You have read it in black and white: the economy is improving: Factories are hiring. Adding 200,000 jobs in December cut the unemployment rate to 8.5 percent. Consumer confidence is rising, and cars are selling again.

Meanwhile, corporate profits hit a record $2-trillion a year, and since the cataclysm in 2008, real gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services, has grown for more than two years.

These economic measures are broad, ubiquitous and reliable, but there are other ways to measure the economy. If you poke around, you’ll find economists — on Wall Street and Elm Street alike — with their own idiosyncratic economic indicators.

Like the GDP and unemployment rate, many are less forecasting tools than measures of the current economy. That may diminish their prognostic value, but not their human-humorous-interest value.

To stay or to vacate?

Vacations, however necessary, can be expensive, and so when the economy tanked in 2008, we began to hear about the cost-cutting “staycation.” By taking time off from work (assuming we had a job…) without leaving home, we could enjoy friends, family and local attractions: parks, museums, lakes and beaches.

We could, in other words, enjoy many of the benefits of a vacation while ducking the hefty price tag. Staycations can have pizazz: would you rather be taking off your shoes in a frenetic airport or building a tree house with the kids?

We failed to find anybody who studies staycations, so the best we can say about their merit as economic indicators is that past performance is no guarantee of future success; read the full prospectus before investing!

Vacant at home

It doesn’t take a Rhodes scholar to deduce from foreclosure stats or photos of abandoned houses that housing remains a black hole in the American economy. But like the staycation, a foreclosure boom follows a sour economy, and is more informative about the immediate past than about the immediate future.

We were, however, intrigued to learn that foreclosure could be a disease vector. Clouds of mosquitoes are breeding in abandoned ponds and swimming pools at foreclosed homes in Arizona.

That gives us another reason to hate skeeters, even if their whine is the sound of love.

Sports: No rush to the finish line

Pro-sport tickets are not cheap, so a full stadium must signify a healthy economy. But it ain’t necessarily so, says Andrew Billings, who studies broadcasting and sports at the University of Alabama. “People often get a flawed picture from simply going by attendance figures. It depends on the sport.”

In the National Football League, he notes, “the majority of stadiums sell out, and demand far exceeds supply.” Before a sick economy leads to empty seats, he says, it deflates ticket prices on resale markets, “but you will still see a full stadium, and may think the economy must not be too bad, even if the demand is cut in half.”

And don’t bother counting duffers at a private golf course, either, Billings says. A full golf course “is not always a straight-off indicator of prosperity,” because the major expense is the cost of membership. “For many people, once they have bought the membership, the costs are sunk, and golf becomes the cheap option for entertainment.”

When money is tight, he says, “They may be playing twice as frequently because it’s already paid for.”

Big screen, big sales, bogus economic indicator?

You might think sales of pricy electronic goods, including those “mine-is-bigger-than-yours” TVs, would closely track prosperity, but Billings says they “may be another misleading measure.”

Many of those giant video screens, more suited to aircraft hangers than living rooms, are bought to watch sports, and looking at the full economic picture reveals the folly of the sales = prosperity equation, he says.

Consider the cost of season tickets for big-league sports — up to $20,000 for a seat behind home plate at the New York Yankees. When times get bad, Billings says, “The buyer may think, ‘Why don’t I get a $2,000 TV and the major-league baseball package? Once you add in parking and food, sports can be very expensive, and that makes the flat screen look pretty cheap.”

Although another flat-screen sale may contribute to the image of prosperity, Billings says, this fan “has really cut their budget to avoid going to the stadium.”

Pretty Byzantine?

How do we get a measure of economic activity in the long, dark epoch before the invention of the GDP or the flat-screen television? In the 14th century, during the death throes of the Byzantine empire, the church was an economic engine and a wealth center. If you bought a marriage license, you paid the church, which also owned buildings, even entire communities.

Because churches hold some of the best documents from the period, some scholars have proposed using records of church wealth as a proxy for economic development — or decline — during this benighted epoch before the spreadsheet was envisioned.

Garbage everywhere

With the possible exception of unwrapped broccoli from a local farm, everything you buy creates garbage, and the garbage disposal system is always affected by economic slowdowns.

Duh.

But we were surprised to hear that garbage can offer almost a real-time economic readout. According to Edward Humes, author of the forthcoming book Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash, “Until the housing bubble burst, the largest landfill in the country, by intake, was Puente Hills in Los Angeles County, which was taking up to the legal limit, 13,000 tons per day. This was cut in half after the housing bubble burst. Home construction and demolition debris fell as construction stopped, and people started buying less stuff.”

Construction fell so quickly, Humes says, that “Landfill operators probably saw [bad economic] things coming ahead of a lot of the rest of us.”

Even “durable goods” can quickly start bulking up the garbage stream, he says. “So much of what we buy is pretty ephemeral, even the stuff defined as durable goods must last just one year. A lot of it is designed to be thrown away; not fixed. The age of the TV repairman is long behind us.”

Garbage tells us about more than just economics, Humes adds. “It’s a little scary, one of our greatest exports is trash. We used to make things, and now we make trash.”

Although high garbage flows correlate to prosperity, Humes says the linkage cannot last forever. “Every culture figures out” that wasting resources is not a long-term solution, he says. “Suddenly, when resources are scarce, humans get more conscious of how much they have wasted, but by then it’s too late.”

Night lights, big city

Can lights at night, as seen from space, measure a region’s economy? After all, lighting requires bulbs, generators, energy and wires, so the argument has face validity. But a 2011 study returned mixed results. Night lights were a useful gauge in 25 percent to 33 percent of counties in the United States (excluding Alaska and Hawaii). In India, night lights gave a useful picture of local GDP in a “very small number” of districts.

And in China, fewer than 10 percent of districts showed a significant correlation between night lights and GDP. One reason: light from the intense coastal urbanization overwhelmed the satellite’s sensors and could not be measured accurately.

Underwater underwear

Alan Greenspan, who ran the Federal Reserve for oh-so-many years, was said to favor sales of men’s underwear as an economic indicator. His theory: When times get tight, men decide to forgo the pleasure of a new pair of briefs or boxers.

We were unable to unearth evidence for this notion, but wish to ask two follow-up questions: Do sales of women’s underwear convey an economic message? And how do you know?

Stick with lipstick?

If men can withstand the urge to buy boxers and briefs, women apparently can’t cut back on “small indulgences” like lipstick. In 2001, the chair of Estee Lauder coined “lipstick index” to explain why lipstick sales rise during a bad economy.

Going to war

For some, the military is a job of last resort, and so the number and quality of new recruits offers a proxy for economic conditions.

But military recruiting ads may be just as telling as the numbers. In 2009, the New York Times described a new Marines ad showing “men crawling through mud and under barbed wire, being smacked in the head with padded fighting sticks, vomiting after inhaling tear gas and diving, boots and all, into a swimming pool.”

With so many potential recruits in the job market, the ad didn’t bother soft-selling the rigors of Marine life.

Recouping the coupons

When pressed for coins, why not cash in on those coupons that clutter mailboxes and newspapers? In hard times, coupon redemptions do rise, according to a company that processes them.

Skirting the economic reality?

If we can believe QI, a quiz show from the United Kingdom, long hair and short skirts are both signs of prosperity. Hey, we tried, but failed, to track this revelation back to a legit study, but still give thanks to reader “St Ga” for the suggestion, and for an elegant mix-mastering of cause and effect: “If the government makes short skirts & long hair compulsory for EVERYONE will the economy improve? :)”

We wish.

Forget that secret childhood crush, forget those teenage indiscretions you posted on Facebook and cannot escape.

Is this your deepest secret — that you actually look forward to the holidays?

Lucky you. For the rest of us, we’re stuck on those holiday-stress media fretlines: over-drinking, under-sleeping and indecent exposure to idiotic in-laws.

Not to mention getting mauled at the mall.

These “Beware: awful-holidays ahead” warnings make little sense to us. Sure, there’s relentless pressure to consume — material goods, foods and alcohol alike. And even if the buy! pressure has intensified (did 24/7 coverage of Black Friday mean it was more important than killing Osama Bin Laden?), those holiday-stress headlines are nothing new.

And if the holidays are so horrid, why do we still have them?

In other words, what have Christmas, Hanukah and New Year’s and Kwanzaa done for us lately?

Maybe not so awful after all?

Because holidays are not (yet?) considered psychological disorders, they get less study than, say, post-traumatic stress disorder or autism. Still, The Why Files rounded up some experts — mainly positive psychologists — to discuss the upside of the holidays.

Holidays can be a spur to beneficial changes, says Robert McGrath, coordinator of student mind/body wellness services at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  ”The disruption to routine that they create can serve as an opportunity to change.  For example, if you’ve been meaning to catch up with a friend for months, the holidays may help bring that deeper priority to the surface.”

