All About That Baseline: The Politics of Ignorance About Pre-Fracking Water Conditions

• In Event: Institutions and Ignorance: New Directions in the Political Economy of Science

Abstract

Baselining—the process of establishing prior environmental conditions—can be a form of contentious politics that has significant implications for the distribution of power and authority in environmental disputes. Ignorance about baseline conditions can be advantageous to companies that are suspected of causing environmental harm, because it allows them to claim that perhaps the pollution was a pre-existing problem. In the case of Marcellus Shale natural gas development, official baseline measures of water quality data are scarce. Thus, gas drilling companies, environmental organizations, and the general public have all participated in baselining, through a wide array of practices, such as volunteer stream monitoring and the hiring of consultants to document well water quality. Power struggles play out through these baselining processes, as drilling companies and their critics dispute whether water quality problems were present before gas drilling began.
This case study brings visibility to baselining as an arena of political struggle where companies strategically use “unknowns” to maintain their positions of power and evade regulatory and legal consequences. Furthermore, the case reveals significant shortcomings of the dominant approach to environmental law that relies on comparisons to a baseline in order to prove environmental harm. The paper suggests possibilities for alternative governance processes in which conflicting values and interests could be more openly deliberated. Environmental governance should involve openly normative questions, not only about how natural resources are valued and used, but also about how to act in the face of ignorance about past, present, and future conditions.

Author

• Abby Kinchy, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute