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Word Rising: In Long-Form Journalism, How Long Is Too Long?

Uprising, by Phil McKenna. Published by Matter, $.99. Visit Matter for details about formats, purchasing, and membership.

Review by Virginia Hughes

In his State of the Union address last month, President Obama made several nods to climate change. To reduce America’s dependence on oil — and the carbon emissions that come from burning it — he pushed for a bigger investment in clean sources of energy, like wind, solar and natural gas. “The natural gas boom has led to cleaner power and greater energy independence,” Obama said. “We need to encourage that.”

Thanks to advances in a technique called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, natural gas production in the U.S. grew by 8 percent in 2011, the sixth consecutive year of growth, leading the International Energy Agency to call this “a golden age of gas.” When burned, natural gas emits half as much carbon dioxide as coal does. The Obama administration and some prominent scientists — including Obama’s pick for new energy secretary — say natural gas could be used as a “bridge fuel,” curbing our coal consumption until greener alternatives are ready for primetime.

But what if natural gas isn’t so clean?

That’s the question artfully raised in Uprising, the fourth installment from Matter, an online platform for long-form science journalism. Uprising, like Matter’s earlier stories, presents an engaging narrative with juicy characters doing surprising science at a length of around 6,000 words. Unlike the other Matter stories, though, I’m not sure this one needed more than the 3,000 words of a typical magazine feature.

In Uprising, journalist Phil McKenna tells the story of two unlikely collaborators — Bob Ackley, a big-car-loving libertarian with decades of experience as a gas company technician, and Nathan Phillips, a liberal tree-hugging professor — and their wacky adventures cruising the streets of Boston to map natural gas leaks.

When methane, the primary ingredient of natural gas, leaks into the atmosphere (rather than being burned) it’s a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. But nobody knows exactly how much gas is leaking. That’s where Ackley and Phillips come in.

Uprising tells why Ackley and Phillips started to work together, and what they’ve discovered so far: In a paper published last month in Environmental Pollution, they reported finding 3,356 leaks in Boston, including six where gas levels were high enough to cause an explosion. Their study included a city map tracking the leaks, which Matter recreated as a striking black-and-white grid with swashes of red and yellow to indicate the leaks. (And although the study is behind a pay wall, Matter made it somewhat open-access by linking to a Google Doc of the study’s full data set.)

The problem, for me, is that it’s unclear how (or whether) this single study contributes to the greater international debate about natural gas and climate that McKenna did such a great job setting up. The study focused on the number of leaks, rather than their volume, so it can’t say anything definitive about whether natural gas really is worse for the climate than coal.

It’s not that these investigations don’t matter: We learn that Ackley and others are finding similarly frightening numbers of leaks in other cities, such as Manhattan and Washington, D.C., and that some of this data is driving a major lawsuit against a utility company. It’s entirely plausible that these leaks will put a crimp on the natural gas boom. But the story doesn’t say much about how the wider energy community has reacted to this data. It didn’t include any skeptical voices, or any comments from scientists or policy makers who still believe in natural gas as a bridge fuel.

I was expecting the story to answer the initial question posed: What if natural gas isn’t so clean? And when I didn’t get that answer, I was disappointed, in a way that I might not have been had the story been shorter. The view, for me, wasn’t quite worth the climb.

 

Virginia Hughes is a science writer based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Nature, Popular Science, and Slate, and her blog Only Human is part of National Geographic magazine’s Phenomena. Follow her on Twitter.

A Time Machine for the Face of Earth

Fragile Earth. Published by HarperCollins. iTunes, $3.95.

Reviewed by Carl Zimmer

Infinity can be cruel. Tablet computers have become so powerful that it's practically impossible to reach the limits of what you can do while creating an ebook. You can embed videos, sprinkle music and voices here and there, let people post a book-inspired thought to Twitter, manipulate a simulated bat, incorporate an encyclopedia of information about chemistry, and on and on. Unfortunately, this virtual infinity of possibilities may leave ebook creators with a virtual infinity of work. Some science ebooks we've reviewed rise to that challenge. They sport a well-integrated collection of features. Other ebooks seem like wild acts of desperation. And others still are acts of wise self-restraint. Yes, you could make a science ebook that does many things poorly. Or you could make a science ebook that does one thing well. One such ebook is Fragile Earth.

Fragile Earth got its start in 2006 as a beautifully disturbing coffee table book published by Collins, filled with satellite images showing how humanity is reworking the planet. "Before" and "after" photographed were paired to show how deforestation, climate change, and other factors have changed the face of Earth. Now Collins has turned it into an app. The Youtube video below gives you a good run-through of its features. The most important one is that instead of putting images side by side, the app does what a book cannot: it lays them on top of each other. You can then use a screen button to slide one picture away to reveal the other one underneath. I'm not quite sure of the visual neuroscience behind this effect, but it works very well. Seeing the same landscape in Alaska covered by glaciers a few decades ago now turned to mostly bare Earth is a sobering experience.

Fragile Earth is not perfect, though. The book and the app alike are presented as a way to see how we're changing the planet. But the app is loaded with other images that show natural changes, such as the devastation caused by the eruption of Mount Saint Helens. Combining these images together makes no thematic sense; the only thing that joins them together is an elegant slider. There's no introduction where you might find an explanation for what a volcano and the deforested Amazon have in common. Instead, Fragile Earth has short caption that describe the specifics of each set of images but leave you wanting more.