The tradition of cooking and distributing sweets can serve as an excuse to walk over to see neighbors we always intend to visit. And New Years resolutions can become a socially sanctioned reason to make beneficial changes to diet, exercise, social involvement or volunteerism.

Rituals, religious and otherwise

However, much of the power of holidays is embodied in things that don’t change, says Lee Ann de Reus, an associate professor of human development and family studies at Penn State University in Altoona. “One thing we know about healthy families is that they incorporate rituals, and that certainly comes with holidays, no matter what your tradition.”

Rituals, she says, can range all over the map, from attending religious services like midnight mass to holding ceremonial feasts at the same house, or eating the same foods, prepared by the same family cooks.

De Reus solicits examples from her students, and says, “Some open all their gifts on Christmas eve, some open one on Christmas eve and everything else next morning. Families may have traditions about who they invite for Hanukah or who takes part in ceremonies around the dinner table.”

Many traditions are unique and whimsical, de Reus adds. “In one family, everybody gets a new set of pajamas, and wears them to open gifts. They may watch a specific film or stay up all night playing Trivial Pursuit. And a lot of traditions revolve around food preparation.”

Reading ritual

Rituals are not just about repetition, de Reus says. “We know that ritual gives multiple things. It’s a way to transmit values, it’s a way to reconnect in a meaningful way, and it brings families together, even families that don’t necessarily get along outside the holidays.”

After a divorce, she says, tradition can temporarily trump animosity. “The parents may put their differences aside; they may come together for the sake of the children.”

College students from families that have split up “often can work it out, spending Christmas eve with one part of the family, and Christmas day with the other part,” says McGrath “But when it has not been worked out, they must choose to be with one parent, and the other one can feel very hurt.”

Ritual also provides a chance for a family to reconnect with its history, de Reus says. “If I ask college age students about their favorite memories about growing up, you can bet the majority are going to talk about some sort of event, memory, probably involving a ritual, often around a holiday or a birthday.”

Ritual, de Reus says, “tells us what are we about, helps a family to regain its center. Maybe they have strayed from these values, are too caught up in consumerism, materialism. It takes an assertive parent to push back against the larger societal pressures that exist around holidays: drinking, overindulgence, mass consumerism. I think we totally underestimate the value and importance of ritual in family life.”

Total togetherness

Holidays bring together many of the most important people in our lives, and, as McGrath points out, researchers regularly find a strong relationship between happiness and time with family and friends, “especially if the gathering is for positive reasons rather than to deal with problems. In terms of the positive experience, just being with people is the key. I don’t know that people come back from the holidays and say, ‘I did not get a good present.’”

The good-will that comes from these gatherings need not end with the holidays, McGrath says. “A positive note is to realize that you can enjoy those same activities daily: eat meals mindfully and enjoy them, have fun with friends and family, share stories, and practice giving often.”

What do you expect?

Part of the holiday-blues problem may exist in excessive expectations, says Leaf Van Boven, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Colorado. “There are very clear cultural stereotypes for what ought to happen at the holidays, for how people will behave, for gifts that will be exchanged. For most people, the holidays don’t meet that expectation, so there can be a sense of disappointment, but that is very different from saying we don’t actually enjoy ourselves.”

And while holidays can be times of reduced stress, “That’s not to say no stress, which is often the expectation,” says Van Boven. “For most people, holidays involve spending time with close others, family and friends.” Sure, those relationships can carry their own challenges, “but most people enjoy spending time with friends and family more than they do spending time at work.”

Money can’t buy me love

The pressure to buy, Buy! BUY!! can be a major source of holiday stress, but a growing body of evidence shows that ’tis truly “better to give than to receive.” In a 2008 study, Elizabeth Dunn, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, gave college students either $5 or $20, and directed them to spend it on themselves, or on a charitable donation or a gift by 5 p.m.

That night, the students who gave away the money reported a higher level of happiness, and the real kicker was being with the beneficiary, Dunn adds. “We did not say you have to give it and walk away. A lot of people took a friend for lunch or bought a toy for a younger sibling.”

The curious thing is that this preference does not operate at the conscious level, Dunn says. Most people think that it make them happier to receive $20 to spend on themselves, she says. “It’s not that they love to give, but when we give them those amounts to spend on someone else, they are more happy.”

For a 2010 study,¹ Dunn put players through a game that allowed them to donate money to another player, and found that the stingy players had less positive emotions, more negative emotions, and higher levels of both shame and stress hormones.

Not so bad after all?

If we’re getting the picture that giving reasonable gifts and hanging out with friends and family make the holidays less painful than medieval dentistry, that’s the message we got from a rare study of Christmas happiness. In 2002, Tim Kasser of Knox College (Illinois) found that a 57 percent of a small sample said Christmas was not stressful.

That, Kasser told us by email, is still a “reasonably high level of stress … around the midpoint of the scale.” Women and people who focused on spending had higher levels of stress.

Yet Christmas may still be “merry,” Kasser wrote. “While levels of life satisfaction and negative emotions were more or less the same as what people report at other times of the year, people do report somewhat higher levels of pleasant emotions during Xmas.”

The study² found more satisfaction among people who focused on family time and took part in religious activities, and less among those who focused on consumption.

“It seems that connecting with others and with something ‘bigger than yourself’ promotes higher levels of well-being; that’s consistent with past research, as is the finding the materialism undermines well-being,” Kasser wrote. “It is not much fun to be fighting the crowds and most research shows that shopping is rarely an inherently engaging and interesting activity.”

(You’ve got to) Accentuate the positive

All of these observations seem to explain why the winter holidays have survived the headlines about holiday horrors. “The big three holidays are good ways of maximizing those things that we tend find most enjoyable, and probably go a long way toward explaining why they are so powerful emotionally, why they persist,” says Van Boven.

One way to cut holiday stress, Van Boven says, “Is to think about what we value in the holidays, what really matters, and then try to behave in way that reflects those values. Often that kind of exercise can be extremely transformative, will get you out of the gift-giving rat race, and more toward the development of social engagement.”

Dunn adds that giving can be more emotionally satisfying when it involves personal contact. “When you have the opportunity to give so you can see the positive impact, that’s when the potential happiness benefit of Christmas giving is greatest. If your mother-in-law loves pedicures, you could buy her a gift certificate, but I think the research shows that it’s better to make the appointment and go with her. That’s the critical piece. If you can turn the gift into an opportunity for social connection, that’s going to maximize the benefit.”

In New York and Pennsylvania, a technique that splits rock so natural gas can flow is pitting environmentalists against industry and neighbor against neighbor.

In areas distant from the surge of natural gas drilling that has swept western states over the past 20 years or so, high-pressure fracturing, or “fracking,” has raised a fundamental question: Can a huge supply of deep natural gas be developed without harming rural landscapes and poisoning the groundwater that most people drink?

Nationwide, fracking is now used not only to liberate gas from shale, but also to boost production in the majority of oil and gas wells. In an era of energy shortages, it’s difficult to dismiss a massive new supply of natural gas, the cleanest fossil fuel, and the gas industry is quick to position fracking as a key to jobs, prosperity and energy security.

But critics charge that fracking pollutes water and causes excess noise, truck traffic and health hazards. They reject the conversion of rural landscapes into what they call “industrial landscapes.”

Update Dec. 9, 2011: On Dec. 8, the Associated Press reported on an Environmental Protection Agency finding “that compounds likely associated with fracking chemicals had been detected in the groundwater beneath Pavillion, a small community in central Wyoming where residents say their well water reeks of chemicals.” Despite the differences in geology and fracking technology between Wyoming and the eastern gas deposits, the finding adds fuel to the contention that fracking can harm groundwater. End update.

The middle ground on the fracking debate seems as lonely as the far side of moon. But could both sides have some valid arguments? And if so, where do we go from here?

Context for the contest

Natural gas was once flared off as junk at oil wells, but it began to enter the energy markets in the 1920s. By now, it’s one of the big three sources of energy in the United States, alongside coal and oil.

Ten or 15 years ago, rising prices heralded a shortage of natural gas, a clean fossil fuel containing mostly methane that has become a major energy source for electricity and home heating over the past 50 years or so.

Those prices helped spark a two-legged technological revolution composed of fracking and horizontal drilling. Fracturing rock allows gas to flow. Horizontal drilling allows one well to tap a profitable volume of a thin, gas-rich wafer of deep shale.

The power of this combination is evident in the frenzy to lock up land above the Marcellus shale, a rock body that underlies parts of Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio and West Virginia, and in the rising estimates for future gas production.

