Speculative Citizens

By monitoring environments, citizens develop speculative modes of engagement with their lived environments. The instrumental citizen here shifts to the speculative citizen. The “speculative citizen” is a concept that describes how different ways of experiencing environments and pollution assemble as propositions for how to sense and build more breathable worlds. As it turns out, the instrumental might have been speculative all along. Returning to the instrumental experimentalism discussed by John Dewey and influenced by William James, we could say that environmental sensing for evidencing harm is a way of putting propositions to work in the world, in concrete situations. Speculation is not, in this sense, a fictional condition but rather a testing, shaping, honing, and transforming of conditions through open-ended practices of inquiry. Open-air instrumentalisms are both speculative and practical. Their doing and unfolding contribute to the making of subjects, communities, and worlds, as well as political possibilities. These open-air instrumentalisms are not the exclusive work of human makers but are part of a field of influence. This is how worlds and propositions for breathability can take hold.

Speculative citizens are not just articulations of propositional citizenship and political engagement. They are also more ecological and distributed formations of what a citizen is or could become, both as a relational entity and subject informed by exchanges with worlds. Political subjects and worlds materialize through these collective and distributed processes of inquiry. What a citizen or citizenship is or could become is less a matter of definitions and more a question of the propositions, inquiries, practices, and political engagements that might be staged—here through environmental sensing. Yet this operationalization of speculative citizens is not equally available to all who monitor environments or create alternative forms of evidence. Harm might inform what counts as a citizenry worthy of protection or care. Yet it might also exclude some people from making a case for harm, or perpetuate the trials of demonstrating ongoing harm so that people become worn down or exhausted by monitoring efforts.

It is these registers of environmental monitoring that I next discuss through the development and distribution of a citizen-sensing toolkit for monitoring air pollution with residents in Pennsylvania. I document how practices of evidencing harm involve speculative encounters with environments, atmospheres, pollutants, data, regulators, industry, and communities. These practices could be oriented toward attempts to “empower” citizens by shifting the infrastructures, technologies, and monitoring practices to less institutionalized arrangements. At the same time, such practices do not easily or readily mitigate harm. Instead, they require new forms of collective attachment and individuation to activate political engagement and effect. How citizen sensing becomes relevant (or not) then materializes through speculative encounters and commitments to evidencing harm, where the instigation of new relations could be characterized through less normative—and even “complicated”—forms of care.20 By focusing on the speculative dimensions of evidencing harm, I suggest the processual and collaborative practices of care could be more fully considered.21 Such an approach focuses on how to generate atmospheric forms of care and environmental policy that are more responsive to multiple experiences and evidence of the harm caused by air pollution, as documented through citizen-sensing practices.

How to Establish the “Facts” of Pollution

It goes without saying that fracking is a contentious issue on many levels. It can divide communities and create diverging understandings and experiences of pollution and harm. Pollution is unevenly distributed. Residents who live downwind rather than upwind of a compressor site will notice acrid odors and noise. People who live in an area with a contaminated water supply will have to source bottled water. And those who live on a road with constant industry traffic will experience diesel pollution, noise, and congestion at all hours. Many residents in these communities, including those who have leased their mineral rights, have sought to document and understand the impact of these extraction techniques on environments and human health.

People living near fracking sites, compressor sites, waste pits, roads, and other infrastructure have collected evidence of numerous environmental disturbances and health effects, from noise and constant light, to smells from emissions, to a range of symptoms that are characteristic of VOC exposure, as well as asthma and other pulmonary diseases, cardiac diseases, and cancer. Residents near compressor sites notice odors and metallic tastes, which some have suggested are linked to the cleaning fluids used to flush compressors, or to the substances emanating from glycol dehydration processes. Across these multiple sites, residents report experiences of chronic and acute nosebleeds, headaches, dizziness, and a range of symptoms that are difficult to tie into a cause-and-effect logic of how fracking may be affecting environments and bodies. Chronic illness can also take decades to manifest. The ongoing and accumulative health and environmental impacts and harms that could be related to fracking do not always translate into immediate data sets or legible evidence.

