, Margaret Brown’s documentary dives deep beyond the news coverage you may remember into a tale of corporate greed and lasting environmental damage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDw1budbZpQ

9. If You Build It

Two designers travel to the poorest county in rural North Carolina to teach a year-long class, culminating in building a structure for the community. In this heartwarming story, 10 students learn much more than construction skills.
http://vimeo.com/79902240

8. The Kill Team

An infantry soldier struggles with his wartime experience after alerting the military his Army platoon had killed civilians in Afghanistan. On the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ long list for best documentary, Dan Krauss’s challenging film shows how morality dissolves in the fog of war and terror of battle.

7. Starfish Throwers

Three people — a renowned cook, a preteen girl and a retired teacher — inspire an international movement to end hunger. Jesse Roesler’s film includes the story of Allan Law, the man who handed out 520,000 sandwiches during the course of a year in Minneapolis, which we featured on NationSwell.

6. Lady Valor: The Kristin Beck Story

A former Navy SEAL (formerly named Christopher, now Kristin) says that changing genders, not military service, was the biggest battle of her life. In retrospect, her SEAL experience takes on new importance as she comes to understand the true value of the words “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

5. The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz

An online pioneer who developed Creative Commons with the academic and political activist Lawrence Lessig at age 15 and co-founded Reddit at 19, Swartz crusaded for a free and open internet. Another potential Oscar candidate, the film poignantly recounts how Swartz ended his own life at age 26 after aggressive prosecutors initiated a federal case against him.

4. True Son

A 22-year-old black man recently graduated from Stanford returns to his bankrupt hometown of Stockton, Calif., to run for city council. Michael Tubbs convinces his neighbors (and the movie’s audiences) you can have “a father in jail and a mother who had you as a teenager, and still have a seat at the table.”

3. The Hand That Feeds

After years of abuse from their bosses, a group of undocumented immigrants working for a New York City bakery unionize for fair wages and better working conditions. Led by a demure sandwich maker, the employees partner with young activists to fight their case against management and the food chain’s well-connected investors.

2. Rich Hill

Three boys confront impoverishment, learning disabilities and dysfunctional families in this human portrait of growing up in small-town America. The backdrop to the teenagers’ lives is their Missouri hometown of 1,396 residents, where one in five lives in poverty and where the fireworks still glow every Fourth of July.
 

1. The Overnighters

Our top film and a favorite for an Academy Award nomination details how an oil boom draws a city-sized influx of workers to a small town in North Dakota, where they scrape by on day labor and live in their cars. With the heft, detail and narrative twists of a Steinbeck novel, Jesse Moss profiles the Lutheran pastor Jay Reinke, who welcomes these desperate men into a shelter called “The Overnighters,” to his congregation’s dismay.
 

Are there any documentaries that should have made the cut? Let us know in the comments below.

The State That’s Prioritizing Residents’ Safety Over Natural Gas Profits

New York is telling the oil and gas industry to get out.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration recently announced that hydraulic fracturing has been banned in the state, as the process “could contaminate the state’s air and water and pose inestimable public-health risks,” the New York Times reports.
“I cannot support high volume hydraulic fracturing in the great state of New York,” says Howard Zucker, the acting commissioner of health.
Fracking, which involves shooting a highly pressurized mixture of water and chemicals into shale formations to release natural gases, is currently driving a drilling boom across the country and is a big reason why your gas is so cheap.
MORE: Meet the 70-Year-Old Lone Star Who Polices Fracking Waste
New York has long been resistant to the process. The state already had a de-facto moratorium on fracking for several years, and as we reported in July, New York’s top court upheld Home Rule, which gave municipalities the right to apply its zoning laws to oil and gas wells. The latest decision is just a final blow to the state’s natural gas industry.
Mother Jones notes that New York isn’t the first state to ban fracking — that honor belongs to Vermont, which banned it in 2012 (but since it doesn’t have natural gas, the move was mostly symbolic). Because New York sits on the gas-rich Marcellus shale formation, “this is the first state ban with real significance,” Kate Sinding, a senior attorney in New York for the Natural Resources Defense Council, tells the publication.
Proponents of the process cite its potential to bolster the economy and create tens of thousands of jobs. That’s why, as Capital New York reports, Gov. Cuomo is already anticipating “a ton of lawsuits” in response to the decision.
Still, it’s a major victory for our health and the health of the planet. Actor and prominent eco-activist Mark Ruffalo (who recently wrote a Huffington Post article about the many dangers of fracking) posted an Instragram video about the decision and thanked Cuomo, Zucker and Department of Environmental Conservation commissioner Joe Martens for their work.
He also gave a shout-out to “all the beautiful, dedicated people on the anti-fracking movement who used science, their guts, their brains and their hearts to make this day a reality.”
Let’s hope this this movement catches on country-wide.