At the same time, “fracking” has become the “brand name” for more generalized opposition to gas drilling, and the debate is confused by the fact that many people use “fracking” as shorthand for new gas development rather than the process that breaks rock so gas can flow. This matters: Although fracking fluids can pose a hazard to groundwater, many gas wells contain other fluids that may carry radiation or other nasties that must be removed before the gas is shipped to its destination.

This “produced water” can be hazardous in its own right.

Down Pennsylvania way

Today, the biggest shale-gas development is in the Barnett Shale, around Fort Worth, Texas, site of more than 10,000 wells. But the hottest political debate concerns the Marcellus shale. The Marcellus was consolidated from mud about 390 million years ago into a fine-grained sedimentary rock that trapped methane produced during the decay of organic matter. The low-oxygen conditions protected the methane from oxidation.

The Marcellus shale lies an average of two kilometers deep, far below the groundwater that feeds home and municipal water wells. With an average thickness of about 30 meters, the Marcellus contains an estimated 295 to 2,700 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

If 10 percent of that gas can be recovered, this amounts to one to 10 years of supply for the United States, which used 21 trillion cubic feet in 2006. ¹

Fracking has been dividing communities in the East, which has seen little of the vast energy development of the West. While some landowners and businesses profit from leases and economic activity related to gas development, others fear for the safety of their well water, streams and air.

Today, much of the concern about fracking focuses on drinking water. According to Food & Water Watch, toxic chemicals in fracking fluid can contaminate water via spills, accidents, improper disposal or poor well construction. Natural gas has entered drinking water, the group notes, during “more than 1,000 documented cases of water contamination near drilling sites around the country.”

Photo: Helen Slottje

This drill worked in Dimock, Penna.

In areas with many gas wells, groundwater pollution cannot easily be traced to a particular well, and it takes some effort to trace the pollution to gas drilling itself. But widespread groundwater pollution can also be virtually impossible to reverse.

One of the more notorious cases occurred in Dimock, a Marcellus-shale town in northeastern Pennsylvania. After drilling started in 2008, 18 private water wells became polluted with methane and other chemicals, turning dishes brown and, according to a press report, residents reported getting sick from drinking the water, or even showering under it.

On Dec. 15, 2010, Cabot Oil and Gas Corp. signed a consent agreement with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection regarding 18 polluted water wells in Dimock. Cabot agreed to suspend drilling, plug and abandon three gas wells, supply drinking water to 18 houses, test home well water, and “comply with all applicable environmental laws and regulations” when it resumed drilling and fracking in the area.

The Department concluded, but Cabot disputed, that the company had engaged in “unlawful conduct.”

Let a thousand wells bloom!

New York City continues to oppose fracking in its prized watershed in the Catskill Mountains. And fracking opponents scored a victory on Nov. 18, when the Delaware River Basin Commission declined to move forward on a decision to allow fracking in the Basin. Opponents had warned that up to 20,000 gas wells in the area would threaten water supplies for millions.

Many billions are at stake in the debate over shale gas, which ConocoPhillips expects to account for almost half of U.S. natural gas production by 2035. The petroleum giant credits shale gas for a 110 percent rise in U.S. natural gas reserves and resources between 2000 and 2009.

What is fracking?

Hydrofracturing, or fracking, is a stage of “well completion” that follows drilling. Briefly, drillers bore through the surface, insert steel casing and concrete to seal the hole against groundwater, and drill deeper into the rock, repeatedly adding pipe and cement if needed to seal the well from the surrounding rock.

As the drill approaches the gas-bearing shale, it is “steered” into a horizontal direction, then forced through the source rock for hundreds of meters or more. Once the drilling is completed, holes are punched in the lower casing and millions of gallons of frack fluid are pumped into the well at roughly 1,000 times atmospheric pressure.

After some of that frack fluid is withdrawn, production can begin, as gas rises under the influence of the immense pressure belowground. At the surface, produced water and frack fluid are removed before the gas is piped to market.

Fracking in the history books?

The gas industry often meets questions about the environmental aspects of fracking by asking, essentially, “What’s new?” “The history of fracturing technology’s safe use in America extends all the way back to the Truman administration, with more than 1.2 million wells completed via the process since 1947,” says the industry group Energy in Depth.

But fracking “was a rare process” at first, says Geoffrey Thyne of the Enhanced Oil Recovery Institute at the University of Wyoming. For 20 years it usually used water measured in the tens of thousands of gallons (not millions like today) and sometimes sand, says Thyne. But in the 1990s, drillers in Wyoming “did a giant frack. Suddenly the amount of [frack] fluid jumped 10 or 20 times, and suddenly a whole class of resources that was labeled unconventional became accessible.”

Let’s do the definitions:

Thyne notes that in contrast to conventional gas, shale gas requires “a lot more development, more wells and infrastructure, to get the same bang for the buck, and that creates a lot of friction with landowners.”

Jonah, an unconventional gas field in Wyoming “has a well on every 10 acres,” says Thyne, who teaches petroleum geology and hydrogeology. “If you flew over it, it looks like a moonscape, there’s an incredible amount of development. If you bring that into areas that have not had development, people are going to be put back on their heels: ‘What the heck?’”

As the economic benefits of fracking were proven, it became the rule for oil and gas. Over the last 20 years, Thyne says, “we went from a period where one well in 100 would be fracked, maybe one time each, to now, where 90 percent of all gas and oil wells are fracked, and the number of frackings per well has gone from one to as many as 25, done over a period of several months.”

But that growth is both normal and desirable, says Felmy. “Absolutely, it’s been a wonderful development of technology, and like all technology, it takes time to ramp up. Fortunately, [as a result] a bright spot for consumers is the low price of natural gas today.”

Let the debate begin

The impact of fracturing and horizontal drilling is evident in a new estimate from the U.S. Department of Energy, which places the national gas resource at 110 years of current consumption (although by definition not all of a fossil-fuel “resource” can be recovered).

Projections about future production are inherently debatable because the economical amount of any energy resources depends on future prices. Internal emails from the U.S. Energy Information Administration have suggested that estimates of production and profit in the shale-gas boom exhibit signs of “irrational exuberance.”

In 1996, Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, used that to describe the “dot-com market bubble.

Natural gas has environmental benefits over coal and oil, including a reduced greenhouse-warming impact. To release the same amount of heat, oil and especially coal release more carbon dioxide than methane.

We have seen an April, 2011 study claiming heavy releases of heat-trapping methane from fracking and drilling make natural gas worse than coal for the climate. Although critics have questioned the study on the ground that the massive releases are both dangerous and uneconomical, methane is clearly entering the atmosphere at some gas operations.

Ozone, which damages the lungs and triggers asthma attacks, forms when sunlight strikes hydrocarbons released from a gas or oil well. The Environmental Protection Agency is studying ozone and smog at a gas field in Wyoming.

In a tight economy, jobs and taxes are big allures of gas drilling. Some landowners have profited mightily by leasing land to gas firms. In 2009, an industry-financed study reported that 622,000 people are directly involved in the discovery, extraction and distribution of natural gas in the United States, and the industry had an estimated, direct economic impact of $170 billion.

Concerns and open questions

There are plenty of concerns about the intensified gas extraction enabled by hydro-fracturing. Beyond the worries about noise, traffic, and the “industrial landscape,” there are other concerns.

Seven hours after fracturing began, more than 50 shallow earthquakes occurred within 3.5 kilometers of a gas-drilling operation in Oklahoma, in January, 2011. According to the Oklahoma Geological Survey, “The strong correlation in time and space as well as a reasonable fit to a physical model suggest that there is a possibility these earthquakes were induced by hydraulic-fracturing,” but added that this is “impossible to say with a high degree of certainty… “

Fluid chemistry

Frack fluid, the liquid used to pressurize and crack underground rocks, is a major concern about fracking. Water, an incompressible liquid, and sand, used to hold open the fractures created by the immense pressure, are said to comprise more than 99 percent of fracking fluid. But the fluid can also contain hundreds of other chemicals to fight bacteria or rust, or to change how the water flows.

Some of the additives are common and low-toxicity, but others, like diesel fuel, are poisonous.

And many are unknown, held as trade secrets. According to an April, 2011 report from Democrats on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, “Between 2005 and 2009, the 14 oil and gas service companies used more than 2,500 hydraulic fracturing products containing 750 chemicals and other components. Overall, these companies used 780 million gallons of hydraulic fracturing products – not including water added at the well site – between 2005 and 2009.”

The safer components of frack fluid included salt and citric acid, the Democrats wrote, but some components “were extremely toxic, such as benzene and lead.” Methanol, a hazardous air pollutant and human poison, was “the most widely used chemical … used in 342 hydraulic fracturing products.”

To counter suspicion about these chemicals, the industry recently established Frac Focus, a public database on chemicals used in particular wells. Participation is voluntary.

