The Paleontological Research Institution (PRI, located in Ithaca, NY) is helping educators from informal, formal, and nonformal (Cooperative Extension) settings to collaboratively toward outreach on energy development, environmental impacts, and climate change. PRI is providing professional development to educators in (especially rural) communities, who are developing presentations and resources that focus on: 1) the Earth system science of their communities; 2) environmental perspectives ranging from local to global; 3) learning within and networking among communities; and, 4) effective non-confrontational communication strategies. The project is being implemented in an area of active and potentially active shale gas drilling (Pennsylvania and the Southern Tier of New York State) that is underlain by the Marcellus Shale. Many communities are debating the pros and cons of gas drilling in their neighborhoods, in some cases resulting in polarized debates around speculative or biased Earth system science information. In some areas, wind farms and biofuels agriculture are also under development. The professional development is designed to proactively help educators talk to their communities about energy choices, provide outreach before polarization occurs, and respond quickly with high quality science education and vetted information resources when controversy arises.
Understanding our energy system and impacts of energy production and use on the broader Earth system is of utmost importance. Such understandings are essential for decision-makers in government and industry, and, in democracies, for citizens. Stakeholders should be able to judge the quality of decisions made and be able to influence decisions from an evidence-based perspective. The industrialization of energy has both made modern society possible, and placed modern society in peril. The energy system has always been dynamic. Changes now underway are bringing energy production closer to home for many in this country, reversing long trends. The potential for energy being produced in one’s backyard brings heightened interest and provides a teachable moment about energy, where it comes from, and the impacts it has on the environment, economy, and society. By focusing on the case of slickwater horizontal high volume hydraulic fracturing (HVHF) in the Marcellus Shale and contextualizing HVHF within the broader energy system, we were able to not only develop and test resources, strategies, and approaches specific to nurturing understandings about this important controversial issue, we were also able to inform the development of such approaches and resources for emergent energy issues of many sorts. A key lesson is that all large-scale energy production and use brings high environmental costs. Evaluating energy sources should start with looking for options that are least bad, rather than good, for the environment. This understanding leads to two others. While we did not and will not advocate for or against HVHF, or any other energy source, we do advocate for using less energy. That simple bottom line idea is juxtaposed with another key idea that runs counter to much of what we do as educators. Instead of simplifying the seemingly complex, an essential part of our work has been to complexify the seemingly simple. We have strived to understand what it means to be, "Marcellus Shale literate" using the new framework defining energy literacy (Department of Energy, 2012) and we have developed approaches and strategies for building such literacy. That striving has led us to not only deeper understandings of the related geology, environmental science, and engineering, but also to deeper understanding of how people learn, and how people resist learning things apparently in opposition to their worldviews. We also have learned that most program participants, and presumably most New Yorkers, have little knowledge of where their energy comes from. Using understandings of local Earth system science as an early step in building understandings of global issues is a theme that cuts across much of PRI’s educational programming, and we found it to useful in the context of this project as well. Don Duggan-Haas has given scores of talks on the work of the project, most commonly some variation of a talk entitled, "There’s no such thing as a free megawatt: Hydrofracking as a gateway drug to energy literacy." See: http://bit.ly/MarcellusGateway to view the presentation, and: https://bitly.com/MarcellusGateway+ to view site statistics. As of January 2014, the page has been visited more than 8000 times. Figure 1 shows an excerpt from the presentation. The talk begins with attention to the local. Participants are asked to identify New York State’s two largest energy sources for electricity generation. Fewer than 5% of the roughly 2000 participants have correctly identified natural gas and nuclear power. Figure 2 shows the related information for total energy use within the state. Project findings have been shared with researchers, thousands of individuals and hundreds of educators through professional development programming, print and online publications, conference presentations, public programming and a conference, "Best Practices in Marcellus Shale Education." See: http://bit.ly/MarcellusEd. In 2013 and in concert with a second Marcellus Shale-related project, "Geoscience education for communities impacted by gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale" (NSF GEO 1016359), we published, The Science Beneath the Surface: A Very Short Guide to the Marcellus Shale, (Duggan-Haas, Ross, & Allmon, 2013) a book for lay readers and educators. See Figure 3. Research findings with implications for program design were described by Henderson & Duggan-Haas (2014). The goals of the work were to develop and pilot effective approaches to community education related to energy issues and to develop approaches that are translatable to other emergent energy issues. We have connected educators across communities, with participant educators drawn from K-12 classrooms, cooperative extension, nature centers, museums, a playwright, and a range of types of higher education institutions (community and, liberal arts colleges; and universities). See Figures 4, 5 and 6. We have deepened our own understandings and the understandings of our participants of the importance of complexifying the seemingly simple; of how people learn and resist learning about controversial issues broadly and about energy issues specifically; and we have produced resources, developed and shared approaches and disseminated these understandings to the broader education community.