The inconsistent occurrences of illness, chemical exposure, and evidence as provided through monitoring make this less a space of demonstrable proof and more an uncertain atmosphere of effects. For instance, tests of drinking water in households where residents complain of illness have at times shown an absence of any substances of concern, and in other instances arsenic, benzene, and heavy metals are evident at high levels.37 Environmental monitoring does not simply reveal the “facts” of pollution but is entangled with complex environmental, chemical, and bodily interactions. While monitoring might indicate care, care is always yet to be realized, since it requires engaging with the speculative aspects of how harm, evidence, and care could yet unfold.

Indeed, even attempts to generate comprehensive lists of harm often indicate how environmental exposures create uncertainty. The Pennsylvania Alliance for Clean Water and Air has established a “List of the Harmed,”38 which documents residents in locations across Pennsylvania and the wider United States who have experienced harm from fracking. The list records the specific gas facilities near to which residents live, as well as suspected or evidenced exposures and symptoms for humans and animals. It also includes press and online reports, which can include videos and photographs of harm experienced. Reaching over 23,000 records and 192 pages in length, the list documents residents living next to a compressor station who experience “headaches, fatigue, dizziness, nausea, nosebleeds,” with one sample “blood test show[ing] exposure to benzene and other chemicals,” as well as the death of goats, cows, chickens, cats, and dogs in areas with contaminated water. Also recorded are environmental nuisances such as seismic testing, noise, dust, heavy machinery sounds and emissions, and “bright industrial lights” throughout the night. The list documents how the light of flaring gas wells can trigger post-traumatic stress disorder, including causing flashbacks for people who have served in the Iraqi conflict.

As a form of evidence, this “List of the Harmed” might be considered to fit within multiple forms of citizen reporting often dismissed as “anecdotal” in contrast to more “scientific” methods for gathering evidence and documenting harm. However, not only is “the science incomplete”39 when it comes to establishing links between fracking and harm, but residents are often uniquely situated to record their lived experiences of exposure to shale-gas production, and so to contribute different forms of citizen data. Care emerges here by indicating the harm experienced by listed individuals and events, which can inform additional ways of addressing the harm and potential harm experienced by communities. What counts as harm, how it is documented, and how this documentation comes to form evidence are questions about the how-to that citizen-sensing practices similarly generate. Practices of how to evidence harm could become as contingent and responsive as the impacts that they would document and address.

How to Sense Pollution

Practices for sensing pollution involve much more than measuring a pollutant. Questions loom about what to monitor, who is monitoring, and how to act upon monitoring results. Concerns surface about what is unmonitored, unaccounted for, yet still could lead to harm. At the same time, the regulatory and enforcement infrastructure for monitoring pollution has not caught up with fracking technology. As a result, it is often ill-equipped to monitor and regulate this industry’s complex processes and impacts. Here, speculative forms of citizenship and practices for documenting environmental pollution materialize together as people gather evidence and attempt to make sense of the effects of fracking.

In this context, the Citizen Sense group began fieldwork and desk research in the summer of 2013. We found that many citizen-sensing practices to monitor air and water quality near fracking infrastructure were underway. These practices included various instruments, techniques, sites, pollutants, and environmental media. Residents used devices such as a high-end Photovac 2020PRO Photoionization Detector that can be used for humidity-compensated VOC detection in air, water, and soil. They regularly set up a FLIR Gas Finder that detects seventeen gases at –20°C to +300°C through infrared thermal imaging that, as mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, some have used to document the effects of compressor sites. They participated in installing NGO-loaned summa canisters for testing a range of air pollutants.40 They set up and wore badges for detecting BTEX chemicals for university studies.41 And they contributed to bucket-brigade community monitoring, a long-standing analog technique using a bucket with a vacuum-powered pump and bag to draw in air and test for more than seventy VOCs and twenty sulfur compounds—a process that requires samples to be sent off to laboratories for analysis. The data from these citizen-monitoring efforts were collected and presented as lab reports and community organization documents. Many image- and video-based forms of monitoring were circulated online and through video-hosting platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo. Initiatives such as FracTracker provided community-mapping data, and MarcellusGas.org provided monthly reports on fracking production.42