Wastewater disposal

Used fracking fluid needs safe disposal. “We are talking a substantial volume, millions of gallons per well,” Thyne says, “and one-half to one-third of the fracking fluid comes back, and has to be disposed of.”

Gas from many wells contains a second liquid, called “produced water,” that also needs disposal.

“In classic, conventional petroleum, they can reinject everything back into the reservoir,” says Thyne, “but they can’t do that with unconventional gas [because the rock formation is not porous], so we have a sudden surge in material that has to be treated and disposed of; that’s been a real challenge.”

Some of the liquids have been trucked to municipal wastewater plants, which are designed to remove biological waste, not the components of frack fluid.

One of those components, naturally occurring radioactivity, has sparked a flurry of interest among Pennsylvania and federal environmental regulators. The source is radium in the deep rocks; the hazard occurs if this water is released into surface water or groundwater.

Yet as so often in the fracking fracas, much remains in dispute, including whether radioactivity is elevated in rivers that receive fracking wastewater.

Contaminated water emerging from gas wells is often stored in a wastewater pit near the well site, and these pits have been linked to groundwater pollution, as EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said in June, 2011. “It gets put in these ginormous huge pools and sits there, and that is a source of contamination all by itself, and so we need to determine how to stop that from happening.”

Wasted by the water

In some states, this wastewater can be spread on land, but a 2011 study² demonstrated that the practice can kill plants.

When 303,000 liters of fracking fluid were spread on 0.2 hectares of experimental forest, tree leaves started to brown and curl within 10 days, and 56 percent of the trees were dead within two years. Every surviving tree was harmed.

The research suggested that high levels of salts – calcium and sodium chlorides – was causing the damage. Several states, including Colorado and West Virginia, permit land application, and the test application was below West Virginia’s limits.

Industry is starting to recycle fracking fluid to reduce environmental contamination, but that’s no panacea, Thyne says. “You can recycle to a certain extent, once or twice. By that time, you’ve got to treat the water to get it back to where it was before you put in new additive. Recycling buys you a little time, but it’s not an end game.”

Mad about methane

Although industry argues that not a single case of water contamination has been conclusively attributed to fracking, methane and other contaminants are appearing in drinking water and near-surface geology after the drill-and-frack sequence.

State investigators traced a house explosion in 2007 in Geauga County, Ohio, to a faulty cementing job on a nearby gas well. After the well was fractured, gas pressure built up inside it and nearby rock formations before being released into basements. One house was seriously damaged and 19 were evacuated, but there were no injuries.

In a 2011 study ³ of 68 residential wells in Marcellus shale in Pennsylvania and New York, Robert Jackson of the Center on Global Change at Duke University found, on average, more than 17 times as much methane in wells that were located within one kilometer of a natural-gas well.

As many as 1 million Pennsylvania households rely on private wells for water, the study noted, and in general, the wells are unregulated and untested.

Jackson says the study found no evidence that fracking fluid had contaminated the water wells. “But we see the gas as a warning sign. If methane is leaking, chances are that other things are leaking too.”

The Jackson study was flawed by “a lack of baseline data,” according to Reid Porter, a spokesperson for the American Petroleum Institute. “Most critical: The authors don’t have hard data to show how much methane surfaces on its own in northeastern Pennsylvania. They cite ‘historical sources’ but don’t say how far back those sources go or exactly what the sources are. … Without more data it’s impossible to distinguish between methane emitted naturally and/or from coal mining and methane released by fracturing.”

A baseline would be nice, but the Jackson study did succeed in finding a significant elevation in methane levels closer to gas wells, and isotopic analysis traced that methane to the Marcellus shale, rather than decay of biomass at shallow levels.

Finding a way

So how is methane reaching water wells from deep shale? It could be rising thousands of feet through existing or newly stimulated cracks in the rock, Jackson says, “but the most likely explanation is poor well construction, cementing or casing.”

Petroleum expert Thyne agrees with that explanation, which “means it’s a mechanical issue that can be dealt with.”

Here, at least, API is in agreement. “The energy industry recognizes that well construction is key to community safety,” Porter wrote us. “That’s why API members have developed five documents that specifically and proactively address well construction and environmental protection practices during hydraulic fracturing.”

When API maintains that fracking groundwater has never been polluted by fracturing fluid, it cites two studies:

Industry is fond of quoting EPA administrator Jackson telling Congress that there has never been a documented case where fracking polluted drinking water, but she implied in June, 2011 that such certainty had not been possible: “There are chemicals in the frack water, and until recently, even today, companies don’t have to disclose them, and we at EPA are exempt from regulating them, except for diesel.”

Because gas wells are much deeper than shallow aquifers, Jackson said groundwater pollution can be prevented by attention to the details of drilling, casing, cementing and closing. “If you get a bad operator, someone who is not responsible, who is not seeing how important it is to get this right, they can contaminate an aquifer … so there need to be some standards.”

Is the enemy fracking, gas drilling — or neither?

The gas industry fears legislation that would ban fracking, says Felmy, and it also believes that some of the opposition comes from “anti-fossil-fuel folks who have discovered that a tenet of their opposition, that we are running out of fossil fuels, is suddenly not true. With the technology developments we have, we can produce a vast amount.”

Yet behind all the protest and controversy, there is some constructive movement. Pennsylvania passed an improved well casing standard in February, 2011, so “it’s quite possible that that will go a long way to fixing problems in newer wells,” says Jackson of Duke. New York has not decided whether or how to allow hydraulic fracturing.

In November, the U.S. EPA announced plans for a study of any relationship between hydraulic fracturing and drinking water, with initial results due in 2012. That’s in addition to ozone studies related to gas extraction.

Some changes are likely in the shale-gas industry, Thyne says. “It’s got a lot of newcomers, it’s very much a gold-rush mentality where the profit margins are low. As the industry matures, it will shake out and the big boys will tend to self-regulate both production and environmental standards.”

Oil and gas are secretive industries, and the voluntary website listing chemicals in fracking fluid is a step toward openness. “The public said, ‘If this is not a problem, why won’t you tell us?’” says Thyne. “I sometimes feel the [energy] companies treat the public a bit like children: ‘You don’t want all these details, you just want to put gas into your car.’ But when the well is in your backyard, you want that information. Half the problem will be going away if they are transparent.”

Porter, of the American Petroleum Institute, says, “Disclosure is something we are very much in favor of.”

In deep water?

Just 19 months ago, the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11, releasing 4.9 million barrels of crude oil, and reminding us that fossil-fuel development can go horribly wrong. Stories from the gas fields remind us that polluted groundwater is difficult or impossible to clean up, even when money is available. Houses atop polluted aquifers are difficult or impossible to sell.

And so the choice is simple: ban fracking, and accept a rising price for energy, or do gas production right, even if that takes more time.

It’s trite but true: Time is money when you are running a gas drilling rig, but haste makes waste. “The Deepwater accident happened because people were in a hurry,” says Jackson of Duke. “I think there is tremendous pressure to move drilling rigs along in the Marcellus. There aren’t enough drill rigs … . The cause of problems here is likely the same as it was with BP: haste.”

Best management practices and standards are important, says Jackson, “but people have to follow them day after day in the field, when they are in a hurry and when nobody is watching, and that does not always happen.”

– David J. Tenenbaum

Among all animals, amphibians are in the worst shape; fully 30 percent are classified as threatened or endangered. Amphibians – including frogs, toads and salamanders — are under attack by a deadly fungus. They are losing habitat to farms and cities, and collected as food or pets. Amphibians are suffering from chemical pollution and the warming climate.

The present is harsh enough, but the future seems worse.

This week, Nature publishes the first global attempt to forecast the impact of three big threats to amphibians by 2080 – a year chosen to be one century after the study’s baseline data.

By comparing areas with plenty of amphibian species with projections of climate change, land use change and the chytridiomycosis fungus, the researchers forecast a grim future for these cold-blooded, four-legged vertebrates. “The bad news is that more than two-thirds of all high-richness regions will probably be affected, to a high intensity, by one of these three threats,” said lead author Christian Hof, who did the work as a Ph.D. student and post-doctoral fellow at the University of Copenhagen.

The geographic study of data on 5,527 amphibian species found little overlap between the cool, moist areas afflicted by fungal serial killer chytridiomycosis, and the places likely to suffer the worst effects of changes in climate and land use.

And the losers win!

In forecasting the future of amphibians, the study coined two technical terms: “losers” — species that are expected to suffer due to disease or changes in climate or land use, and the less numerous “winners,” which are expected to prosper by 2080.

The projection hinged on whether an expected change would make a habitat more or less suitable to the species, says Hof, who’s now at the Biodiversity and Climate Research Center in Frankfurt, Germany. “We ran a number of climate-change models and based on them, calculated a change in climate suitability for each region across the globe.”

