More to the point, I am struck by the relative lack of engagement to these ideas by a vast majority of middle-class workers in developed western economies – particularly in knowledge economies (or what Marx would consider intellectual labor) – as these populations construct individual realities that are somehow abstracted from the very real problems of their labor being driven by the production of commodities stripped of their connection to personal contribution, and thus a sense of personal fulfillment (or what we commonly call the ‘happiness factor’). The question then is, how far removed are workers of the technoscientific class from the circumstances described by Marx in the devaluation of social labor due to the introduction and later dominance of manufacturing / industrial economies?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently updated the projections for what our economy will look like come 2018. To begin, let us reflect upon the following prediction from the BLM’s Overview of the 2008-18 Projections:

“Employment in professional, scientific, and technical services is projected to grow by 34 percent, adding about 2.7 million new jobs by 2018. Employment in computer systems design and related services is expected to increase by 45 percent, accounting for nearly one-fourth of all new jobs in this industry sector. Employment growth will be driven by growing demand for the design and integration of sophisticated networks and Internet and intranet sites. Employment in management, scientific, and technical consulting services is anticipated to expand at a staggering 83 percent, making up about 31 percent of job growth in this sector. Demand for these services will be spurred by businesses’ continued need for advice on planning and logistics, the implementation of new technologies, and compliance with workplace safety, environmental, and employment regulations.”

In visual terms, this shift in the economic climate might look like this:

If we consider for a moment the basis upon which Marx describes how human value in work is diminished – through the introduction of symbolic associations (like monetary value), as opposed to direct relational value (exchange of services and goods) – what constitutes the value of labor is established by the degree to which labor can be inserted and exploited in the production of excess commodities abstract from the labor required to produce them; for it is the excess of production that gets extracted from the individual usefulness of things. Yet, as Marx states in Das Capital, “nothing can have value without being an object of utility.” What then becomes the relative value of knowledge-economy labor, how is this value established, and by whom? It has been said that corporations operate much like nation-states described by Marx. And the reality of our global economy is one dominated by Neoliberalist ideologies centered on corporate models. As opposed to the separation of labor generating out of geographic affiliation or skill-oriented task, combined to create a “productive force” whereby the collective of workers becomes unified under the imposed direction of the ruling class – the Market-based corporation imposes similar constraints but in the creation of abstract borders and collectives of labor to create competitive exchanges with other corporate entities (or national entities reconstituted in corporate form).

Where this becomes most interesting for the sake of studying technoscientific systems is how advances in industrial processes reify these internal relationships of stratification. Marx believed, “the motion of the whole system does not proceed from the workman, but from the machinery, a change of persons can take place at any time without an interruption of the work.” As we continue to create sociolcultural environments friendly to the division of labor in knowledge-economies – namely the early indoctrination of skills through technical-oriented institutionalized education designed to insert worker into predetermined tasks (engineering schools for example) – the ability to produce without interruption becomes ubiquitous. This is evident in “job creation” political rhetoric as a symbolic measure of economic (and personal?) worth without signifiers to what kinds of jobs are created (or the extent to which these create individual sense of fulfillment). The implied connection here is that satisfaction of both intellectual laborers and those who control the use-value of technology are motivated solely by the increased commodity value that technology brings forth. Despite the fact that of these two, the former, finds itself under the thumb of the destabilizing consequences of new technoscientific arrangements. As Marx states in the Capitalist Manifesto, “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.”