While individuals in northeastern Pennsylvania had been undertaking environmental monitoring by using low-tech and high-tech instruments, one of the primary groups contributing to and mobilizing evidence about air pollution was Breathe Easy Susquehanna County. Made up of around twenty members, this citizen group came together in early February 2013 to protect local communities from poor air quality and its health effects, primarily due to the growing fracking industry. In addition to its mission to address air quality, the group outlines its strategy as one of “respectful dialogue between the natural gas industry and our Susquehanna County community.” The group’s intention was to work with industry to improve air quality across all aspects of the fracking infrastructure, but to encourage voluntary industry efforts in this area rather than seek new legislation. As the chair of the group, Rebecca Roter, writes on the Breathe Easy Facebook page:

Breathe Easy Susquehanna County PA (BESC) is a fledgling community group attempting to bring together divergent voices who have been pitted against each other around one common concern, air quality. The marcellus [sic] train left the station six years ago in our county. We all live with the same impacts to our community whether we signed a lease or not, whether we were on that train or not. Many of us from across the table share the same concern about keeping our air as clean to breathe as we can. We cannot choose to not breathe as we see more compressor stations and well pads permitted weekly. We need to act now together, to bring our community together now over air quality, to try to keep our air as clean as we can.43

The call to work toward breathable worlds, expressed in the very name of this community group—to “breathe easy”—became the basis for developing actions to care for the air, but in ways that would require collective forms of inquiry to establish where pollution was occurring and how to address it.

Air quality was an increasing focal point both for this community group as well as for multiple other residents in the area who were engaged in diverse projects and initiatives to address air pollution. Some residents felt that Breathe Easy’s attempt to work with industry but not advance regulation did not hold fracking operators to account. Other groups and residents focused on development plans and used environmental data to contest further industrial activities. While not the only group concentrating on air quality, Breathe Easy was especially vocal about this issue and worked with NGOs, including Shale Test and Earthworks, to collect environmental data on pollution from fracking. The group’s members had contributed to VOC testing with buckets and badges and had purchased their own array of monitoring instruments to test air and document industry processes. As Frank Finan, a member of Breathe Easy, noted on the reasons for monitoring air, “We decided on air. It affects everybody.”

Although residents and community groups had undertaken water-quality monitoring to assess pollution from fracking, individual residents could have very different exposures to water pollution. Some private wells could be contaminated while others were not, and some residents might obtain their water from municipal supplies. In contrast, air pollution was a more pervasive problem, yet it too was unevenly distributed in the community. Those who lived downwind of compressor stations might suffer much worse air quality than those who have not yet had infrastructure encroach on their home or work environments. Nevertheless, air provided a “focus,” since as Frank explained, the group sought “to be focused, to forget about every other aspect of our lives that got screwed.” For Frank, this focus on air involved buying and using monitoring toolkits. He bought a toolkit to test water and air as well as radon. He purchased a “four-gas sniffer,” and many other instruments that he noted required considerable labor to learn about and use. Because of the effort in using these different instruments, he decided to focus on the “gas finder camera” (the FLIR introduced earlier in this chapter), along with photography, to document the effects of the fracking industry and poor air quality.

Some of these monitoring practices required residents to collect samples for lab analysis. For this reason, citizen-sensing practices that produced “real-time” data on air-pollution levels generated considerable interest as a way to expand ongoing environmental monitoring practices. By comparison, while buckets and similar techniques for monitoring air pollution have been used for fence-line monitoring at refinery sites and as part of environmental justice campaigns, buckets do not generate real-time data.44 Sensors could provide a more immediate picture of environmental conditions. However, they do not lead to a direct trajectory from data collection to environmental action as change. As it turns out, many complications arise when citizens collect data about air quality.

The gathering of “evidence,” which monitoring technologies initially seem to enable, raises more questions about how monitoring is undertaken, how data are collected and managed, how to translate the data into policy and action, and how practices for sensing pollution could expand potential infrastructures of care. Citizen-sensing practices collect data about particular pollutants. At the same time, they can attend to parallel “qualitative” data such as noxious smells, noise, and health effects, which in turn can shift the categories and procedures for how evidence forms. Yet these diverse data types can be challenging to mobilize for political change. They might not easily align with or circulate within regulatory frameworks.