Based on these changes in suitability due to climate, land use and disease, Hof adds, “We calculated the number of species that would probably decline due to a decline in habitat suitability. We classify the species as a loser in a particular region, but that does not mean it will decline across its whole range.”

Overall, the researchers found an increasingly dire future for amphibians. For example, 54 percent of frogs are likely to be “climate losers” in the average grid cell of their model. And heavy impacts are projected for about two-thirds of the regions with the highest species richness in frogs and salamanders.

In fact, the future could be even worse, since the study ignored a number of potentially damaging factors, including chemical pollution from cities, factories and agriculture.

Photo: Robert Fletcher, Ohlone Preserve Conservation Bank

Tougher times might await this prowling California tiger salamander, an endangered California native.

Going down!

It’s frustrating but understandable that the study could not predict rates of decline among amphibians. “For many species, we are not sure about the actual distribution, many have tiny ranges and we don’t know where they occur, so we can’t relate historic changes to, say, climate change. We were very careful not to predict extinctions, based on these uncertainties.”

Data are scarce in the study of amphibians, agrees Anna Pidgeon, an assistant professor of forest and wildlife ecology at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s frustrating, amphibians are out at night, often in remote areas, they are small and many are cryptic, so it’s a huge challenge” to understand their populations and ecologies. “We work with the best data we have all the time … and try to make inferences from what we know about close relatives.”

Pidgeon, an expert on habitat needs of vertebrates, says predicting 70 years into the future is always dicey, but that the study’s analysis of multiple threats and global scope are major accomplishments. “They did a lot of things to make sure they were using consensus data, and that makes it a pretty solid approach.”

Although the study looked at overlapping threats, it did not actually look at interactions between those threats, Hof says. “What needs to be done, and we could not do that with our model, is to look at, for example, how climate change would affect susceptibility to the fungus. How would habitat fragmentation affect susceptibility to climate change?”

Although the study does not suggest practical changes that could sustain amphibians in the short run, “The general conclusion is that it’s very important, when thinking about the future for amphibians, to consider different threats together,” says Hof. “Just looking at one threat will not give us the whole picture.”

– David J. Tenenbaum

Twelve years on, and another billion people are sharing the planet.

Starting half a century ago, the Green Revolution doubled or tripled production of the major grains, using modern seeds, heavy use of fertilizer and irrigation. The revolution helped India and China to feed themselves and averted widespread starvation.

Today, an estimated billion people go to bed hungry. Hundreds of millions are stunted by poor nutrition. And by 2025 another billion people will want to know what’s for dinner…

What to do?

After World War II, agronomist Norman Borlaug played a role in founding international farm research stations that invented and distributed seeds and technologies to Latin America and Asia, with a focus on the big three crops: rice, wheat and corn (maize).

The green revolution that resulted gave a dramatic boost to farm production. But population continues to rise, and funding for food projects tapered off after the initial gains were realized.

The green revolution averted massive starvation “in some situations, but in others, especially Africa, it failed terribly,” says James Lassoie, a professor of natural resources at Cornell University, and leader of Agriculture Bridge, which attempts to harmonize agriculture with conservation.

Small could be beautiful

As the green-revolution research organizations continue working on high-yield crops, a newer approach to raising food production is emerging that concentrates on methods and technologies that can be built and maintained locally.

For reasons related to economics, environment, and efficient technology transfer, the new projects have steered away from large-scale provision of food, equipment, seeds and fertilizer, and toward social and environmental goals. Many projects work in Africa, where food and population problems are most acute, and with women, who do most of the farming.

Although few would discount the role of high-yield seeds in feeding seven billion, “Economic development needs to support both environmental protection and livelihoods,” Lassoie says. “Technologies are not going to help if they don’t also deal with the social and political dynamics.”

Our look at a few of these projects only offer an educated scanning of the horizon. We neither visited these projects nor possess a crystal ball, and so can neither vouch for their results nor predict the end game. But farmers are smart people who gravitate to things that work — if they fit the local culture, economy and environment.

Enough introductory blather. Let’s take a look!

Progress on one acre in Kenya and Rwanda

Africa’s agriculture is dominated by “small-holders,” people who work an acre or two, mainly with family labor, and are an increasing focus of attention in the effort to feed ourselves.

Services are loans, not gifts, and as is common with micro-lenders, borrowers join small groups that guarantee each loan. One Acre says 99 percent of its loans are repaid.

The fund’s advisors offer farming advice during weekly visits that emphasize profitability as much as productivity. For example, because prices are usually lowest during the harvest, the advisors suggest that farmers hold on to their crops for a few months.

One Acre says its growing and marketing strategies double the average farmer’s income, allowing small-holders to pay school fees and buy land to improve family income and food security. One Acre is reaching 55,000 families in Kenya and Rwanda, and aims to enroll 150,000 families by 2013.

Fish, water and wetland in Uganda

The realization that healthy ecosystems improve water quality and store carbon from the atmosphere has spawned a system called “payment for ecosystem services.” After all, if people downstream are getting clean water or hydroelectric power from a well-forested watershed, that should be worth paying for…

It’s a simple concept that conceals any number of complexities, but these payments do bring in outside money that can support environmental improvements.

In densely populated southwestern Uganda, the organization Nature Harness Initiatives is combining payment for ecosystem services with collaborative management to protect the environment of a wetland in the Kanyabaha-Rushebeya region.

The wetland provides fish for food, bees for honey, and fiber for thatch, mats and baskets, but farming and deforestation by people trying to make a living are causing serious soil erosion, harming the wetland and its many human and non-human residents.

Although baseline data on water quality is short, Nature Harness is convinced that it’s program works, and can be expanded to regions with similar problems.

Growing new farmers in Uganda

In Uganda – and elsewhere — farming is often seen as an occupation best suited to school dropouts and people who cannot afford college. Could interesting the younger generation of Ugandans in growing vegetables reverse this trend?

Through the Project for Developing Innovations in School Cultivation, more than 1,100 children in at least 31 schools have transformed schoolyards into gardens as they learn to grow local crops with traditional and environmentally-minded methods.

Project DISC was inaugurated in 2006 to combat rising food shortages and preserve Uganda’s culinary traditions. By allowing children to experience growing, tasting and cooking fruits and vegetables, it is cultivating a generation that values agriculture and quality, local food.

(The whole setup reminds us of the U.S. urban farming movement.)

The farming lessons includes methods for sustainably growing crops in Uganda’s increasingly hostile climate, as the children learn about raised gardens, drip irrigation and drought-tolerant crops.

Project DISC does face obstacles, such as Uganda’s staggering population growth and declining soil fertility. All the more reason to encourage young Ugandans to see agriculture as a respectable livelihood, rather than a last-resort job.

Community grazing rights in Mongolia

In land-locked Mongolia, 2.7 million people coexist with about 10 times as many horses, cattle, sheep, goats and camels. The people of Mongolia have followed their animals for centuries, living a nomadic life in portable shelters called gers.

This windy, dry and cold land exists at the mercy of the weather; the harsh winter of 2010 killed 20 percent of the country’s livestock. Meanwhile, overgrazing is promoting erosion and making the pastures less productive, while the Gobi Desert encroaches from the South.

It’s a classic case of the “Tragedy of the commons,” the idea that resources owned by all are protected by none.

To avert tragedy, Mongolia is experimenting with “co-management,” a system for making joint decisions about the grasslands to maximize benefits and prevent long-term degradation. In co-management, groups of herders contract with the government to assume the regulation and protection of tracts of land. Contracts are adapted as needed during annual renegotiations.

The result has been a reduction in herd size and an attempt to breed better animals to maximize profits from a resources that is now managed with an eye to community prosperity. Evaluations say the process is raising family incomes by 5 to 10 percent annually, and the idea is catching on elsewhere in Mongolia and Central Asia.

Banking on the harvest in Niger

In many lands with poor people and marginal agriculture, the months before harvest are called the “hunger season.” In Niger, in the dry Sahel region just south of the Sahara Desert, the hunger season has been exacerbated by droughts and locusts.

Niger is second to last in the United Nations Human Development Index.

Micro-lending is catching on as a way to fight poverty, but there’s a twist in Niger: Instead of lending money, the Project for the Promotion of Local Initiative for Development in Aguie lends grain through “soudure” (pre-harvest) banks.

The cooperative buys grain from local farmers, and lends it when needed at 25 percent interest, a fraction of what moneylenders charge.

By the middle of 2010, about 168 soudure banks, managed by over 50,000 women, were storing enough millet – a local staple grain — to feed 350,000 people for at least a month. That storehouse helped villagers survive the hunger season (see #38) during the spike in global food prices in 2008.