And yet, these structures are maintained, and even supported by those who populate the current proletariat body in contemporary knowledge economies (this is not a new orientation – Marx also states that while the intellectual class may have greater access to resources and are perceived to be not classified as material laborers, they nevertheless remain external members to the bourgeoisie). Why is this so? First, the depths and breadth of class division are no longer visible. Individual members of economy have lost their ability to conceptualize their place in stratified society. Second, social classes and their associated ideologies are not easily identifiable in the first place. In fact, Marx makes the point that revolutions unseating one ruling ideology for another ultimately have characteristics of both as their end result. Following this, a democratic revolution remains monarchic, and monarchies have aspects of feudalism, etc. As such, the modern proletariat perceive themselves as participants in an ill-conceived democratic system. They sympathize with their own discontent but also with content of those who control their political and economic systems. Again from the Manifesto, the lower middle class, “fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class… If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.” The same might be said of the average wage-labor corporate employed worker, relegated to the daily cubicle office life…”Like them or not, there is simply no better way to provide your office workers with the environment they need to be effective in the workplace than well designed, affordable cubicles.”

Regarding the charge of socialism then: to rethink private property, to reinstate human considerations into the use-value of commodities, to create collective arrangements of exchange that better equate different laboring traditions. Where can these be applied in a revolution against the modern socioeconomic condition? Some evidence can be seen in the rise of rhetoric and sentiments around “the commons” instigated by new champions against intellectual property, advocates of participatory governance, and the development of the open-source economy (an example being Raymond’s theories on the Bazaar economy). Here, the value of labor becomes associated with one’s contributions to a larger project, but through which individual gain becomes associated with those direct contributions – rather than through the translation of one’s labor through a symbolic third association; in other words, the reemergence of an intellectual barter system.  I think it is no small coincidence that each of these efforts to rearrange economic and political systems is strongly opposed by the contemporary equivalent of the bourgeoisie – and the portion of the labor class most concerned with being associated as proletariat (most notably supporters of the Tea Party). For if such a revolution deprives, as Marx claims, “no man of the power to appropriate the products of society,” but instead, “of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriations,” corporation in a market-economy quickly find themselves without their most valuable asset necessary for survival – a mass body of use-value-less human assets.

[Note: Images garnered from google image search]

Baseline Water Sampling
Over the weekend of August 27th-29th (also the arrival of Hurricane Irene – more on this in a moment) I visited Bradford County, PA, to participate in a local monthly water quality monitoring exercise. This was followed by my attending their most recent group meeting to discuss quality control and view their initial test results compared to known but limited EPA, DEC, and other data sets. This particular group, organized by the Community Science Institute, focuses on establishing water quality baselines in order to anticipate potential degradation of watersheds due to gas extraction and other industrial factors. What makes this kind of work important is the relative absence of distributed water monitoring activities in rural areas. The Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC) for example maintains only two remote water quality stations in the same area – each running a limited subset of possible tests. Here are a few images from this trip…

Treating Hydraulic Fracking Wastewater
Also this past week I traveled to a natural gas well site in Chenango County, NY, for an introduction to a research project conducted by Texas A&M’s Marcellus Shale Project (part of a collaboration with Environmental Friendly Exploration and Production). The gist of which is to use membrane filtration technologies to extract chemical, mineral, and other contaminants in order to produce waste water suitable for processing by municipal water treatment facilities. Or, it has been suggested, to become useful byproducts in other industrial processes. My take? While it shows potential and could easily be used as required practice by regulatory groups, the existence of filtration processes could also have the unintended effect of reinterpreting natural gas drilling as “safe”. This on basis of highlighting the reduction of post-process impacts alone, whereas the methods used to drill these wells remain less scrutinized (it is worth noting that only a portion of the fluids injected during fracking are recovered – leaving one to wonder to what extent does filtration solve water contamination that remains in the ground). Nevertheless, the work underway has merit in a secondary way – the availability of mobile filtration systems could be useful for disaster relief (again, see Hurrican Irene below) and emergency first responders.