As Michelle Murphy has suggested in her comparison of toxicology tests to citizen-led monitoring practices of indoor air pollution, these diverging evidentiary practices can make present or “perceptible” different aspects of chemical exposure.45 Toxicology tests focus on how individual chemical concentrations create distinct bodily effects. Yet these practices might not register the diffuse and multiple modes of exposure that are difficult to describe within singular and causal dynamics. By comparison, citizen-led health studies could present a more situated and lived experience of chemical exposure. By registering lived experiences of chemical exposure, such citizen practices could “instigate” other forms of political action, even if they do not align with regulatory frameworks.46 The process of making pollution present and sensible could be differently approached as concentrations, experiences, and lived encounters that anticipate harm to environments, bodies, and politics. At the same time, future effects could evade present perceptibility.47 Speculative citizenships materialize through this anticipation of indeterminate future effects that mobilize current practices to document, analyze, and struggle toward more breathable worlds.

How to Activate Open-Air Inquiry

As part of the process for distributing toolkits, in October 2014 the Citizen Sense research group hosted a series of events in northeastern Pennsylvania. The events included a community workshop where the Citizen Sense Toolkit was introduced, a walk along fracking infrastructure on which various monitoring equipment was tested, and a roundtable to discuss broader issues related to fracking and community organizing.52 We invited community members along with speakers who had experience with environmental monitoring, public health, and fracking to contribute. Participants included residents, technologists, environmental-health practitioners, local ecologists, and community organizers.

During the workshop, we distributed the Citizen Sense Toolkit to residents to test, take home, and install. But even more than learning about the monitoring toolkit, the workshop created a forum for the how-to. This was a space for working through and asking how to monitor air pollution from fracking, what to monitor and where, how to analyze and communicate data, and how to connect findings to other experiences such as health effects. While the workshop sought the input and experience of all involved who might help to identify problems and discuss ways of monitoring, the gathering was one where many people in the room were not necessarily on speaking terms, since the pressures and strains that fracking had placed on the community had led to lasting rifts between people. Monitoring and data collection were perceived to offer a possible neutral zone. Infrastructure could be studied to establish whether it was contributing to elevated pollution levels, and actions could be taken based on evidence. Neutrality was a movable condition that relied partly on our role as “third-party” researchers external to the community and partly on the role of sensors and data as the evidentiary techniques that could be used to hold industry to account.

In this sense, the workshop was also a chance to air concerns and develop a more collective approach to inquiry. As part of this process of inquiry, our research group communicated what our project motivations were for studying pollution in the area, since this information helped residents to understand what our commitments were and decide whether they felt the research was organized to facilitate their own questions.53 People wanted to know whether we were funded by industry and our views on oil and gas extraction. We explained how the project was studying the rise of citizen-sensing technologies and practices, and how or whether these were contributing to new or more effective approaches to documenting environmental concerns. We also noted we were interested to understand what practices and questions emerge when people undertake monitoring and use data to address environmental pollution, which we also hoped to address.

This more speculative aspect of the research relied on a collaborative approach to working with the sensors to see how they could contribute to different forms of environmental engagement. We noted that monitoring data could be used in many different ways to document environmental concerns. At the same time, monitoring data alone might not be sufficient to address problems and regulators or industry might not accept citizen data. Documentations of experience alongside sensor data could, in this sense, begin to develop a more compelling narrative about air pollution in the gas fields. We also emphasized that the research process involved open development, where neither the technology nor the research design was entirely “finished” and that the project would continue to take shape as the sensors were installed and used. As a process of open-air instrumentalism, this research was at once speculative and collaborative. It attempted to undertake collective inquiry to respond to changeable conditions while suspending the rush toward specific outcomes. Such an approach could allow other kinds of inquiry—or science—to emerge.54 This speculative process of open-air instrumentalisms sought to understand how sociotechnical engagements unfold in worlds, as they also work to make breathable worlds.