Beating hillside erosion in Yunnan, China

After a devastating flood in 1998 in Southwest China (blamed largely on deforestation of steep slopes), a new reforestation project focused on planting trees that generate income. (Reforestation projects can drive farmers and herders from their land by planting trees that may offer long-term environmental advantages but do not provide income to local people.)

The World Agroforestry Center has sponsored a different approach to reforestation on a 42-square-kilometer watershed in Yunnan Province. The project began with a collaborative design process that focused on using trees for food, forage or other purposes.

Walnut trees provide edible nuts. Beneath the trees, medicinal herbs are planted as a cash crop. Women may spend four hours a day collecting firewood, but new fermentation devices transform pig dung into biogas for cooking.

Although the project is said to be working on the small scale, and is producing enough income so parents can send kinds to school, these techniques will only provide a meaningful benefit once they are applied more broadly.

WFARM-TV in Benin

Rice, a staple crop and food through much of southern Asia and tropical Africa, is usually grown on small farms. To stimulate and propagate farmer creativity, Africa Rice develops short videos with significant input from local farmers, and distributes them across the rice-growing region.

Farmers are inherently interested in the ideas of other farmers, and seeing their innovations legitimizes farmer experiments and leads to further improvements.

The 10- to 20-minute videos cover such topics as preparing land, transplanting seedlings, managing weeds and harvesting the rice. AfricaRice distributes the videos through farmer associations; the farmers line up the video equipment and stage the screenings, which are often held outdoors.

By 2009, 11 videos were available to communities in Africa; some have been translated into more than 30 African languages and/or been transcribed for radio broadcast.

– David J. Tenenbaum

Seven viewpoints

Introduction

Katharine Hayhoe

Richard Alley

John Nielsen-Gammon

John Williams

Michael Notaro

Kent McGregor

Kevin Trenberth

Drought and searing heat in Texas: Is this the face of global warming?

Courtesy Eric Bruning, Texas Tech University Atmospheric Science

The cold front that blew through Lubbock, Texas on Oct. 17 raised a dust storm not seen since the 1930s Dust Bowl. The dust storm, seen in this movie, is called a “haboob,” an event more common to Saudi Arabia than Texas.

On Oct. 17, a cold front blowing through Lubbock, Tex. raised a red dust cloud that recalled the awesome Dust Bowl of the 1930s, an epoch of drought, enormous dust storms, poverty and social upheaval that depopulated the Great Plains.

The 2011 dust storm served as an exclamation point on a cruel Texan summer, with drought, wildfires, and temperature records that would not quit. On Oct. 19, the Lower Colorado River Authority, source of much water in the Southwest, warned customers that the drought was likely to force another 20 percent cut in water supplies.

On Oct. 18, Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst instructed the state legislature to study drought-related problems like helping homeowners protect against fire, and ensuring that utilities would get enough water to cool their generators.

As far as we could tell, the multi-pronged assignment did not mention something that many observers think contributes to heat waves, fires and droughts: climate change.

Many recent “natural” disasters have raised the same question: Is the no-sense-denying-it-any-longer human-caused planetary warming intensifying devastating hurricanes, giant rainfalls and snowfalls, or the deadly heat waves in Europe (2003) or Russia (2010)?

Despite political skepticism in the United States, the scientific study of changing climates has grown exponentially for 20 years. In 2009, almost 14,000 research reports focused on climate change, and 20 scientific journals are devoted to the issue.

UPDATED NOV. 18: Today, the New York Times reported that a United Nations panel has concluded that “At least some of the weather extremes being seen around the world are consequences of human-induced climate change and can be expected to worsen in coming decades. It is likely that greenhouse gas emissions related to human activity have already led to more record-high temperatures and fewer record lows, as well as to greater coastal flooding and possibly to more extremes of precipitation, the report said.”

Enough introductory blather. Let’s ask some experts: Is the hot, dry weather in Texas a reflection of global warming? Or is it just proof that the essence of weather is its natural variability? The Why Files talked to seven climate scientists. Peruse their viewpoints in the box above.

With little notice until recently, a shortage of medicine is starting to impair treatment at America’s hospitals. Common, cheap and necessary drugs needed to fight bacteria or cancer, to ease pain or to nourish premature infants are running out.

Many of these meds are injectables, which must be made under sterile conditions. All are generics, which sell for pennies compared to the buck-buster drugs that feed the bottom lines at the big-name drug companies.

Most shortages are unnanounced until a wholesaler’s shipment arrives lacking an ordered drug. “It’s unbelievable,” says Sara Shull, manager of the drug policy program at the University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics in Madison. “Today I was trying figure out alternatives to papaverin,” an old drug used to prevent spasm in the many surgeries that involve grafting a blood vessel. “We have identified some alternatives, and I am now I working with the surgeon to figure out how to dose them, how to apply them. Is it bathed on? Sprayed on? He’s busy, we’re all busy, and sorting this all out takes a lot of time. The continual need to find replacements gives me a headache.”

Shortage-induced substitution played a role in Alabama, where nine hospital patients were killed by intravenous nutrients this summer, says Allen Vaida, executive vice president of the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, a non-profit that targets medicine hazards. “Because of a shortage, this compounding pharmacy was making a product from raw material, and it got a bacterial contamination.” (The maker of the nutrient solution, Meds IV pharmacy in Birmingham, Ala., is apparently out of business.)

Medications on this rack will restock a robot that fills individual patient envelopes that will be sent tomorrow to nurses’ stations in the hospital. Actually, the robot restocks itself in its 24/7 delivery of thousands of prescription drugs.

Photo: The Why Files

ENLARGE

Source: U.S. House of Representatives

Shortages are growing, especially for injectable medicines.

Running long on shortages

Pharmacists have always had to find substitute medicines, as patients keep coming through the door, but Vaida cites Food and Drug Administration numbers to argue that shortages are now at “crisis” proportions. “The FDA shows 70 shortages in 2006, 129 in 2007 and last year, there were 211. So far this year, we are already above 200 shortages, and the year isn’t done. Shortages have been around forever, but they have never reached this number.”

Some drugs can be substituted, says Vaida, but “especially with chemotherapy and nutritional products, it’s not like are three alternatives for some medications, as there are with blood-pressure drugs. Some chemotherapies are specific for certain cancers, and if they are not available, you may have no alternative or [you] may have to use a third-line alternative.”

The pharmaceutical situation has never been more complicated, with more than 45,000 prescription drug products on the market, from about 1,400 manufacturers. Although we could not easily find numbers, drug shortages are also rising in the United Kingdom, where the supply situation is complicated by the restriction on exports within the European Union.

Shortages have many possible causes, but because manufacturers tend to be closed-mouthed, it’s not clear which problems are most momentous or easiest to solve:

How short is short?

A drug is considered “short” if a specific dosage and formulation is unavailable, and in some cases, a similar item can be substituted. But Shull says that’s still a problem in a big hospital. If a product that is normally purchased in a pre-loaded syringe is only available in a vial, University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics can no longer send a “unit of dose” to the nurse, and “that’s what the nurses are expecting,” Shull says.

Changing procedures complicate care and raise costs, Shull adds. “All our people are working in a complex system, with lives on the line. These shortages can be a recipe for increased errors.” Her hospital must dedicate one staffer to securing supplies of the common blood-thinner heparin, she says. Searching for alternate sources is less rewarding than studying the efficacy of various medication treatments, she adds. “It’s not what I was taught in pharmacy school, but when your back is up against the wall, you have no other options.”

Beyond impairing patient care, shortages have also become a major burden in medical research. Tests of new medicines, often set up to run at several hospitals nationwide, must give standardized meds to the treatment and control groups, and chaos can result when the drugs become unavailable. “These shortages are now affecting clinical trial options for patients with cancer,” Robert DiPaola, director of the Cancer Institute of New Jersey, told the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health on Sept. 23. “Due to the uncertainty of being able to obtain many of these drugs, enrollment of patients on clinical trials has been delayed or stopped in several of our trials.”

Howard Koh, assistant secretary of health and human services, reinforced that message to the committee: “Many of the cancer drugs in short supply … are mainstays of the anti-cancer arsenal, and were largely developed through federally funded research begun 20, 30, even 40 years ago. They are still essential to treatment and research,” he said. The National Cancer Institute is currently sponsoring 349 clinical trials that require these drugs, Koh added. “Taken together, these studies represent thousands of patients, as well as a significant federal investment in clinical trials research.”

At the same hearing, Mike Alkire, chief operating officer of Premier healthcare alliance, told Congress how widespread the shortages have become. In a recent Premier survey, 53 percent of hospital pharmacists said they had faced at least six shortages “that had the potential to cause a medication safety issue or an error in patient care.” And 34 percent of respondents said at least six shortages had “resulted in a delay or cancellation of a patient-care intervention.”