Hurricane Irene
The two trips above bookend Hurricane Irene which, as many of you know, had severe consequences for much of the east coast. Hit particularly hard were communities along rivers and streams in upstate New York, Berkshire county Massachusetts, and much of southern Vermont. The capital region was not excluded from dire circumstances as we discovered on our way home from Bradford County the morning of Monday Aug. 29th. Route 88 was altogether closed (when was the last time you drove down a highway and encountered a “road closed” sign directly in front of you?) creating a state of near-panic on the part of travelers trying to get to various points around the Northeast. In the end, a trip that should have taken 3 hours amounted to over 12 as we had to travel a network of alternate country roads up to the base of the Adirondacks and back down to Troy on the other side of areas plagued with closed bridges and breaching dams. Here are a few images as well as a map of our eventual route…

ArcGIS layers

The proposed project uses large-scale spatial mapping as well as key informant interviews and focused case studies to examine the ‘social production of knowledge and ignorance’ about the impacts of unconventional gas drilling on surface water in the areas of New York and Pennsylvania that are affected by Marcellus Shale natural gas development.

The broad question is: what are the social forces that structure what is known and not known about the impacts of unconventional gas drilling on fresh water resources?  More specifically, the proposed research will answer the following questions:

1. Where are public agencies investing in watershed monitoring, and why are these public efforts unevenly distributed across the Marcellus Shale region?
2. To what extent does civil society research (volunteer or activist water quality monitoring) fill knowledge gaps about the impacts of gas drilling on water quality, and why are these civil society efforts unevenly distributed across the Marcellus Shale region?
3. How and to what extent do academic scientists aid in filling knowledge gaps about the impacts of gas drilling on water quality?

For more information on the Marcellus Shale natural gas drilling issue see below:

“Gasland” – a film by Josh Fox
This is a wonderful documentary / commentary piece on fracking. PBS summary: Sundance award-winning documentary on the surprising consequences of natural gas drilling. Fox’s film—inspired when the gas company came to his hometown—alleges chronic illness, animal-killing toxic waste, disastrous explosions, and regulatory missteps.”

This American Life podcast: “Game Changer”
Aired: July 8, 2011

“Host Ira Glass tells the stories of two professors, each making a calculation that no one had made before. One gets acclaim. One ends up out of a job. The first, Terry Engelder, a geologist at Penn State, was estimating the amount of natural gas that’s recoverable from the Marcellus shale, a giant rock formation that’s under Pennsylvania and several other Eastern states. The second, Conrad “Dan” Volz, at the University of Pittsburgh, estimated how much toxic crap—chemicals and pollution from gas exploration—might be getting into water supplies.”

Photo by Jacques del Conte

NYTimes articles from recent months:

Drilling Down: Articles in the Drilling Down series from The New York Times examine the risks of natural-gas drilling and efforts to regulate this rapidly growing industry

U.S. Department of Energy Prepares to Take the Floor in the Nation’s ‘Fracking’ Debate
Published: July 26, 2011

Insiders Sound an Alarm Amid a Natural Gas Rush
Published: June 25, 2011

Toxic Contamination From Natural Gas Wells and Regulation Lax as Gas Wells’ Tainted Water Hits Rivers
Published: February 26, 2011

The best way I can summarize the complexities of the problem is to quote some excerpts from my recent paper on Culturally Situated Sensing. Also see the gallery of images below which are from both my trip to NM in early June and my trip to AZ in late June of 2011 documenting the ubiquitous presence of the energy extraction industry on the reservation. As I hear more about how this kind of activity is coming to the doorstep of residents in PA and NY with the recent discovery of natural gas in the Marcellus Shale bed, I have an uneasy feeling that we should pay closer attention to the Navajo experience…

Environmental Vulnerability on the Navajo Nation
Archaeological evidence suggests that the Navajo people (Diné) have lived in their current location for at least 1,000 years. They are the second largest Native American tribe of North America, with an estimated population of 300,000 people identifying as Diné. According to the 2000 US census 180,462 Navajo still live on the reservation spanning 27,000 square miles across 3 states — the remaining in bordering towns or nearby cities [Navajo Nation 2000]. The Navajo Nation is represented by an governing body consisting of many of the functions one would expect of neighboring states — an independent Navajo EPA, police force, judicial system, as well as elected officials at local, regional, and national levels. Meanwhile, the Navajo language is still spoken throughout the region and many of their traditional practices remain integral to daily life such as sheep herding, rug weaving, and crafts.