As part of the citizen-monitoring project launch events, we then took monitoring toolkits out on a drive and walk to infrastructure sites to test monitoring practices and technologies. The drive–walk allowed us to discuss issues related to fracking as well as how best to monitor in particular settings. The walk became an extension of the workshop as inquiry, and yet here we literally moved into the open air. We tested an array of monitoring equipment while also experiencing numerous infrastructural sites and the distinct patterns of pollution that they created.55

We began our outing as a group by first driving to the Tennessee Transmission Pipeline. We undertook a walk to see the patterns of forest clearing, land grading, and pipeline installation that characterize this part of the natural-gas infrastructure. A local ecologist, Nancy Wottrich, explained the effects pipelines had in carving up larger ecologies into more fragmented spaces; she noted that this often led to reductions in biodiversity, since many organisms required larger intact ecosystems to survive. Next, we walked from the pipeline to a nearby compressor station, where we had gained permission from the landowner to install a Frackbox to monitor emissions. As we walked to the compressor station with handheld methane monitors, ultrafine particle detectors, badges, and several other monitoring devices, we detected a palpable and acrid wave of air. The churning of the compressor station made it difficult to talk above the noise, and Nancy mentioned that noise was also a pollutant that could damage local ecologies and organisms.

As a mode of open-air inquiry, the walk moved the experience of fracking infrastructure to a more central if even debilitating aspect. We decamped to the road to discuss further how best to monitor and record emissions from these sites. We then drove to our next stop, a gathering line and well pad where active construction was underway. We first looped around the well pad by climbing an adjacent hill and overlooking the construction site. Diggers and trucks mechanically scraped, leveled, and hauled dirt to create an expanded well pad location, where additional wellheads were being added to the site. Erosion fences were in place next to an extensive area of land that had been seeded after clearing. However, the seed mixes mostly consisted of fescue and clover, a greatly reduced palette that Nancy reminded us bore little resemblance to landscapes prior to disturbance from fracking. Here, new fracking ecologies were being shaped, affecting air, water, soil, plants, animals, and people.

We turned back down to a dirt road near an adjacent gathering line. At this stop, we heard from Laurie Barr, a resident of Pennsylvania who had started a project for monitoring lost, abandoned, and orphaned wells. Because Pennsylvania has been the site of extensive activity from the extractive industries, there are also numerous leftover pipelines, abandoned wellheads, and leaking infrastructural components that continue to affect environments. With her citizen-led project, Laurie had begun an initiative to document, map, and monitor these lost, abandoned, and orphaned sites. She passed around maps of wellheads and showed night-vision photographs of deer drinking briny water at leaking wellhead sites. She also showed her “gas finder” monitor for detecting methane, which she used to assess whether gas leaks might occur at these sites.

As a how-to mode of inquiry, the walk visited infrastructure to observe and document industry operations underway. We observed a Frackbox installation next to a compressor station, investigated a new well site under construction, and listened to community organizers describe their own practices of undertaking environmental monitoring and gathering data. We spoke to residents living near infrastructure to learn more about their day-to-day experiences of industry operations. We also heard about attempts to work with state and federal regulators to understand existing monitoring infrastructures and environmental data, and how these could address fracking-related pollution.

The walk offered a chance to investigate ecological disturbances and learn how new gas-field ecologies form through linear excavations carved into soil and forests, along with grading and clearing that reshaped environments for wellheads and compressor stations. In this way, the walk formed a collective experience of studying these infrastructural ecologies. It also made palpable the unequal experiences of harm from fracking. Some people lived surrounded by compressor stations, and others had second homes in the area. As researchers, we were primarily located in London, far from fracking but not removed from the problem of air pollution. We added to the inventory of harms experienced through the walk and conversations. And we considered how to document pollution with monitors, diaries, data, platforms, social media, and community organizing as part of the more extensive proposal for how to work toward more breathable worlds.

The walk, workshop, and roundtable served as collective modes of inquiry as well as forums for discussing the problems of air pollution. The concerns and proposals that materialized informed the next steps of the monitoring process, which involved setting up components of the Citizen Sense Toolkit in monitoring locations. How and where to set up sensors, how to monitor and for how long, how to ensure the data would be useful and be listened to: these were all recurring topics in our multi-sited and multi-day conversations as we installed sensors. We visited residents, often at their homes, to help set up devices, ensure that connections were made to the data platform, and discuss issues related to monitoring. Participants were interested in monitoring at several sites, comparing infrastructural locations, and even surrounding infrastructure with sensors. While we had a limited number of monitors, we began the process of visiting locations of concern, working with participants to set up sensors, and establishing a connection between sensors and our platform so that participants could view data in real time and over time, as well as compare their data to other monitoring locations in the network.

