Crazy Mother Frackers

My grandparents' house is situated on a sandy lump of acreage on the bottom of an ancient glacial lake in Central Wisconsin.  That sounds pretty interesting, right?  Well, it is.  Not too far down the road is Mill Bluff State Park with towering rock formations that rise 150 feet straight up from the earth with shear rock faces on all sides.  These formations used to be islands when the lake existed there some 15,000 years ago.

Mill Bluff State Park | Camp Douglas, WI

Being the bottom of an ancient lake means that the soil all around this region is very sandy and silty.  This is Perfect for growing cranberries which the people of this region are very proud of.  They are the number one cranberry growers in the world.  But, it is this ancient sand that has caught the attention of industry; the petroleum industry to be more precise.

Apparently, this white sand that is all over central Wisconsin is very valuable to the oil and gas industry because it is the perfect size and mass for use in "Fracking".  Fracking is a destructive process used to retrieve oil and gas from hard to reach layers within the earth's crust.  Sand and chemicals are pumped into the ground causing it to fracture thereby releasing the oil and natural gas sequestered within.  This is a now wildly popular method for obtaining oil in the US since most of the traditional oil wells are being emptied of their ancient solar energy.

What is causing my concern is a phone conversation that took place between me an my mother the other day.  She was extremely excited by something she overheard in town.  She had noticed these mounds of white sand appearing all around her rural landscape but suspected that the cranberry marshes were just expanding down closer to her.  This was not to be true, however.  She found out that the white sand was being mined all around her for the oil industry and that there were stories circulating the region that people were selling their modest few acres for millions of dollars.

Knowing nothing about fracking or why the sand was so valuable, my mother was over taken with the idea that her elderly parents would sell their 26 acres to some oil executives for millions of dollars and they would be on their way to living the high life.  She had become so invested with the idea of being rich that she lost sight of what the ramifications of that would mean.

After some quick Internet research, it became quite apparent to me that this white sand mining is the last thing anyone back home in Camp Douglas, WI needs to have in their backyard.  The mining causes large amounts of silica dust to be released into the surrounding areas.  People living next to some of these retrieval operations complain of the dust on everything in their homes.  Silica has been proven to cause cancer.  The dusted properties have become impossible to sell because no one wants to buy them.  The mining also can lead to contamination of the water table.  Abandoned train tracks behind my grandparents house are being repaired and prepared to carry cars of white sand out of Wisconsin to fracking operations throughout the nation.  This will mean that noisy trains will now be carrying cargo directly behind their home at all manner of the day and night.  There goes their quite country living.

Grandparent's Front Yard | Wisconsin

I am deeply troubled by these developments.  Our corner of the world had seemed "untouched" by industrial destruction.  Bright stadium style lights can now be seen at night time from my grandparents porch.  The lights are from a nearby white sand mining operation that is running 24 hours a day and seven days a week.   A large segment of my family lives in a tight knit rural community that is quickly being enveloped by white sand mining.  They are being stuck in the "quick sand" of a new unregulated industry.  I fear that they will have to sell and leave their way of life and the community that they have lived in for several generations because the area will become unlivable.  It is true that people have been offered twice the worth of their properties by the mining companies but that is little reimbursement for having to uproot your entire heritage and split your family apart.

My mother and her crazy thoughts of becoming rich had no idea of the evil fracking business that was about to swallow up her community.  Wisconsinites must unite and tell the petroleum giants to get out of town.  We are all facing hard financial times, except for them, and the pressure to sell and make a buck is high but look at what would be lost.  Our whole lives would be uprooted and sheared away like the rock faces of the nearby bluffs.

It is time to send a message: NOT IN MY BACKYARD! Not here, not anywhere.  Stop fracking!  Find alternative sources of energy and stop slashing the surface of the earth, our home, to make a quick dollar.

Doped Up and Mapped Out

This evening NPR aired a program regarding environmental behavior research that involved drug addicts and smart phones in Baltimore, MD.  The research project distributed smart phones to drug addicted research subjects that had an app developed to track their behaviors in relationship to their physical location.

The smart phone app had simple statements that were to be responded to by the subjects like:
1. I felt a craving to use but didn't.
2. I felt a craving to use and I did.

The smart phone recorded their position using GPS technology.  The data that was retrieved by the researchers would show if people felt urges to use at certain locations in Baltimore and which places they decided to use.  Or, they used thirty minutes after leaving a particular spot.  A pattern soon emerged showing locations that were trigger points for people to have cravings or use issues.  The researchers could then go and analyze the physical characteristics of the trigger nodes and look for clues as to what in the environment may initiate drug use cravings, such as caps from used drug vials.

The hope of the researchers is to develop software that can help people avoid trigger points in their environment while they are trying to get over their addictions.  The software may even become reassuring by letting people know that they will get over their craving in 20 mins and to just hang in there a little longer.

I thought this was very fascinating and wondered how it could be used to track people's sustainability habits and what kinds of information could be revealed.