Public health researcher Lisa McKenzie remembers her first aerial view of the landscape-altering impacts of fossil fuel production on the picturesque mesas that rim the western slope of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains.
“It was well pad, after well pad, after well pad,” said McKenzie, a recently retired associate professor at the Colorado School of Public Health. “I remember thinking to myself, that’s like 7,000 point sources of benzene.”
The marred panorama altered the trajectory of her work. Since the 2010s, she’s leveraged her background in environmental chemistry and epidemiology to lead seminal studies that quantified the health effects of an oil and gas extraction process known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Her research transformed how drilling is regulated nationwide…