However, despite geographic solidarity as compared to other Native American tribes, the Navajo are threatened by a litany of environmental hazards put in motion by decades of unmonitored energy and mineral extraction industries. Twenty-five Native American territories throughout the United States contain extractable coal deposits accounting for a potential 30% of all national reserves, with Navajo Nation mining facilities ranking as some of the largest [Office of Technology Assessment 2002]. The density of natural resource extraction is astounding in some areas. Paradox Basin, a region of about 33,000 square miles overlapping the Navajo Nation in southeast Utah, is home to some 6,000 oil and gas wells according to the Dine Environmental Institute.

Nearly a century of uranium extraction maintains a legacy of 520 mines on the Navajo Nation according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency — although environmental justice group Forgotten People claims this number is closer to 1,300. Most uranium mines remain unmanaged in a state of abandonment and many in close proximity to nearby villages [Diep 2010]. Navajo uranium extraction is now prohibited under the Diné Natural Resources Protection Act of 2005. But with nearly 37% of all uranium in the US estimated to exist on or abutting Native lands, increasing demand by the nuclear energy industry has pushed growing interest in reconsidering future mining [Smith 2007].

In addition to poorly managed resource extraction, the prevalence of coal on the Navajo Nation supports a series of power generating stations including three of the largest in the Southwest — Four Corners, San Juan, and Navajo Generating Station — for a combined output of more than 6,000 megawatts supplied to half a million people in nearby cities. Consuming over 100,000 tons of coal per day and a combined water use in excess of 16 billion gallons annually, these three sites rank as some of the greatest sources of air pollution in the country. A 2004 comparison showed Four Corners Station ranked as the single highest emitter of NOx of any power facility in the United States, and the 24th highest for carbon dioxide. Meanwhile Navajo Station ranked 11th in NOx in the US and 5th for carbon dioxide emissions [Milford et.al. 2005].

Public Health and Issues of Dependency
The severity of environmental impacts on the health of the Navajo people can hardly be overstated. Records collected by The New Mexico State Tumor Registry dating back to the 1970s shows a 17-fold increase in childhood reproductive cancers on the New Mexico portion of the Navajo Reservation, when compared to the U.S. average [Williams 2008]. A 1998 health survey of 896 households bordering oil fields on the Paradox Basin in Aneth, Utah (population 2,236) found complaints of upper respiratory distresses, dermatological conditions, musculoskeletal inflammations and psychological concerns far exceeded US averages.

In 2007 a study by Northern Arizona University on uranium endocrine disruptors linked decades of mining to growing contamination levels in water supplies across the Navajo Nation [Raymond-Whish, et. al. 2007]. Additional studies suggest some 40% of unregulated Navajo water sources exceed drinking standards for arsenic and 11% exceed maximum allowed uranium levels [Walker and Carroll 2011]. Meanwhile, the Navajo EPA estimates that up to 30% of its population draws water from unregulated sources such as private wells, nearby springs, and livestock collection tanks [US EPA 2011].

Under social pressures including 42% unemployment and 42% of families below the poverty line, the Navajo people remain economically dependent on extraction and energy industries. More than half of the Nation’s annual General Fund comes from oil, coal, gas, and heavy metal mining royalties: $71.34 million out of $124 million as of 2005 [Liu 2010]. Native Americans account for 83% of employees in mining operations across the Navajo Nation and 80% of employees across the three mentioned power plants.