Numerous questions arose in the process of setting up Specks, which was often far from straightforward. Sheltered outdoor locations needed to be identified, power cables needed to be sourced, duct tape had to be procured, and Wi-Fi had to be connected. The minor digital infrastructures that enabled monitoring became sites to identify, adapt, and stabilize to undertake monitoring. The online platform similarly required tussling with home PCs and ancient operating systems, Internet Explorer browsers, and multiple components that were not part of our original testing of the website. Eventually, multiple monitoring locations came online and a community-monitoring network began to take shape and grow, surrounding infrastructure, roadways, and homes in this three-county area of Pennsylvania.

Along with the Speck monitor setup, we placed Frackboxes at three strategic locations next to compressor stations to monitor this industry infrastructure that was of particular concern. Setting up the Frackboxes required installing mailbox posts (in some cases) or sourcing stands, along with power for the Frackbox to function. One Frackbox was powered by solar energy, and this required setting up the PVC panel and battery in a plastic tub in the woods. Data were piped over a 3G dongle to the internet, forming an at times precarious connection in this remote location. While they were a provisional and test device, the Frackboxes and their data were of considerable interest in the community. In the early stages of setup, Fox News learned of the devices through a community member and contacted us about the data. We told the reporter that the locations were confidential and that the data had yet to be analyzed or verified. Nevertheless, a cat-and-mouse game ensued, with one Citizen Sense researcher having to duck out of a hotel early in the morning when learning of the reporter’s plan to intercept the researcher in the hotel parking lot. Working with technologies in the open air, we learned, was also a process that could lead to overlapping and controversial forms and worlds of inquiry.

How to Transform Data into Evidence

In all, we distributed nearly thirty Citizen Sense Toolkits to participants, which they used over a period of seven months. We also installed three Frackboxes that ran for the duration of the study, even in the depths of winter during blizzard conditions. We had initially planned to monitor for three months, but new participants continued to join. A broad range of monitoring practices materialized across multiple locations. Some participants produced long-term, continuous data sets while recording their experience of pollution. Others contributed data for a few months or weeks until devices had to be moved or unplugged. Participants logged their approximate monitoring location on the Citizen Sense Toolkit platform, primarily through the use of the Speck PM_2.5 monitor, but also by logging their observations of industry and other activity that might generate high PM_2.5 levels. Data were available to view both in real time on actual Speck devices and on the platform once uploaded. Observations and readings could be compared across distinct monitoring locations, and in some cases discussion arose about the multiple readings, techniques, and events that might cause elevated pollution levels. Participants considered whether nearby gas infrastructure caused elevated readings, or if high pollen counts or other industries nearby were causing spikes in their data.

This collaborative process unfolded an ongoing set of questions about how to monitor, what to do with their data once it was collected, and how to ensure regulators take their data seriously. At various points, participants suggested that their data were not indicating anything of significance, which often meant that their lived experiences of odor or nuisance or perceived emissions did not match up with real-time displays on the Speck or in the data collected and available on the platform. There was a sense that an immediate register of harm should be evident, or else the device was failing to perform. Here, the device did not make pollution evident in the way it was expected to. The sense that pollution must be present created dissonance across machinic and bodily experiences of environmental events.

On other occasions, Speck monitors would provide high readings, or spikes in PM_2.5 levels. There was often a process of troubleshooting to understand what could be causing the high readings: Was it a device malfunction, or was a pollution episode or some other atmospheric event underway? On one occasion, two participants and members of Breathe Easy, Chuck and Janis Winschuh, called the Pennsylvania DEP in order to lodge a complaint in relation to a high PM_2.5 reading on their Speck. Chuck and Janis found that when they were visited by the DEP, industry representatives also came to their home to find out what monitoring equipment was in use and how the study was organized. The participants’ concern was that neither the DEP nor industry actually attended to the high readings they recorded, which occurred over several hours and were not due to a faulty device.

