It's Not Easy Being Green

Last night, I watched a PBS show that highlited a documentary called "GasLand".

Here's a 15-second clip from the documentary:



Yeah, that's an actual person's kitchen sink.

The documentary follows the filmmaker as he learns about the potential environmental impacts of "fracking", which is a widely-used natural gas mining process. In this process, natural gas is released by injecting a high-pressure mixture of water, chemicals and sand into ground. The chemicals in this mixture are usually toxic, yet the process of fracking is exempt from EPA regulation under the Safe Water Drinking Act.

You can watch the entire NOW on PBS interview that I watched here.

Now that was pretty shocking, but let's take a step back for a second. I realize that about half of the population has a built in distrust towards documentaries like these, and for good reason. After all, documentaries are usually produced as propaganda to push some kind of message onto uniformed individuals. Perhaps this is the case for GasLand also... but I doubt it.

I worked in the environmental consulting industry for four years before going back to grad school. During this time, I visited at many sites that had underground storage tanks contining fuel, dry cleaning chemicals or other hazardous materials. In my experience, the advent of more strict regulations during the later part of the 20th century has caused industries to do better job of keeping their chemicals out of the soil and groundwater than in the past. But better fuel and chemical storage practices today cannot remove the thousands and thousands of gallons of jet fuel that already exist beneath numerous military bases across the country.

It seems like we, as humans, are trying to make quick fixes to real issues without addressing the source of the problem. Centuries of groundwater contamination, air pollution, solid waste accumulation, and deforestation are caused by our desire for convenience, selfishness, laziness and greed. I mean, the first guy who dumped gallons of black industrial sludge into a pond probably had an inkling that it might have some negative effects, but he did it anyways.

I'm sure the same is true for this "fracking" process. Somehow, blasting a mixture of water, sand and industrial chemicals into the ground just seems like a bad idea.

So maybe natural gas burns slightly cleaner than gas and diesel... maybe drilling natural gas in the US will reduce our dependence on foreign oil... maybe a natural gas mining boom will provide new jobs during slow economic times... maybe. But these all seem like temporary benefits that may have a permanent side-effect to our already shrinking drinking water supply.

Now, am I suggesting that we all plug into an Avatar and worship a great big tree? Not exactly, but the film does seem to make a lot more sense to me now....

Anyways, it's not easy being green, but it will make it a lot more difficult for humanity in the future if we continue with our toxic ways.

Belief is a powerful thing

Recently, I stumbled across an article with this little pie chart:



This is from a poll of Texans and you can read the writeup here. To me, these charts are a wonderful explanation of why discussions about science and faith can become quite heated. Usually, these arguments begin because the people are not focused on who has the "correct" answer. Instead, they are arguing over whose beliefs are "correct".

So let's examine this thing we call "belief" and where it comes from.

As humans, we absorb knowledge, beliefs and ideals from all kinds of information sources, but certain influences carry more weight than others. So how do we decide whether or not to believe new information when it is presented?

I have a one-word answer to that question: Trust.

Advertisers will tell you that repetition forms beliefs, and while that may be true to a degree, our core beliefs are born from trust. If you trust a source, you will be more likely to accept it and incorporate it into your beliefs. If you question the source, you will be more likely to look to other sources for confirmation. Essentially, whether or not you believe your parents, your religious leaders, your professors, Wikipedia, CNN, NBC, FOX, Obama, Bush, OJ Simpson, Bono from U2, or even yourself is all based on who you trust. It makes little difference if the source is "correct".

This is why humans find it so difficult to change their core beliefs. Changing your core beliefs requires you to acknowledge that previously trusted sources may have been incorrect. Then, you must do something that seems extremely unnatural... you must remove any previous feelings of trust and examine the information on your own, free of outside influences. Not easy to do.

To prove my point, let's do a little exercise:

If you know me, then you know that I'm a graduate student studying earthquakes. So if I was to write a blog telling you that large earthquakes are becoming more and more frequent, you would probably believe me and not question the source, right?

This is because (1) you trust me and (2) a theory about increasing earthquake activity would be supported by what you heard about earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, right?

Well, the truth is that earthquakes are not becoming more and more frequent. If you trust the USGS, you can read this FAQ, which explains why earthquake activity is not increasing and what causes this common misconception.

If you don't trust the USGS, I just spent 10 minutes downloading data and plotting it in Excel:



Regardless of who you believe, I hope I've made the point that belief does not necessarily equal truth.

This blog was kind of a preface, and I hope it will prepare you to be challenged in future posts. As I move forward, I hope you will be able to look beyond your beliefs and seek the truth. But don't believe something is true just because you read it on the Internet. Believe it because you have examined it on your own and accepted its truth free of outside influence.