DON’T MISS: Watch How This Little Town Stood Up Against a Gas Giant

The New Scientific Discovery That Catches Polluters Red-Handed

For the first time, we can play gotcha! with the fracking industry.
Researchers have developed a new tool that can identify the chemical “fingerprints” left behind hydraulic fracturing (fracking) waste, Think Progress reports. Fracking involves shooting an absurd amount of water, chemicals and sand to extract natural gas and oil from shale formations.
We’ve mentioned that the booming but controversial drilling process has been linked to a variety of health and environmental problems — from creating millions of barrels of toxic waste a day to causing earthquakes, as well as polluting the air, our water supply and our bodies.
MORE: Meet the 70-Year-Old Lone Star Who Polices Fracking Waste
In the just-released study (published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology) scientists have traced two elements — boron and lithium — that are found in shale formations and that also show up in contaminated environments due to fracking fluids.
This development is important because fracking companies can no longer sweep spills under the rug or point fingers at other causes of pollution, meaning that they can now be held accountable for the clean-up or be forced to pay fines.
“So if there is contamination, we can tell the source,” researcher and Duke University geochemist Avner Vengosh tells the McClatchy News Service. “Once you see this kind of water in the environment, you will be able to say, ‘Yes, this is fracking.’”
Nathaniel Warner of Dartmouth College, lead author of the study, says “This new technology can be combined with other methods to identify specific instances of accidental releases to surface waters in areas of unconventional drilling. It could benefit industry as well as federal and state agencies charged with monitoring water quality and protecting the environment.”
DON’T MISS: Watch How This Little Town Stood Up Against a Gas Giant

When Veterans Need Jobs, This Industry Offers Plenty

Each year, more than 300,000 service members leave the military and seek employment in the civilian world, yet the unemployment rate remains higher for new veterans than it does for the general population. In May, the unemployment rate was 6.8 percent for post-September 11th veterans compared with 5.7 percent for everyone else.
Which begs the question: why?
Part of the problem is that companies often don’t know how skills gained in the military will translate to their business. But there’s one line of business that doesn’t have any doubt about the benefit of military skills: the oil and gas industry, which has boomed in recent years due to oil-shale fracking.
Several programs across the country are assisting veterans in the transition from active duty to employment with oil and gas companies. According to Madasyn Czebiniak of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, when 30-year-old Army veteran John MacZura recently graduated from Penn State with a degree in petroleum engineering, he had a half dozen job offers and now works as a completions engineer for Cabot Oil and Gas.
The G.I. Bill assisted MacZura with his tuition, and he started at a high-level position in the industry. But for those who can’t hack an engineering degree, there are plenty of other jobs for vets. “I had friends who started out as welders and roustabouts, worked their way up, and after they got trained they were placed into every day field jobs,” MacZura tells Czebiniak.
Programs helping veterans learn skills for oil and gas industry jobs include Austin-based Retrain America, which aims to help blue-collar workers and veterans train for high-paying jobs and ShaleNET, which launched in 2010 when the oil and gas industry needed more skilled workers than it could get.
Dave Pistner, who directs energy initiatives at the Pennsylvania College of Technology in Williamsport (a school that offers a training program for veterans seeking to enter the oil and gas industry), says, “The traits that the military imparts on the men and women — loyalty, courage, safety, commitment, leadership, teamwork — are all valued by employers in this industry. It’s a natural fit for our troops leaving active service.”
MORE: When America’s Heroes Can’t Find Employment, This Program Trains Them to Be Wilderness Firefighters
 
 

What Happens When a 13-Year-Old Girl Takes on an Oil Company?