Furthermore, conflicting opinions complicate potential environmental justice efforts as anti-economic. In 2009, for example, then President Joe Shirley Jr. ejected the Sierra Club and other environmental action groups from the Navajo reservation over concerns that their agendas damage local economies and revoke Navajo authority, “our greatest opposition comes from environmentalists [who] don’t know about Navajos, sovereignty or self-determination. They just want any use of coal stopped. However, coal is the Navajo Nation’s most plentiful resource, and our prosperity depends on it.” [Hardeen 2009] In March 2011 incoming Navajo President Ben Shelley (Shirley’s former VP who ran and defeated the progressive New Mexico State Senator Lynda Lovejoy) signed a new 25-year lease for the Four Corners power plant, securing 700 jobs and Tribal government revenues, despite concerns that the 50-year-old plant has far passed its intended life expectancy [Slothower 2011].

Why is Measuring Soil Moisture Important?
Soil moisture information is valuable to a wide range of groups concerned with weather and climate, flood control, drought, soil erosion and slope failure, reservoir management, and water quality. Soil moisture is a key variable in controlling the exchange of water and heat energy between the land surface and the atmosphere through evaporation and plant transpiration. As a result, soil moisture plays an important role in the development of weather patterns and the production of precipitation. Soil moisture also strongly affects the amount of precipitation that runs off into nearby streams and rivers.

As was the case with the New Mexico DEI workshops earlier in the summer, participatory mapping was a major part of this workshop. Because of the difference in age group however (6th-12th graders as opposed to college interns) I also introduced a section on how to interpret and create topographical maps. This turned out to be crucial as we quickly learned many of the students had not thought critically about how maps were constructed.

The following are some photos from the ITEP workshops (all photos have full clearance). A portion of these were taken by ITEP staff (taken in the classroom and those with my calibrating the sensors).

By this time our project had evolved into not only the devices themselves, but also a stripped down equivalent of a GIS system developed by Louis using Google Maps APIs. For my part I had spent May and June developing a series of workshop booklets to serve as guides for participants. These were intended as a series of worksheets and instructions for the daily activities, but also meant to solicit conversation around communal responsibility and social justice issues related to environmental monitoring. Much of this focused on community mapping projects and “Participatory GIS” whereby the group uses the sensor technology to not only collect data but also create a local resource map contextualizing their findings.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) defines participatory mapping as: “A growing toolbox of techniques that can help communities make land use decisions. These maps go beyond the physical features portrayed in traditional maps; nearly everything valued by the community can be expressed in spatial terms and represented on a participatory map, including social, cultural, and economic features. The process used to create these maps is as valuable as the maps themselves. Participatory mapping is used for many reasons: to represent resources, health hazards, and community values; to gather traditional knowledge and practices; to collect information for environmental monitoring, or to find gaps in current data; to assist in conducting surveys or interviews; and to educate the community about local issues that affect their daily lives.”

On this particular trip I was resident in Shiprock NM (alternatively, in Summer 2010 the Pathways conference was held at Tsailé campus in AZ). Below is a brief outline of our activities and some photos from the workshops. Additionally, here is the full workshop booklet we used.

First Workshop – Preparations (classroom based)
Activities: Introduction to participatory mapping and using basic sensors.
Purpose: Determining the objectives of the workshop, the purposes of community resource mapping in environmental study, and the role sensing can play in this process. Build a basic temperature sensor circuit.

First Workshop – Fieldwork (field visit)
Activities: Surveying and documenting field sites, gather temperature sensor data.
Purpose: Participants visit sites to gather detailed information and begin to understand the scope and environmental parameters of their community.

First Workshop – Wrap Up (classroom based)
Activities: Build the community resource map using data from first field site visit, sketching to build our use-case scenarios.
Purpose: Transcribe data onto physical maps. This begins to flesh out significant land features, social and cultural resources, and areas of interest in environmental surveying.

Second Workshop – Preparation (classroom based)
Activities: Discussion of air pollution, introduction to the RPI Community Sensor.
Purpose: Training on the portable RPI sensor units then allows participants to build their intended “use case” based on the constructed community resource map.