Premier estimates that the 2,500-plus non-profit U.S. hospitals in its membership pay an extra $66 million per year due to these shortages — which translates to $415 million at all U.S. hospitals.

Market going gray?

When the usual sources run dry, hospital pharmacists often get emails, faxes and phone calls from the “gray market,” sources outside the usual supply chain. In the summer of 2011, the Institute for Safe Medication Practices surveyed 549 hospitals and found that:

Alkire, of the Premier alliance, told Congress that the gray market is “appalling,” with an average markup of 650 percent. Forty-five percent of the offers were marked up at least 1,000 percent above normal price, and drugs for leukemia and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma were marked up 4,000 percent. “We saw similar markups for medicines for sedation during surgeries; to dilate veins and prevent brain or heart spasms; and to prevent damage during a heart attack,” Alkire said.

For these reasons, University Hospital at UW-Madison does not buy gray, says Shull, although it does buy from a wholesaler that seems to have supplies of drugs when nobody else does.

The gray market arouses suspicion: How do some firms know about shortages before anybody else? How do they obtain drugs when normal sources are short?

“There is speculation going on,” says Vaida. “Some secondary wholesalers may try to buy up some available drugs and sell them for higher prices. Often times, they are looking for people who need the product, and try to obtain it from whatever sources. Some are playing it almost like Wall Street, anticipating what may go on shortage — if two manufacturers have just consolidated, and there’s a generic product that is only going to be made by one of them.”

Cures for missing meds

Many measures have been proposed to ease the medication shortage:

Photo: Armin Kübelbeck

Generic, injectable drugs comprise the majority of shortages.

The FDA seems to be getting the message. In testimony to the subcommittee on Sept. 23, Koh claimed that the agency had already headed off 99 looming shortages in 2011, compared to 38 for all of 2010. But Koh added that today’s shortages “include standard therapies for the treatment of lung, breast, ovarian, testicular and colorectal cancers, as well as several types of lymphomas and leukemias.”

Sometimes, Koh said, common-sense, proven measures can sidestep shortages. “… the FDA was able to mitigate a shortage by allowing the use of a filter to safely remove foreign particles contained within vials of injectable drugs, averting the obvious risk to patients of having metal shavings or other particulate matter injected into their veins.”

A pessimist, of course, could say the higher number of averted shortages simply reflects the greater number of shortages overall.

At any rate, organizations concerned with shortages say they are in a vise. “From our members’ perspective, it’s become [a] crisis,” says Hill. “We are seeing shortages nationwide. We have been tracking this for about 10 years, but in the last few years, we’ve seen a spike in the numbers.”

Given the problem’s multiple and sometimes obscure, roots, Hill sees “no single solution, and that’s the troublesome part. Unfortunately we will be dealing with this for a while. But there are some things we can do. We’d like to establish a mandatory early-warning system, so a manufacturer that has a problem has to notify the FDA. The FDA says it has avoided 99 shortages in the past year when it had that information. When there are multiple sources, the FDA can reach out to other manufacturers and urge them to ramp up production.”

David J. Tenenbaum

Each year, as influenza season approaches, medical authorities must scramble to predict which strains of flu will be most important, and then to grow enough vaccine to inoculate the population. Why does this take so much time, and what are some alternative strategies that might speed the process?

Find the article:

Flu vaccine shortage

Discussion Questions

1. Discuss: How does the influenza virus benefit from having so many strains?
2. What are the key steps in the process for identifying and making flu vaccine?
3. How have scientists proposed to speed up this process?
4. What is the meaning of the “H” and “N” in the virus designations, and how do they help explain the activity of a virus?
5. How is a virus different from a bacterium?
6. Why is influenza so deadly in some years, and not others?

Lesson Plans/Activities

1. Bird flu, swine flu, ferret flu? The flu can be spread between all sorts of creatures. Explore the NCBI Influenza database to find out what kinds of animals have been the source of flu outbreaks. What factors cause diseases to spread from animals to humans?
2. Facebook status: Outbreak! Follow this lesson plan that teaches about epidemiology and contagious diseases using social media.
3. The flu through time. Have students research previous flu pandemics, such as the deadly 1918 outbreak. Have students identify the similarities and differences between these pandemics, including the specific strains of the flu and the symptoms they produced. Aside from vaccines, how can people help prevent the spread of the flu?

In Africa, elephants trample farms. Some traditional herders are prohibited from grazing their herds on land occupied by tourist-magnets like lions, leopards, giraffes and gazelles.

And buffalo, zebras and antelopes eat grass that could feed cattle.

In the East African savannas, the interactions between wildlife and the people whose livelihood depends on cows and goats, are complicated, critical and contentious.

Grazing is about the only way to make a living in this hot, dry land, but livestock and many wild herbivores eat similar vegetation.

And so the competition is obvious: How can a cow eat forage that a zebra ate first?

The question answers itself, and so nobody studied the issue.

Not so obvious after all

But in other realms, ecologists have found that organisms that seem to compete may actually aid each other. “We are just beginning to understand that the relationship between species is highly contextual,” says Truman Young, a professor of plant sciences at the University of California at Davis, “and this interaction includes competition and facilitation. Once, people thought if two species were similar, they always competed, but years ago, it became clear that facilitation exists in certain situations.”

Young is senior author of new study showing that in Kenya’s highland savannas, competition is partly offset by facilitation; although during the dry season wildlife steal food from the mouths of cattle, so to speak, the situation is reversed during the wet season.

When the rains come, wild ungulates (mammals with hooves), particularly zebras, seem to benefit cattle by eating fibrous, woody grasses and revealing the more delectable, higher-protein grasses beneath.

This gives cattle access to forage with more protein, and their wet-season weight gains nearly counterbalance the dry-season losses inflicted by wildlife.

Well done

The study was performed during 2007 and 2008, on nine fenced plots, or “exclosures,” each 4 hectares in size. The researchers placed four young, unbred females of an African breed called Boran on each plot for 16-week periods, and measured their eating habits and weight gain in three conditions:

First author Wilfred Odadi, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University and the African Wildlife Foundation, wrote us to explain that facilitation nearly equaled competition. “Wildlife-driven depression of cattle weight gain in the dry season is 35 to 40 percent. In the wet season, cattle put on weight faster by about the same percentage when they forage with wildlife.” The real-world situation, he added, would “depend on the lengths and frequencies of dry and wet seasons.”

This was the first experimental evidence that wildlife and livestock are engaged in facilitation and competition, Young says. “There is a basic-science excitement here. With this large-vertebrate system, we have shown that you can actually sometimes have competition and sometimes facilitation.”

It’s possible that the 15-year history of experiments on the site has changed the vegetation enough to weaken the results. But the continuous grazing of cattle kept the site’s vegetation similar to the surrounding savanna, Young says. “If we had excluded all large herbivores, the rangeland would become very different, and our inferences would be skewed. But because cattle are the dominant herbivores … the plots were not that different. My belief is if we had started the exclosures last year, we would have gotten the same result.”

What are the practical implications?

Killing wildlife, except for rogue animals, is illegal in Kenya, but it still happens, Odadi told us. “Because in Kenya wildlife belongs to the state, and not to the land owner, some livestock keepers still show a negative attitude towards wildlife because of perceived ‘detrimental’ effects on livestock including competition, livestock depredation and disease transmission. Some people react by fencing off their properties to keep wildlife away. There are also situations where water sources are fenced off by pastoralists to make them inaccessible to wildlife. In extreme cases, wild animals are actually killed, albeit illegally.”

And so in a region with unreliable rainfall and few resources, it’s good news for advocates of biodiversity conservation that the competition between domestic and wild ungulates, at least on savannas, may be more apparent than real.

Good news for conservation

Indeed, large mammal ecologist Johan du Toit of Utah State University, wrote in Science that the new information should eventually “provide managers with opportunities to capitalize on facilitative interactions, intervene against competitive ones, and enhance animal production overall.”

Rangeland managers often mix native and non-native plants, du Toit added. And after “bold experimentation and a break from orthodoxy,” a similar approach with animals could boost production while conserving biodiversity.

Odadi says better knowledge of cattle-wildlife interactions could support short-term changes, such as slaughtering or marketing livestock “at the end of the wet season, when they have recovered from competition in the preceding dry season, and also to minimize competitive effects (by reducing densities) in the next dry season.”

Conservationists in East Africa and elsewhere are seeking “to manage land for ecosystem biodiversity and short-term extractive value,” says Young, “but it’s pretty hard to find good examples, other than assertions about the profitability of ecotourism. We were able to show that wildlife and cattle have a complex interaction; that wildlife is not uniformly bad for cattle, and that allows us to be a little more lenient toward wildlife.”

– David J. Tenenbaum

Almost four years after the economy started sliding into the Great Recession, unemployment in the United States is still at 9.1 percent. On Sept. 1, the White House announced that it expected a 9 percent rate at least through the presidential election.

