The state of Ohio is home to millions of people and thousands of species that depend on clean air to breath and fresh water to drink, live in, and utilize in their daily lives. These seemingly basic necessities have become more compromised as our society has developed into a synthetic society with less connection to the natural world around us. As the natural world becomes regarded less so as nature and seen only in terms of the resources it can provide for us, our environment suffers, and in turn, so do the living things dependent upon it. The ways in which we extract resources are the main culprit that damage the environment in Ohio.
Hydraulic fracturing or “fracking”, pollution from coal burning power plants, and algae blooms on Lake Erie are all causing damage to Ohio’s people, wildlife, and natural resources. These destructive practices have a long way to go before they are fixed, but the state is in the process of cleaning up some of their damages. The purpose of this paper is to outline the main environmental concerns that the state of Ohio faces today and the ways in which they are being handled and solved. This paper will discuss three main topics: fracking, coal, and algae blooms. The fracking section will outline fracking in eastern Ohio; the negative effects of fracking on water, people, and wildlife; the regulations the state has made to mitigate these negative effects; and speculations of the future of Ohio fracking.
The coal section will discuss the harm coal power plants place on the atmosphere, water, and health of people; explain the reduction of coal use in recent years; and speculate on renewable energy for future. Lastly, the algae bloom section will explain the causes of algae blooms on Lake Erie, the damage they cause to humans and wildlife, the processes the state is undergoing to solve the algae bloom issue, and speculation on ways to prevent algae blooms in the future. Fracking is a natural gas and oil extraction method used in eastern Ohio. This method of extraction includes the process of drilling thousands of feet into the earth and then horizontally in order to inject water, fracking fluid, chemicals, and sand into rock and shale in order to break them up and fracture the rock (Hoffman 2019).
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This modern technology has proven to be extremely detrimental to the environment, people, and animals in the surrounding regions of the fracking sites. One main issue with fracking is the abhorrent amounts of water necessary to carry out the extractions. It has been estimated that between 2 and 10 million gallons of water are used every time a well is fractured, and wells can be fractured multiple times, leaving the exact number of gallons used unknown (GreenPeace). This is problematic because the water is typically used from sources nearest the well sites, leaving many cities in water scarce situations (GreenPeace).
Another issue pertaining to water is the storage of the fracking fluid and water that are stored in large impoundments near the fracking sites that are often unregulated and do not require lining underneath (GreenPeace). This leads to chemicals making their way to the water table and harming both humans and wildlife that rely on the water for both drinking and agriculture (GreenPeace). The harmful chemicals within the fracking fluid have been linked to negative effects on the brain, nervous system, immune system, cardiovascular system, kidneys, endocrine system, and may be even linked to cancers and mutations (Hoffman 2019). Besides the obvious environmental issues pertaining to fracking, it is also an issue of environmental injustice.
As we have explored previously in this course, environmental injustices occur when a disproportionate share of the negative environmental consequences are put upon a certain group of people (Spieles 2020). The people that face these externalities are typically those in lower class or minority groups (Spieles 2020). Fracking sites are rarely placed in affluent communities and are typically placed in communities that rely on these fracking company’s money to help them get by (Grant 2019). In eastern Ohio, families have been forced to sign leases on their properties, leasing their land to fracking companies for a monthly royalty (Grant 2019). These families claim that once the fracking began, family members began getting rashes, headaches, dizziness, and even developed breathing problems as well as dying trees, cats, chickens, and sheep on their land (Grant 2019).
When families like the Bonds in Noble County Ohio made complaints to the Ohio EPA and nothing was done, they had no choice but to move out of their family home (Grant 2019). This clear example of environmental injustice is not rare in the fracking business. Companies with copious amounts of money have power over the rural citizens in eastern Ohio and continue to drill wells and contaminate Ohians despite the unfair burden it may bear. Luckily, there have been some steps taken to mitigate the harmful effects of fracking and create more transparency with the people about the types of materials used in fracking. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources’s Division of Oil and Gas Resources is responsible for the regulation of fracking in Ohio and has created some regulations in recent years (BallotPedia).
In 2013, a law was passed by the Ohio Legislature requiring well operators to submit quarterly production data to the state and in 2017, Ohio passed a law requiring fracking operators to submit a list of the chemicals used in the fracking process (BallotPedia). There are loopholes, however. Operators that consider the chemicals or the concentration of chemicals to be a “trade secret” are able to withhold this information from the public to thus withhold the information from their competitors (BallotPedia). These loopholes are conniving ways in which fracking companies can continue to pollute Ohio’s water and further damage the health of those reliant on the water sources.
As for the future of fracking regulation in Ohio, it will depend on the elected officials of our state. As a swing state, Ohio has a pretty mixed landscape of voters. If voters elect officials with strict environmental policies as their goal, then hopefully fracking in Ohio will become a more tightly regulated practice. If officials are elected with lax environmental policies and money driven ideals, fracking will likely continue to deteriorate Ohio’s environment. Unfortunately, fracking is not the only process polluting the state of Ohio; coal is another large problem. Coal is a commonly known resource burned around the world for power. The state of Ohio relied heavily on coal in past years, making the state a large producer of carbon dioxide- higher than the national average in 2015 (Kowalski 2018). Though coal has been a primary source of power because of its cheap cost, the true cost of burning coal is far more than just an electricity bill.
