Letter to the Editor, Marietta Times by Victor Elam, May 6

Externalized costs are costs that are generated by one party who benefits but a third party pays for those costs directly or indirectly. The Mid-Ohio Valley is rife with examples of its residents and its lands paying the price while others reap the rewards, from forest harvest in the early 1900’s followed by oil, coal, gas extraction to industry leaving behind poisoned employees and lands.
One such example occurred in 1999 when an industry near Marietta released harmful chemicals into the Ohio River that killed thousands of fish and at least 990,000 mussels over a 20 mile stretch of the river. The guilty parties paid a 3.25 million dollar penalty for their misdeed yet 30 years later and after great efforts to restore the mussel population, the population has not recovered.
The public often has no opportunity to have a voice when these externalized costs are forced upon them, but there is a proposal submitted to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) that will require a permit and is subject to public comment and it so happens to have potential to affect the same area as the chemical release in 1999. The proposal is to bring well waste by barge to a docking site and pump the waste material from the barge to existing holding tanks where it will then be transferred to trucks and transported to area injection wells for disposal. So here again the residents of the MOV are subjected to risk of contamination from spills or unknown risks resulting from the injection wells to help others profit while we get nothing. If something does go wrong, we will suffer or the environment in which we live will and no amount of money will be able to correct the damage.
I encourage you to provide comment regarding this project to: lrh.usace.army.mil/missions/regulatory/public-notices/article/2142164
Unless an extension is granted, comment is being taken until May 6. In the past public hearings were held for these types of actions but the USACE has elected to forego those hearings and only accept comment online. If you feel that this should be delayed until we can have a proper public hearing please let the Huntington District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers know.

Letter to the Editor Marietta Times May 13, 2020 by Aaron Dunbar

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been,” wrote prominent science fiction author Issac Asimov four decades ago. “The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”

I don’t know that a more succinct explanation exists for the era in which we live.

How else to make sense of the heavily armed protesters demanding an end to stay-at-home orders during a deadly pandemic? Or a President who casually floats the idea of injecting disinfectants in order to treat the coronavirus, leading to a reported spike in calls to poison control centers throughout the country?

How do you explain Mike Pence’s visit to the Mayo Clinic without wearing a mask? How do you explain Jared Kushner referring to 58,000 dead Americans as a “great success?” How do you explain a political party that brazenly promotes itself as being pro-life, now pushing for the reopening of the country despite explicit warnings from medical professionals, and arguing that the loss of a few million lives is a worthwhile price to pay for a strong economy?

How do you explain the fact that many of the same people witnessing this insanity will (literally) die on the hill of denying any of this? Of insisting they were right all along despite observable reality?

Anyone who’s paid any attention to our nation’s gross mishandling of the climate crisis can hardly be surprised by the turn of events now unfolding in response to COVID-19. As a Vox article from last month astutely pointed out, “One of the strongest and most robust predictors of social distancing behavior is found in attitudes toward another major challenge facing the United States: climate change.”

I really do not know how to lay this out more explicitly:

I do not know more than scientists. Neither do you.

You do not know more than medical professionals. You do not know more than epidemiologists. You do not know more than the international community of climate scientists, who overwhelmingly agree on the reality of anthropogenic climate change, and the unprecedented threat it poses to humanity’s future.

I don’t know better, you don’t know better, and neither does the President, whose cult of ignorance appears endlessly willing to bend objective reality in order to accommodate whatever pseudoscientific delusions happen to pop into his head on any given day.

The only way we can ever hope to grow is by possessing the humility to admit that there are things we simply do not know as individuals. Instead of manufacturing theories from whole cloth based on what we want to hear, perhaps it would be wiser to defer to those who’ve spent their entire lives devoted to studying whatever it is we’re unsure about. Maybe it’s time to stop paying attention to the President and his henchmen, whether on climate change or COVID-19, and to finally start listening to the scientists.

Individual ignorance is one thing. But when huge segments of the population are willing to accept certifiable falsehoods as truth, we all inevitably suffer the consequences.

Letter to the Editor May 5, 2020 Marietta Times by Rebecca Phillips

Yet again, proposals affecting the health and well-being of everyone in the Mid-Ohio Valley are being made without our input. The Army Corps of Engineers is considering a proposal that would expand a docking facility on Route 7 south of Marietta to allow potentially radioactive drilling wastewater to be offloaded there. No public notice of this proposal appeared in local media, and the Corps will not be holding a public meeting; the online comment period ends on May 6, in just a few days.

Drilling waste contents are not generally made public because of loopholes in US law, but the likely toxins include arsenic, benzene, toluene, and mercury, in addition to a mix of radioactive materials. Much of the wastewater coming our way would be from other states as Ohio’s geology makes it “suitable” for service as a wastewater dumping ground. Some of this out-of-state waste would likely go into injection wells in our county; more of it would be transferred to trucks – as many as 250 per barge – and sent over our roads, through residential neighborhoods and past farms.

Barge accidents and leaks are not unheard-of. The Ohio River provides drinking water to more than five million people and is already considered one of the country’s most polluted bodies of water. Many local water systems already face challenges filtering toxins such as C8: does adding to the risk make sense?

The Corps of Engineers is accepting comments on this permit application until May 6 unless an extension is granted. Please consider submitting a comment and a request for extension at the following web address. Only online comments are being accepted: lrh.usace.army.mil/missions/regulatory/public-notices/article/2142164

Especially in this time of pandemic, people and communities should not be placed at increased risk, and especially not without their informed consent.