And on Sept. 13, the Labor Department revealed that the poverty rate had reached 15.1 percent, a rate not seen since 1993. A family of four must have income below $22,314 to qualify as poor.

Those numbers hide even more grievous problems: Among blacks, the rate is 16.7 percent, and among all Americans under age 24, it’s 18 percent.

And if you count discouraged workers, who have quit looking for a job, and part-time workers who would prefer full-time work, the rate soars to 16.2 percent — or 14 million Americans.

All this, and the average period of unemployment has stretched to 22.9 weeks.

Who is looking for work? It’s easier to ask who isn’t…. According to new research from the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire, men, single parents, young adults, and people with less education have been hit harder. Marybeth Mattingly, a research assistant professor of sociology who directs research on vulnerable families, says, “Jobs in manufacturing and construction have disappeared in the recession and they may or may not be coming back, and these tend to be jobs held by men and the less educated.”

Beyond the numbers

Unemployment is not just about economics. Psychologist Maria Jahoda argued in the 1930s that employment provides latent byproducts, hidden things,” says economist Arthur Goldsmith of Washington and Lee University. “She said people always see the explicit benefit — the wage — but employment also organizes your day, gives you a way to connect to other people, status; there are many other things associated with work. If all you do is say, ‘We have a lot of unemployment, the GNP is down 1.4 percent,’ you don’t capture the potential psychological and social costs.”

Goldsmith adds that developmental psychologist Erik Erikson said “your sense of self is undermined by an incapacity to become a self-sustaining member of society.”

In 2011, the psychological effects of unemployment are compounded by a devastating surge in foreclosures: Millions of families are confronting poverty and being forced to find a place to live. “Foreclosure has been an enormous part of this narrative that does not always happen with a wave of unemployment,” says Goldsmith.

And so we got to wondering. Beyond the obvious — and ominous — economic harm from unemployment, what does it do to self-esteem, psychological health, the willingness to get up and face the world with diminished prospects? In a time when so many people identify themselves by their occupation – what does it mean to be out of work?

Suffer the children

Being laid off, even when you are one of millions with the same problem, can lead to “why me?” questions, and to doubts about your self-worth, about your role and utility in society.

When the story ends with a well-paid, fulfilling job, these doubts usually answer themselves.

Otherwise, these doubts can easily lead to brooding, depression, despair, isolation and anxiety – even apparently to child abuse. A study presented in April¹ found that the incidence of shaken baby syndrome had doubled in the Great Recession (December 2007 through June 2010), compared to a prior period of prosperity.

Babies have weak neck muscles, so severe shaking can cause violent head movement and serious, even fatal brain injury. Shaking, often by angry, frustrated care-givers who cannot stop the baby’s crying, causes an estimated 1,300 such head injuries each year. Surviving children can have varying degrees of visual, motor or cognitive damage, or even end up in a permanent vegetative state — a coma.

Beyond a doubling of the rate of such abuse, the researchers also saw trends toward graver injury and a higher death rate, though they were not statistically significant.

Suffer the teachers!

In a study of school behavior among children of single mothers that started in the 1990s, Heather Hill, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration, found a higher level of problems among children of mothers who had been out of work years earlier.

The study was intended to explore the effects of welfare reform, which mandated that welfare mothers find jobs, and was performed when their children were 8 to 10 years old, five years after some of their mothers had been unemployed for at least three months.

The teachers reported a rise in both “external” problem behavior, such as acting out or disobedience, and “internal” behaviors, such as seeming depressed or anxious. “Problem behavior captures how they are coping, processing, as they have to sit in class, pay attention, stay on task, and do what they are told,” Hill told us.

Both categories of behavior were much more prevalent among the children of mothers who had been unemployed years earlier. The delayed reaction reflects the fact that early childhood sets the stage for future achievement and adjustment, Hill says. “The early years, prior to starting school, are very important for the developmental process.”

Life on the line?

The stakes in unemployment may be even greater, however. A new analysis of 42 studies, mainly performed in western nations, found a 63 percent increase in deaths (78 percent for men) among those who had been unemployed.

Although this deadly impact probably reflects financial and physical roots, not just emotional ones, “Our study results clearly indicate that unemployment is not just bad for your pocketbook; it’s also bad for your health,” said Joseph E. Schwartz, professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at the Stony Brook University School of Medicine in New York, in a press release. “The results suggest a causal relationship between unemployment and higher risk of death, as well as the need to identify strategies to minimize the adverse health effects of unemployment.”

Map: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

The analysis of unemployment and mortality data, which covered 20 million people, showed that a significant history of job loss raised the risk of death by 75 percent among people younger than 50. The elevated risk of mortality was 25 percent among older people.

Bright spots in a dark picture

Could the woes of unemployment be temporary? In a study of 774 Germans who lost their jobs between 1984 and 2003, psychiatrist Isaac Galatzer-Levy of the New York University School of Medicine found that most people had regained their emotional equilibrium within a year.

The participants were divided into four groups based on how satisfied they with their lives. The largest group, 69 percent, reported a relatively high and stable level of life satisfaction before job loss, and although they were affected more severely by unemployment, a year later their life satisfaction was restored to its pre-unemployment level.

Although life satisfaction scores were less positive among the other subjects, the results tend to refute the standard view of unemployment, says Galatzer-Levy. “There’s a real concern that [unemployment] will have long-term implications on the mental well-being of a large portion of the work force. But this analysis suggests that people are able to cope with a job loss relatively well over time.”

We tried to reach Galatzer-Levy to ask how well results from Germany, where unemployment is lower than in the United States, apply to the United States, but we could not connect. But by looking at the same people before and after they lost their jobs, the study sidestepped a basic pitfall in understanding the psychological outcome of unemployment: the problem of causation.

A word on method

In science, an experiment is the cleanest way to establish cause and effect, but this technique does not apply to studying the psychology of persistent unemployment. Instead, researchers try to correlate unemployment and health, behavior or psychological well-being.

They ask, are people with jobs healthier, happier, or more stable than those without?

But finding that two things go together — are correlated — cannot distinguish cause and effect. To take an obvious example, unemployment could cause psychological depression, or depression could cause unemployment.

The correlation between unemployment and psychological harm dates to the Great Depression of the 1930s, Goldsmith says. To get a better picture of causality, researchers began to follow individuals over time, as the German study did. Having evidence of mental-health and job status in 2010 and again in 2011 helps pinpoint cause and effect, Goldsmith says, but “Unfortunately, many things could also happen during this period,” and some could override employment status.

A grimmer picture

In an effort to refine the methodology, Goldsmith and colleagues are completing a study on the psychology of unemployment, using data from 2002 and ‘03. The first step was to exclude people with a history of psychological difficulties.

“We focused on people who have never had a psychological problem, or had a first bout of poor mental health in the past year,” Goldsmith says. “We all lose girlfriends, dogs, our surfboards get dented, but these are pretty tough people.”

Among subjects who were fully employed and then were unemployed, the researchers statistically controlled for education, work experience, marital status, having children, and church membership, all of which can buffer assaults on mental health.

The goal, Goldsmith says, was to tease out the psychological effects of unemployment from the other slings and arrows of unfortunate fortune. “Suppose you were unemployed last year, and had your first ever bout of poor emotional well-being. It’s hard to believe that caused your unemployment, because we know you are resilient.”

The study, which has not yet passed peer review, included contributions from Tim Diette, Darrick Hamilton and William Darity Jr. The results, Goldsmith says, show that long-term joblessness has an especially severe emotional impact among those with more education. “This is not surprising, those are the kind of people who have an internal locus of control, a lot of self efficacy, have always had the sense that they could govern the things that happen to them.”

Similarly, a study of 9,570 people found that those who were conscientious — and likely to fulfill their obligations — had a 120 percent greater decrease in life satisfaction during unemployment. “Thus the positive relationship typically seen between conscientiousness and well-being is reversed: conscientiousness is therefore not always good for well-being,” the authors wrote².

Although Goldsmith found a small detriment following unemployment of less than 15 weeks, people with longer unemployment were almost twice as likely as employed people to evince depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder. “These are not trivial diagnoses, they are very serious, can be long lasting,” Goldsmith says. “They can spill over and have effects on people around you.”

Thus the emotional fallout is not restricted to the 16 percent of Americans who are unemployed, discouraged, or involuntarily working part time, Goldsmith contends. “These people have spouses, children, grandchildren, and former coworkers. This says to policy makers that the cost of joblessness is more than financial, there is a substantial social consequence, and while we are having this debate about budget deficits, we ought not to forget that putting people to work does not just produce output, but also greater well-being as a society.”

— David J. Tenenbaum