Second Workshop – Fieldwork (field visit)
Activities: Surveying and documenting “use case” field sites, deploying RPI sensors and collecting data.
Purpose: Participants return to their community sites having constructed the draft map. The more robust sensors offer environmental data and begin to stimulate and answer questions as well as fill in gaps from initial field site visits. This provides the opportunity to take a more critical look at the community resource map created in the second workshop.

Second Workshop – Wrap Up (computer-lab based)
Activities: Upload data from sensors to the RPI online system as well as site survey information. Conduct data analysis using online tools and finish by revisiting the community resource map.
Purpose: The online RPI system allows participants to view their findings in relation with other field sites as well as enable technical application of the sensor data. By revisiting the community resource map constructed in prior workshops participants develop broader understanding of the relationship between surveying, sensing, and environmental study.

The end device was capable of sensing volatile organic compounds (VOCs), carbon monoxide (CO), temperature, relative humidity, and soil moisture. Louis and Chris also tried to get a dust particle sensor working to no avail, but it was a valiant effort. To be truthful, the VOC and CO sensors didn’t work to our satisfaction in this first model, but it did give us relative values for some educational comparison purposes. You can read the full user manual for the sensor device here.

Here are some photos of the RPI Sensor model 1.0…

3.0 Objectives
We will create a prototype environmental sensor system, using mixtures of proprietary and non-proprietary components.  This sensor system will operate as a generic platform from which a larger infrastructure can be built.  Designers of custom sensor technology, such as Sawyer/Shing and others will then be able to utilize this infrastructure to deploy their technologies into the SOOS sensor community.  

The MDL team will be primarily responsible for developing the sensor system/hardware and device interface with the end goal of launching a stable prototype by end of Spring semester 2011.  During this time Gutierrez will be developing the software infrastructure for the SOOS online community. While much of the basic online structure will be built on available Open Source technology, some special-purpose utilities will be developed in partnership with the MDL team to support the sensor device.  The MDL team will also work in collaboration with the oversight team to create supporting documents and educational tools for the community of users (e.g. circuit diagrams, instruction modules, physical layouts and other documents not normally part of open source but critical to the SOOS community).

The crux of the problem was a core disagreement over what “open source” implied as an educational directive in research projects. As far as we were concerned, if the project was developed with open source principles and the parties agreed to the language in the contractual SOW all was well. Various offices across campus, however, each had their own definition of what constituted our intellectual property vs. the inherent right of the school to claim ownership over work done in their facilities. Ultimately, the ruling decision was made by the “Office of Technology Commercialization” that the SOW was indeed a binding contract and the Open Source agreement had to stand.

Interestingly, the MDL administration agreed to this mediation by justifying it as a financial argument:

In this regard, our general policy and stated objective in the Design Lab has been to identify sustainable funding sources for service oriented projects that will facilitate our working for charitable causes in to the future.  As an exception to this general policy and in the interest of promoting entrepreneurial initiatives on the part of the Navajo and Ghanaian people, I’m proposing that we (i.e., RPI and the Design Lab) do not claim IP protection on either of these two projects.

Nevertheless, this is a far more complicated story than I can tell in this blog entry. If you’d like to see the full version go see the 2-part presentation I gave to the Rensselaer Center for Open Source in July of 2011 here:

In the Spring of 2011 we were given an opportunity to work with the RPI Multidisciplinary Lab (MDL) which allowed us to contract a capstone design team of 12 engineering students to develop the sensor platform. Typically the MDL is contracted to provide solutions for industry partners like GE, Boeing, and IBM, and has facilities encompassing over 6,000sq.ft. of equipment for prototyping, fabricating, and workspace. Working with the team was a windfall for the project, although not without complications which I will write about later…

Here is the full Statement of Work we developed and delivered to the MDL lab prior to commencing the project.

Here is a collection of images from the Spring of 2011 as we co-developed the sensor platform with the MDL team. Their final deliverable poster can be seen here. The final presentation photos were taken by Mark Anderson of the MDL lab.