Chuck and Janis subsequently took their story to the media, which documented how regulators and industry responded to their citizen-sensing activities and concerns about pollution.56 In the process of attempting to evidence harm, Chuck and Janis found that their data were of less interest than the act of citizen monitoring. Here, the “evidence” of harm materialized not through data sets but through participating in a citizen-sensing study and having that participation queried. Such an arrangement resonates with Murphy’s suggestion that monitoring can be as instigatory as it is evidentiary, since the DEP and industry were apparently more attentive to the “fact” of community organizing than to the data they were collecting.

Yet this is by no means to discount the importance of data collected by citizens, since it has also been used to document pollution levels of concern. Other participants, Meryl Solar and Rebecca Roter, found that the intense and rich data sets collected, which numbered over five million data points by the end of the monitoring period, could be mined for patterns using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to indicate that harmful levels of PM_2.5 were occurring at several sites across the community-monitoring network. Meryl and Rebecca used these data to arrange a teleconference with the Pennsylvania DEP, the Pennsylvania Department of Health, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), and the Centers for Disease Control, along with Citizen Sense, to discuss their findings. Agencies and regulators were skeptical about the citizen-sensing devices and raised queries about their calibration and use as well as the validity of the data. Yet Meryl and Rebecca were able to use a combination of data and experience of lived exposure to make a case for regulators to undertake follow-up monitoring at one of their homes.

While we were analyzing and communicating preliminary findings from the data, it became clear that the graphs available on our provisional platform could not fully convey the different patterns of pollution experienced. How to analyze data then became part of the long list of how-to items that unfolded through this collaborative research. While working with a King’s College London atmospheric scientist, Benjamin Barratt, we learned of an open-source software, openair,57 which we could use and adapt to analyze citizen data. With the objective of making a DIY data-analysis platform, we then made a citizen data toolkit, Airsift, which would allow participants to analyze their data more fully according to the time of pollution events, the direction of pollution, and the likely source of pollution based on wind speed, humidity, and a host of other variables. We were assembling an expanding community-monitoring infrastructure that adapted to conditions taking place quite literally in the “open air,” in response to political engagements and pollution events. These open-air instrumentalisms did not arrive at a finished condition as such but rather worked through ongoing processes of inquiry to generate practices for evidencing harm. They were, in this sense, forming speculative citizenships that struggled to create tactics and forums for reducing and mitigating environmentally destructive practices.

With the plots and graphs we were able to generate from the Airsift toolkit, we worked with participants to collect on-the-ground observations and experiences of pollution that together formed narratives for five key locations in the network. We developed these narratives into data stories according to the township where the monitoring had taken place.58 The data stories documented pollution levels in Bridgewater, Brooklyn, Dimock, Mehoopany, and Liberty Townships. The data stories analyzed the citizen data and observations of pollution events, while providing indications for how to mitigate or reduce pollution based on findings. Citizen Sense launched the Pennsylvania Data Stories in April 2016 and, along with participants, shared the findings with state and federal regulators.59

Soon after we launched the data stories, the ATSDR released a report that documented the results from their parallel follow-up monitoring.60 Their report documents how they found elevated PM_2.5 levels at the test monitoring location, and higher pollution levels were likely attributable to nearby infrastructure. The report corroborated the citizen data findings at this Brooklyn Township location. These findings also led the ATSDR to recommend that the Pennsylvania DEP develop more robust practices for monitoring and mitigating emissions, particularly from industry.

Just after the ATSDR made its report public, the Pennsylvania DEP announced that it was undertaking an “unprecedented expansion” of its PM_2.5 monitoring network.61 In turn, the fracking operator whose particular infrastructure was near the ATSDR monitoring location responded that it was disappointed by the DEP’s decision to undertake additional air-quality monitoring and that it found the ATSDR’s report to be based on “speculative” data.62 Commenting on this news, Rebecca indicated that a speculative approach was in fact not a bad thing, since waiting for harm to be done and then conducting “retrospective public health studies” was less advisable than taking action before harm was done.

The process of evidencing harm drew on multiple forms of data and evidence, some of which could be considered “speculative” exactly because they were generated through provisional practices. Yet these practices enabled residents and agencies to make a case for greater levels of care in the form of monitoring and attending to exposure from fracking to avoid harm before it occurs. Speculative monitoring practices became a way to evidence and work toward reducing harm. Rather than wait for harm to be done, the citizen-sensing practices demonstrated that pollution was occurring at elevated levels and that action should be taken to prevent future harm. Speculative citizenships materialized here as a practice for proposing political subjects and engagements that could work and struggle toward more breathable worlds. Rather than simply document pollution once it has affected environments and health, here speculative citizenships sought to prevent pollution before it occurs.

