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McGraw
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to provide several families with potable
water after the Pennsylvania Department of
Environmental Protection found water wells
there were tainted by shale gas drilling.
He’s now skeptical about the hype
surrounding estimates of unconventional
gas reserves – and the idea that the United
States may become the Saudi Arabia of
global gas supply.
“We’re not going to be the Saudi Arabia
of natural gas,” he said. “What we’re likely
to be is the Nigeria of natural gas.”
‘A Larger Theology’
In his career as a freelance journalist,
McGraw’s writing has appeared in
such diverse publications as Popular
Mechanics, Reader’s Digest, Playboy and
Spin. He’d decided to give up journalism
when the Marcellus shale events came
along.
“Nearly three decades of writing for
newspapers and magazines, in a career
that had never provided more than a
meager and unreliable income, had left
me frustrated, angry and pretty much
dead broke,” he wrote in the
acknowledgments for “The End
of Country.”
As a final gesture, McGraw
wrote a proposal for a
book based on his family’s
experiences and the Marcellus
play, expecting and half-hoping
it would fail.
That wasn’t a mistake.
People who don’t write much
and don’t write for money often
think of writing as a special
talent or skill. People who write
a lot and write for money tend to think of
writing as a chronic disease.
McGraw’s only mistake was in thinking
there’s a cure.
As it happened, his proposal for “The
End of Country” drew considerable interest
and ended up in a bidding tug-of-war
between major publishers. McGraw is now
at work on another book, a ground-level
look at the debate over climate change.
“The idea is that if we can pry the
discussion away from the talking heads
and talk to the hearts, maybe we can start
to find common ground,” he said.
Too often, McGraw observed,
people will take a position on an issue
like hydraulic fracturing based on
preconceived notions and their personal
belief systems, not on experience and
research and facts.
“When I find out where somebody
stands on this issue, I can tell with
frightening accuracy where they stand
on five or six or seven or eight other hotbutton
issues. And that’s absolutely tragic,”
McGraw said.
“It’s not being evaluated on its merits,”
he noted. “It’s being evaluated as part of a
larger theology.”
Comfortably Numb
McGraw’s luncheon talk at the AAPG
meeting is titled “Comfortable in Our
Ignorance.” The title comes from an
experience he had at a lecture discussion.
“This person stands up and cites a
cataclysmic event here in Pennsylvania,”
he recalled.
The event was so
remarkable it would have
drawn intense coverage not
only in the United States but
around the word, McGraw
said, if it had actually
occurred.
It hadn’t.
“It never happened,” he
said. “But this person wasn’t
lying to me. I looked into this
person’s eyes and knew this
person absolutely believed it
had happened.”
After he asked a few questions,
McGraw noticed “almost a look of terror”
as the person realized the event might not
have been real.
McGraw said the individual stood up
to leave and announced, “I am not going
to argue with you. I am comfortable in my
own ignorance.”
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Life Lessons
“Honestly, I didn’t know if I’d even like
to work with kids. All I knew was I loved
geology,” Bolhuis said. “It wasn’t until I spent
considerable time in the classroom that I
realized the kids are awesome.
“They feed off my energy just as I feed
off of theirs.”
To engage his students at the beginning
of a semester, Bolhuis first works at building
a relationship with them.
“It all starts with relationships,” he
stressed. “Once a foundation of respect
is established, the kids will respond to
whatever is happening on any given day.”
As for his method of teaching, he admits
that’s a little more complicated.
“We’ll do traditional labs, inquiry
activities, lecture, field trips … whatever
it takes,” he said, “to maintain a rigorous
curriculum while doing my best to make my
classroom the place where the kids want to
be at that particular time.”
With issues like “fracing, climate
change, oil and gas reserves, mountaintop
removal, diminishing fresh water and natural
disasters” in the media daily, he said, “a
teacher doesn’t need to look very hard to
bring relevancy into the class.
“It (geology) is always in the news,” he
said, “perhaps more than any other field of
science.”
Bolhuis’ creative teaching doesn’t stop
in the classroom. He uses every chance to
take his students outdoors to explore.
“I take every opportunity to let students
observe the magnificence of geology and
learn to understand the power that caused
it,” he said.
But getting his students out in the field of
geology comes at a price – and to minimize
bussing costs, Bolhuis obtained his CDL
(commercial driver’s license) so he could
drive the school bus to field trip sites.
One student recalls the enthusiasm and
energy Bolhuis brought to the classroom
when he was his student.
“He (Bolhuis) would get fired up about
every lesson he taught,” he said, and
“we (students) would tease him about his
unceasing love of rocks.
“His passion did not stop at the material,
either,” the ex-student continued. “He was
always weaving valuable life lessons into his
lectures.”
Bolhuis said he is fortunate to have a
career that he loves. Teaching and making
an impact on each of his students is a
bonus.
“I have to remind myself every day that I
never know where my influence begins, nor
where it ends,” Bolhuis said.
“I want to make an impact,” he said. “I
want to make a difference.”
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