Coal burning power plants emit high amounts of carbon dioxide, a commonly known greenhouse gas contributing to climate change (Kowalski 2018). Beyond carbon dioxide emissions, coal burning power plants are the largest emitters of mercury and arsenic and are responsible for 81% of the electric power industry’s greenhouse gas emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrogen oxides (U.S. National Library of Medicine 2017). Besides air pollution, coal burning power plants also contribute to the issue of coal ash leakage into groundwater along the Ohio Valley (Patterson 2019). Recent data found that unsafe levels of lead, arsenic, and mercury were leaking into groundwater from 10 coal burning power plants in Ohio (Patterson 2019).
These toxins are not only harmful to the humans and animals that consume it, but can make their way into lakes and streams, leaving these irreplaceable resources unsafe for fishing, recreation, and irrigation (Patterson 2019). On a positive note, coal power is on the decline- for now. Research has found that carbon dioxide emissions in Ohio’s energy sector have fallen by 50 million metric tons within ten years, that is 47%. (Kowalski 2018). This is a large step for the state, as Ohio’s energy sector had been heavily coal dominated in the past. The decline in coal from 80 to 60 percent of power generation is due to the switch to natural gas (Kowalski 2018). The switch to natural gas makes the decrease in carbon dioxide emissions possible because natural gas produces about 45% the amount of carbon dioxide as coal for the same amount of kilowatt hours produced (Kowalski 2018).
In very recent news, the mayor of Columbus has set a goal for the city to be carbon neutral by 2050 (Gunderson 2020). Though this is a lofty goal, the mayor believes that it can be made possible through the use of renewable energy and community involvement (Gunderson 2020). I think that if Columbus begins the process of switching to renewable energy, it can encourage other cities in Ohio to do the same and if the state government gives out subsidies for switching to renewable sources, more people will jump on board. Besides the environmental destruction occurring throughout eastern and central Ohio, northern Ohio faces another pressing concern, algae blooms. Northern Ohio is home to Lake Erie, one of the Great Lakes that provides drinking water for 11 million people, supports important migratory bird habitats, produces billions of dollars in fisheries, and supports coastal wetlands (The Nature Conservancy 2018).
This essential body of water is facing an algae bloom crisis that is toxic to both people and wildlife (Glanville 2020). Algae blooms are formed as a result of nutrients in fertilizer and manure runoff producing bacteria called cyanobacteria (Glanville 2020). These toxins not only contaminate the drinking water of millions of people, but also poison the small fish that consume the bacteria and slowly make their way up the food chain to larger fish and even humans that eat the fish through bioaccumulation (EPA 2019). These harmful algae blooms can also lead to dead zones or hypoxia within the lake (EPA 2019). Dead zones occur in areas of lakes that have little or no oxygen and are caused by algal blooms consuming the oxygen as they decompose (EPA 2019).
Dead zones are inhabitable to aquatic life and force them to leave the affected areas, which in turn affects the fisheries in areas affected by dead zones (EPA 2019). These algae blooms have not gone unnoticed and the state of Ohio is in the process of recovering the lake. The state has created the “H2Ohio Plan” to protect the lake and clean up current blooms by creating more wetland areas to help filter fertilizer runoff, planting “cover crops” to hold the nutrients in the soil, and removing areas of concern along the lake (Glanville 2020). The plan also includes the control of invasive species like Asian carp, hydrilla, and phragmites because they often outcompete the native species (Glanville 2020).
This takes away fish’s natural habitats and reduces wetlands’ ability to filter the water entering the lake (Glanville 2020). These alleviation efforts have helped the Lake Erie algae blooms decrease in size since 2014, but there is still ways to go in solving this major issue. The high production synthetic society we live in today with high demand for crops is a large contributor to the issue of algae blooms. The demand for production leads farmers to using fertilizers and chemicals on the crops to keep the harvest consistent and the output high, but this demand comes with a detrimental impact.
There is no clear solution to this problem and crop production does not have an ending in site, but focusing on creating organic fertilizers that do not release algae bloom producing bacteria could be a potential way to halt the blooms. The state of Ohio has found itself in the midst of many environmental challenges: fracking, coal, and algae blooms, to name just a few. Though fracking has contaminated water and targeted poor communities, burning coal has contributed to greenhouse gas emissions and soiled the groundwater, and algae blooms have intoxicated food and water sources of millions, there is progress being made. The state has been working hard to regulate fracking sites, switch to clean energy, and stop the flow of harmful nutrients into Lake Erie in order to combat these environmental issues.
These solutions, however, cannot stand alone. The state of Ohio and the residents who call it home must continue to fight for stricter regulations, cleaner energy sources, and better farm management in order for the state to become greener. As our society has developed into one focused solely on a linear economy of taking, making, using, disposing, and polluting, it is the job of this generation to take a step back and look at the future we are headed towards (Spieles 2020). This generation must decide whether growth and money should take priority over clean air and water and make the necessary changes to keep our earth and its inhabitants healthy.
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