In 2018 the Pennsylvania DEP installed a regulatory air-quality monitor for PM_2.5, carbonyls, and VOCS in an area where citizen sensing had taken place.63 Situated in the township of New Milford, the monitor signals to the community that the DEP has begun to take their concerns about air quality more seriously.64 However, the expansion of this network also raises questions about the extent to which monitoring can become a practice of preventing harm, or whether it can become a mechanism for allowing an “acceptable” level of pollution to occur. Monitoring practices could create an uneven relationship to improving or detoxifying environmental conditions, since polluting industries could potentially expand if an official monitoring location can demonstrate that pollution levels do not exceed regulatory guidelines. Moreover, under a new administration, the federal EPA dialed back regulations for oil and gas, in a move that suggests evidence and harm can be the least of concerns where extractive industries are concerned.65

The overall inquiry of “how to evidence harm” that guides this collaborative research is how or whether evidence could be sufficient to address or forestall harm. Here, somewhat remarkably, citizen data contributed to evidence-based policy that led to the expansion of a state air-quality monitoring network. And yet, the influence that citizen data had in this process and decision was not always publicly acknowledged.66 Evidence and recognition of harm were not necessarily communicated through the more accountable and transparent channels and forums of governance and industry engagement that communities sought. Moreover, not all residents who undertook monitoring would necessarily have equal access to creating and communicating evidence. For instance, property ownership might seem to confer more rights on people who monitor air quality than on those who do not own property. These forms of speculative citizenship might in turn reinforce, rather than transform, unequal forms of property-based citizenship formed through economic inequality and settler colonialism. At the same time, it is a curious contradiction that property ownership does not confer as many rights as might be expected, where eminent domain is frequently exercised to install pipelines and infrastructure across the gas fields. In a related way, homeowners in Flint, Michigan, did not seem to have greater sway over the problem of water pollution.

While certain evidence can count in distinct situations when communicated by well-connected actors, it might also be overlooked or ignored, depending upon prevailing political interests and socioeconomic power relations. In other words, the drive toward creative democracy and inquiry that would work through a Deweyan critical and engaged intelligence is thwarted by power struggles and inequalities. As Cornel West writes in his study of pragmatism, such striving toward radical democracy can present severe limits for “the wretched of the earth, namely, the majority of humanity who own no property or wealth, participate in no democratic arrangements, and whose individualities are crushed by hard labor and harsh living conditions.”67 Rather than unfolding as participatory democratic exchanges, practices of gathering and presenting evidence could reinforce and exacerbate inequalities. Indeed, regulators and industry could issue a repeated demand for evidence—to prove that pollution is occurring—but then disregard that evidence.68 The gathering of evidence could then lead to exhaustion and injustice, a topic that will be taken up and further expanded upon in the next chapter. Yet here it is important to note the variable and uneven ways speculative citizenships can materialize when attempting to evidence harm and generate responsive practices of care.

How harm registers, the forms of evidence that are admissible, the subjects that can convey and act on evidence, and the worlds that are varyingly configured or denied—all of these are expressions of power. How to evidence harm asks how it could be possible to account for more and other experiences in struggles for more livable and just environments. Speculative methods, as Ruha Benjamin notes, can be a way to extend social practices toward possibilities for greater equity in the facts that are taken into account and how they are acted upon. Working in a register of speculative fiction, Benjamin suggests that these modes of inquiry can offer a way to “experiment with different scenarios, trajectories, and reversals, elaborating new values and testing different possibilities for creating more just and equitable societies.”69 As processes of open-air instrumentalism and collective inquiry, citizen-sensing practices demonstrate that evidencing harm is a complex process that organizes sensing, facts, relations, environments, and speculative citizens toward different possible environmental inhabitations. How-to as a process of evidencing harm can designate a speculative mode of inquiry. How-to can also demonstrate the politics whereby decisions are made, as well as propose how to struggle toward and realize more breathable worlds.