That's too bad, because Fragile Earth illustrates on a profoundly important fact about our species. In 2005, Bruce Wilkinson, a University of Michigan geologist, published a paper called, "Humans as geologic agents: A deep-time perspective." [free pdf] "Humans are now an order of magnitude more important at moving sediment than the sum of all other natural processes operating on the surface of the planet," Wilkinson concluded. We're also having other huge effects on the planet--acidifying the oceans faster than at any time in the last 300 million years, for example. Humanity isn't just leaving a mark on the Earth you can see from space. It's a mark that will be preserved in the fossil record for millions of years to come.

Before and after pictures can go a long way to showing the magnitude of that change. But without context, they can also oversimplify it. If you were to select a before and after pair of pictures of glaciers in the Himalayas, for example, you would not see a frightening retreat over the past decade. In fact, you might not see any change at all. Such specific cases are ripe for cherry-picking by global warming denialists. The reason that this one case does not refute global warming because of the overwhelming evidence of changes caused by global warming on a planetary scale--such as the overall loss of ice from the entire Arctic Ocean.

Fragile Earth would thus be a better app if its pictures had more context and a more coherent point. But I'm also glad that its creators didn't try to grasp for infinity.

 

Carl Zimmer writes frequently about science for the New York Times and is the author of 13 books, including A Planet of Viruses

Blowing Windmills and Seeing the Future: Al Gore's Our Choice

Our Choice by Al Gore. iPhone or iPad 

Reviewed by Dan Fagin (guest reviewer)

If you’ve heard Al Gore give a speech, watched An Inconvenient Truth or read anything the former vice president has written, you probably know that two of his obsessions are the innovative use of information technology and the visual image of a spinning Earth, as seen from space. So it’s no surprise that both are central to his first true e-book: Our Choice. Created for the iPad and released in the spring of 2011, it’s anything but a cut-and-paste digital version of the 2009 print volume, as Gore’s previous digital efforts have been. This time, the text has been tricked out with all sorts of digital-only features. There are dozens of unfolding photographs, tightly edited videos and startlingly clever interactive graphics. There’s even a page where you can blow into your iPad’s microphone to spin the blades of an on-screen windmill. Really.

The introductory image sets the tone. It is, predictably, a striking view of our planet, spinning serenely, seen from space. Touch it, Gore’s voice instructs, and when I comply the Earth spins quickly in the opposite direction for a few seconds before stopping and resuming its normal rotation. But now the surface has changed. Huge typhoons loom menacingly near Japan, India and Mexico, and a whopper hurricane is bearing down on Florida. Most of Africa (not just the Sahara) is parched brown; so are Italy, Spain and portions of the American Midwest. The familiar solid white of the Greenland ice sheet now includes patches of exposed land. (You can get a rough idea of how it looks, without the movement, by running your mouse over the planet here.)

All the Beautiful Bioreactors

Living Architecture: How Synthetic Biology Can Remake Our Cities (TED) by Rachel Armstrong. iPad, Kindle, Barnes & Noble.

Reviewed by Annalee Newitz

In the opening section of her long essay, Living Architecture (based on a TED talk), materials designer Rachel Armstrong lays out the problem facing all urban residents in a crisp, moving description of Sendai in the wake of the 2011 earthquake. Buildings in the coastal region of Japan had buckled and crumbled, and its streets pulsed with contaminated water. First responders tried to rescue a dog, but found that it wouldn't leave until they followed it to an area where they discovered another dog, barely breathing. Both animals were taken to safety and given medical attention. What this sad scene underscored was that in the face of disaster, all forms of life try to help each other survive. 

Encapsulated in that tale of two dogs is also the problem and, possibly, a solution to troubles in modern cities. As Armstrong explains, metropolitan areas will be home to nearly two thirds of the Earth's population in the next half century, but they are breakable, dangerous, and depend on unsustainable forms of energy. Still, those cities are filled with life that can make it through disasters that shatter buildings. Armstrong, whose research touches on synthetic biology, asks whether it might not be better to build cities that are as resilient (and compassionate) as the lives inside of them. 

A Guided Tour of Hell

Into the Forbidden Zone: A Trip Through Hell and High Water in Post-Earthquake Japan, by William T. Vollmann. Byliner Originals, 2011. (Nook/Google Ebook/Sony eReader/iTunes bookstore/Kindle Single)

Reviewed by Maggie Koerth-Baker

On March 11, 2011, one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded ripped apart a swath of eastern Japan. About an hour later, a huge tsunami wave tore through the wreckage, leaving behind a trail of salinated sludge and a burgeoning nuclear disaster.

You know all of this already, of course. In fact, at this point, the narrative of what happened in Japan—what's still happening, really—has been repeated so many times that you might be tempted to think there's no reason to read yet another take on this situation.

But you should set those thoughts aside. At least, you should set them aside long enough to read William T. Vollmann's Into the Forbidden Zone, a 70-page narrative that tells the beautiful, heartbreaking story about the aftermath of the Tohoku Earthquake and highlights two of the key problems with the way this tragedy has been covered in the popular press.

Vollmann isn't a science journalist. In fact, he's primarily a novelist. If you're looking for a lot of technical details on the science of earthquake prediction, or the real risks of radiation exposure, he can't help you very much.

But, on the other hand, I think that's part of what makes this book so powerful. As someone immersed in the science of news, it's easy to lose track of what an event looks like from any other perspective. As an American, far removed from the actual event, it's easy to get so caught up in seismometers, early warning systems, and debates over nuclear energy—in other words, what could happen to us someday—that we forget about the people all this stuff really did happen to 11 months ago.

Vollmann's book brings the real story—how an earthquake, a tsunami, and a nuclear meltdown have affected the Japanese people—back to the forefront, where it ought to be.