Fractured knowledge: Mapping the gaps in public and private water monitoring efforts in areas affected by shale gas development

Abstract

Spatial gaps in environmental monitoring have important consequences for public policy and regulation of new industrial developments. In the case of Marcellus Shale gas extraction, a water-intensive new form of energy production that is taking place in the state of Pennsylvania (USA), the perception of large gaps in government water monitoring efforts have motivated numerous civil society organizations (CSOs) to initiate their own monitoring programs. Using geospatial mapping, this study reveals that nearly half of the watersheds in the region lack government water monitoring, and CSOs are the sole source of continuous or frequent monitoring data in 22% of the watersheds. While many watersheds remain unmonitored, the gaps do not map on to demographic characteristics typically associated with environmental injustice. This study probes both the reasons for and the implications of the gaps in watershed monitoring, drawing conclusions about the promise and limitations of citizen science.

Strategic ignorance and politics of time: how expert knowledge framed shale gas policies

“…Another stream of research has underlined the role of citizen knowledge to fill the gap of undone sciences (Hess, 2016;Frickel et al, 2009). This is particularly true with shale gas development that generated, for example, the production of alternative assessments about monitoring watersheds (Kinchy, 2015;. This citizen science leading in some cases to what Widener (2018) called a civic boomerang effect that is the expansion of initial critics to the whole industry of hydrocarbons.…”

<b>Engaging the Underground: An STS Field in Formation</b>

“…The rapid expansion of hydraulic fracturing activity close to US communities in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Colorado prompted scholars to track the environmental and social risks and harms, along with forms of community and political organization to mitigate them (Kroepsch 2016;Perry 2012;Espig and de Rijke 2016;Willow et al 2014;Eaton and Kinchy 2016;Partridge et al 2017;Smith 2017a, 2017b). Citizen science and other forms of public engagement 7 Other recent STS contributions to making sense of the underground have addressed topics ranging from the interpretation of remote data sources in petroleum reservoir geology to decision making about geothermal energy to conspiracy stories about the definition of geological boundaries around protected sites, among other subjects with public relevance (Almklov 2008;Almklov and Hepsø 2011;Raman 2013;Gilbert 2015;Rahder 2015;Barandiaran 2015;Gross 2015;Pijpers 2016;Bleicher and Gross 2016;Sareen 2016;Oskarsson 2017). in science have been key features of these controversies, as activists and concerned communities aim to fill the gaps in "undone science" (Kinchy 2017;Kinchy, Parks, and Jalbert 2016;Malone et al 2015;Jalbert and Kinchy 2016;Wylie et al 2016;Vera 2016;Zilliox and Smith 2018).…”

Post‐Truth and the Production of Ignorance

“…For all our worries about the spread of scientific skepticism, a number of social movements contest "undone science"-an oppressive form of ignorance created when the (typically) privileged groups who produce knowledge reproduce their cultural assumptions and material interests (Frickel et al 2010;Hess 2009). Case studies have investigated a wide range of social movements that identify and mobilize against undone science, including movements focused on, for example, uncovering the health effects of environmental racism (Brown et al 2004), identifying geographic gaps in water quality monitoring (Kinchy, Parks, and Jalbert 2016), and cataloging consumers' concerns about the safety of drugs (Barker 2019;Langlitz 2009). Some of these movements are even powerful enough to resist explicit forms of suppression.…”