Ever wonder what’s so bad about fracking?
The process — which is a nickname for hydraulic fracturing — involves a highly pressurized mix of water, chemicals and sand to release gas and oil from rock formations.
Fracking, which has caused drilling to spike across the country, is also accused of causing a variety of health and environmental problems, from creating millions of barrels of toxic waste a day to causing earthquakes, as well as polluting the air and our bodies.
Thirteen-year-old Nalleli Cobo from South Los Angeles is one of the many faces of fracking. Since 2010, she and her family have been living across the street from an AllenCo Energy Inc. facility in University Park, an urban oil-drilling site.
“The AllenCo oil site has gotten me sick,” she says in the slideshow below. “I have heart problems, I get nosebleeds frequently, I get headaches and I have stomach pain.” Her mother and grandmother (as well as others in the community) weren’t asthmatic until three years ago, around the same time the site opened. As Nalleli’s mother, Monic Uriate tells ABC7 last September, the fumes from the site were so noxious that she and her neighbors couldn’t even walk outside or open their windows.
MORE: Meet the 70-Year-Old Lone Star Who Polices Fracking Waste
The family cannot simply move away from their home: “Unfortunately this community, we don’t have the economic position to move to another place so easy,” her mother says. The Los Angeles Times writes that their neighborhood, which is close to the University of Southern California, is home to low-income housing, day-care centers and schools.
That’s why Nalleli and her family joined a community effort called People Not Pozos (People Not Oil Wells) to permanently shut down the wells. Brave Nalleli, at the tender age of 12, was passing out flyers, speaking at press conferences and urging local leaders to close the site.
After 260 official complaints to air quality officials from residents over four years, a lawsuit was filed against the facility by the Los Angeles city attorney. An inspection from the EPA found that AllenCo did not meet recognized industry standards and practices of the Clean Air Act to prevent accidental air releases of hazardous substances, resulting in a $99,000 fine and a temporary shutdown of the University Park facility last November.  The company agreed to spend about $700,000 to make improvements.
With any luck, the shutdown will last much longer, and Nalleli and her neighbors can continue breathing air that has noticeably improved since the temporary closure of the oil fields. The Natural Resources Defense Council notes that in February, Los Angeles became the biggest city in the country to approve a moratorium on fracking, and city leaders will soon draft an ordinance zoning fracking and other harmful extraction methods out of city limits.
In the second video below, Nalleli asks the Pope to shut down the wells, which are owned by the Catholic archdiocese of Los Angles. (The English version starts at the 2-minute mark.)

DON’T MISS: This Drilling Practice Is Controversial. But Now, New York Towns Can Say “Get the Frack Out”

Meet the 70-Year-Old Lone Star Who Polices Fracking Waste

As the oil and natural gas industries continue to boom in Texas, someone needs to fight on the side of the environment — especially when these industries (intentionally or not) cause big, messy spills.
The unlikely green crusader in resource-rich Jim Wells county? Seventy-year-old deputy sheriff Hector Zertuche, who’s patroling against the illegal dumping of fracking waste, Inside Climate News reports.
We’ve already mentioned that fracking, which has caused drilling to spike across the country, is a health and environmental nightmare. This controversial process uses a highly pressurized mix of water, chemicals and sand to release gas and oil from rock formations — but in the process, it also creates millions of barrels of toxic waste a day. Even scarier, there’s really no good way of getting rid of this sludge: the corrosive and chemically-laden byproduct, if disposed of “correctly,” can either go into underground wells, treatment plants or other means. Unfortunately, much too often, the waste water gets spilled onto the open road.
MORE: Watch How This Little Town Stood Up Against a Gas Giant
And that’s where Zertuche comes in.
As Inside Climate News puts it, because Texas’ environmental agencies aren’t very effective at policing spills, it falls on Zertuche’s lone shoulders to make sure these offenders don’t get away with it.
This year alone, the septuagenarian has reportedly taken about a dozen violators to court for reasons such as transporting waste without a permit, illegal dumping on the roads or carrying waste in an unmarked truck. Drivers are slapped with a $1,000 fine and 10 days in jail per violation. In 2013, he allegedly cited up to 10 trucks per day for a variety of violations.
Pretty incredible for someone who’s well past retirement age. But as he told the publication, it’s all in a day’s work.
“I want to make a difference for the people who live here,” Zertuche said. “If I can make this a better place for people to live, then I have done my job.”
DON’T MISS: North Dakota on Fire: One Man’s Quest to Turn Wasted Gas Into Power

This Drilling Practice Is Controversial. But Now, New York Towns Can Say “Get the Frack Out”

Just a few months ago, we detailed the years-long David and Goliath battle between the small town of Dryden, New York, and Norse Corp., a natural gas company that wanted to frack the gas-rich land underneath the community’s feet.
Fracking, a controversial process that’s booming across America, has a whole range of negative health and environmental impacts.
Citing environmental concerns, Dryden’s officials unanimously banned the fracking within their borders in 2011, despite the fact that Norse had a lease to drill. Naturally, the gas company took Dryden to court (twice!).
But now, in another blow to the gas giant, New York’s top court has upheld Home Rule — a municipality’s legal right to apply its zoning laws to oil and gas wells. Essentially, New York towns and cities have the right to ban fracking.
MORE: How This Little Town Stood Up Against a Gas Giant
In the 5-2 decision, the Court of Appeals upheld the opinion of a lower state court. Judge Victoria Graffeo wrote that the two towns, Dryden and Middlefield (which was also named in the suit), “studied the issue and acted within their home rule powers in determining that gas drilling would permanently alter and adversely affect the deliberately cultivated, small-town character of their communities.”
New York has had a state-wide fracking moratorium since 2008 which oil and gas companies are hoping that Gov. Cuomo will one day end. Dryden was the first town to prohibit it all together, and remarkably, more than 170 other communities in New York followed its lead with similar bans. With this ruling, these towns can stay frack-free even if Cuomo lifts the state moratorium.
“It’s really, really great for the local municipalities who need to defend themselves against these big national and international corporate interests,” New Paltz, New York, supervisor Susan Zimet told the Daily Freeman. (New Paltz banned fracking in November 2012.) “Home rule is about the only power our small communities have in fighting these battles.”
DON’T MISS: North Dakota on Fire: One Man’s Quest to Turn Wasted Gas Into Power
Deborah Goldberg, an Earthjustice lawyer who argued on behalf of Dryden told the Voice that the decision will have a “huge impact here in New York state and may very well influence similar efforts around the country.”
The anti-fracking movement has spread across state lines, including communities in California, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Texas and Ohio. Now if only the whole country could get on board.
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Is Crowdfunding the New Way to Pay for Important Scientific Studies?

Even if you don’t know much about fracking (the process through which oil and gas companies pump water, sand, and chemicals into the ground to release oil or natural gas), you probably know that, politically-speaking, it’s a controversial topic.
Many people who live close to fracking operations fear that the process or its byproducts could harm them or the environment. But because of its polarizing nature, it’s difficult to land funding for non-biased scientific research on fracking.
Studies funded by industry groups have (of course) found no potential harm to humans from the practice. Citizens of several Colorado towns are skeptical, however, and have passed bans on fracking within their communities’ borders that may or may not hold up in court.
Nelson Harvey writes for High Country News that “the government’s own research on fracking is coming under fire from both sides of the political spectrum,” with the EPA recently responding to criticism by backing away from results of a 2011 study that found fracking to be the cause of the pollution of an aquifer in Wyoming. The state of Wyoming will continue the study, but it will now be funded by EnCana, the oil company responsible for fracking in the area.
Outside of industry-sponsored research, there’s little funding available to study fracking as federal grants for such studies have been slashed. So this year, at least four scientists have turned to crowdfunding to finance their research.
Dr. Susan Nagel of the University of Missouri is currently seeking to raise $25,000 through Experiment.com for her study: “Does fracking contaminate water with hormone disrupting chemicals?” She’s already gained $19,000 in backing, so apparently many people have the same question.
Harvey notes that, so far this year, University of Washington researchers successfully raised $12,000 through Experiment.com to study fracking’s effects on air pollution in Utah and scientists from Juniata College collected $10,000 through crowdfunding to research fracking’s impacts on streams in Pennsylvania. However, one fracking study proposed by a University of Colorado biologist failed to garner the necessary backers.
When a combination of budget cuts and political pressure makes it hard to study a certain topic, perhaps seeking donations from the questioning public is the best way to find answers to some of science’s most pressing questions.
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How North Dakota Made Its Incredible Economic Comeback

States scrambling to lower unemployment and boost their economies can count on a new role model: North Dakota, which is recovering from the recent financial collapse better than the rest of its peers, according to the Washington Post.
According to writer Reid Wilson, who’s been chronicling the country’s best states in an ongoing series, North Dakota has a lot to be proud of: A rise in oil production has helped the state’s unemployment rate drop from 4.1 percent to 2.6 percent since 2009, while the median income increased 4 percent and median home price increased a whopping 16 percent. Elsewhere, booming oil production has also provided a fiscal boost to states like Wyoming, Texas and West Virginia.
In naming North Dakota the winner in economic recovery, Wilson used three factors: The drop in a state’s unemployment rate between 2009 and this April; the difference in median income in 2009 and in 2012; and the difference in median home prices before and after the recession, which Wilson says he estimated using data from the U.S. Census Bureau and Trulia.com (a real estate website).
As Wilson writes: “Other states deserve credit for making a comeback: The unemployment rates in South Carolina, Vermont and Utah have fallen by more than half since the worst of the recession…But no state has pumped up more in all three categories than North Dakota.”
MORE: North Dakota on Fire—One Man’s Quest to Turn Wasted Gas Into Power