I say ‘our’ as the collective, as in ‘our failure’ — though I certainly feel no loyalty to this demagogue as the leader of my country, because I feel the position was not earned within the accepted architecture of our democracy. Lies were told without accountability. Fear and hatred were exploited as diversion tactics. Worse yet, a foreign nation interfered, and now it appears that a Manchurian candidate has prevailed.

In the month since the election, Trump has given us reason to fear the worst. His cabinet, for instance: a collection of the least qualified, least educated individuals in modern American  history, two of whom (Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil, chosen for Secretary of State, and Wilbur Ross, chosen for Secretary of Commerce) have close economic ties to Russia. The rest, filled with people whose principled ideals run counter to the missions of the very agencies they’ve been appointed to lead, most notably the anti-science climate-deniers appointed to the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency. Why? Because willful domestic ignorance is what the master plan requires.

If Trump’s team is any indication of his administration’s priority over the next four years, you can boil it down to one word: petroleum. Notwithstanding America’s own love affair with oil, it seems that Russian oil interests have turned this election on its head. This past year, while Americans argued over Trump’s tweets and Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, Vladimir Putin was positioning his chess pieces to support Russia’s increased Arctic drilling. Climate change is a good thing for him (and others with oil interests), at least in the short run, because melting polar ice caps will make fossil fuel extraction economically feasible in previously inaccessible areas.

Last February, Russian officials presented a revised claim of Arctic Territory to the United Nations, arguing that the country’s continental shelf extends well into the Arctic Ocean, including an area under the North Pole. If granted, Russia’s claim to the seabed would include mineral rights in the area — hundreds of billions of dollars in crude oil, currently unclaimed and untouched.

Now the only things standing in the way of Putin and Exxon Mobil’s development of these resources are 1) U.S. sanctions against Russia as punishment for their occupation of Crimea and crimes against Ukraine, and 2) U.S. policies restricting fossil fuel development in light of climate change.

If only there were people inside the White House who were sympathetic to their cause…

*

Last week, the Washington Post published an article about climate scientists in federal agencies scrambling to copy and archive as much federal climate data as possible before Trump is sworn into office. The fear, of course, is that Trump’s administration will order the destruction of the scientific evidence — a fear heightened by his transition team’s memo to the Department of Energy, asking agency officials for the names of employees and contractors who have participated in climate talks, conferences, and development of climate-based regulatory policy.

In the women’s domestic violence shelter where I volunteer, we call this kind of activity safety planning — preparations for survival under the threat of abuse. This kind of intimidation — the threat of retaliation, the threat of destroying one’s livelihood, or one’s property and professional work — is really not so different from the domestic abuse tactics we see before the escalation of physical violence. In these circumstances, we might help someone gather their supplies, make copies of the essential documents they need. Help them go into hiding if they feel their existence is at stake.

I shared the article on Facebook, posting: “Science, going into hiding like Anne Frank.”

*

Much has already been written about the parallels between the current political climate and the rise of Fascism in the 1930s. The patterns are recognizable, even with the limited history that I know: the xenophobic rhetoric, the racial superiority, the nationalism, the nostalgia for ‘better days of old.’  I sense danger in my body, my cells registering some kind of implicit knowledge, like the fight-or-flight impulse triggered by a predatory gaze.

I struggle to explain this history, this feeling to my kids — as much as I want to shield them from these things, it seems important for them to know an age-appropriate version of the truth. So I bought my oldest daughter a copy of The Diary of Anne Frank. I can’t remember how old I was when I first read the book, but my daughter is the same age that Anne Frank was when she began documenting her family’s life in hiding: just thirteen years old.

When I was thirteen, I believed in the nobility of my country. Freedom and democracy, justice for all. I believed in the history book lessons we were told about the land of opportunity, the inscription on our Statue of Liberty: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…

Fact: in 1941, Anne Frank and her family were denied entry as refugees to the United States. I did not learn this part of the story until I was an adult. Despite her father’s business connections in the U.S. and the presence of family in Boston, the Frank family’s applications for visas came too late, at a time when U.S. attitudes and policies concerning immigration were increasingly suspicious. It seems that America turned Jewish refugees away during the Holocaust because, among other things, we were worried about them being spies. (Does this sound familiar?)

Anne Frank died in a concentration camp at age fifteen. Turns out, her blood was also on our hands.

*

I know what you’re thinking. What does this have to do with that?

Do you see it now? A bouquet of words; they complement one another.

*

I wonder sometimes about the other diaries-in-hiding that could emerge when all of this is done. What stories will they tell? How bad will it really get? Will our children read about some Muslim girl hiding with her family in the attic of someone’s house? Or will it be more ‘civil,’ like the Japanese internment camps of the 1940s? Who else will be detained?  Dissenters? Journalists? Scientists?

It’s crazy, this line of thinking, I know. Unimaginable. Except that in many ways, the unimaginable has already happened — the data are already there. The votes have already been counted.

Maybe this is the diary they’ll find: a climate scientist’s records showing what we really knew all along.

Photo credit: Will Rose, Afghan refugees floating on the Mediterranean Sea, from qns.com

The post Science is a Refugee appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

The post Am I an Environmental Hypochondriac? appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

Critics have been swift to attack.  Oh no, there’s too much uncertainty to call 2014 the warmest year. It may have been one of the warmest, but not definitively the warmest — a brand of diversion politics frequently employed by climate-change deniers, and a strategy with which we more scientifically-minded Americans have become all too familiar.

Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas and creationist presidential wannabee, had the most loaded response: “Not to diminish anything about the climate, but Mr. President, I believe that most of us would think that [an ISIS] beheading is a far greater threat to an American than a sunburn.”  Implying, of course, that the potential for climate change to trigger large scale injury and loss of property and life, as well as significant changes in global migration patterns due to catastrophic weather events and drought-related social conflict, is no more risky than the dark side of a day at the beach.

But this resistance to the science shouldn’t surprise us, because in truth, it isn’t about the science at all. Nor is it about the accuracy of scientifically-based predictions. This resistance is about culture. A dogma. It’s about a way of life.

Huckabee’s new book, God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy, proclaims that American culture is divided into two sects: “Bubble-ville” (representing the out-of-touch urban centers of finance, politics, and entertainment, like New York, Washington, and L.A.) and “Bubba-ville” (the American South and Heartland regions, representing real American values).  He writes:

This is a book about God, guns, grits, and gravy.  It’s not a recipe book for Southern cuisine, nor a collection of religious devotionals, nor a manual on how to properly load a semiautomatic shotgun. It’s a book about what’s commonly referred to as “flyover country,” the vast portion of real estate that sits between the East Coast and the West Coast and which more often than not votes red instead of blue, roots for the Cowboys in the NFL and the Cardinals in the National League, and has three or more Bibles in every house.  It’s where there’s nothing unusual at about about God, guns, grits, or gravy. It’s not a novelty; it’s not strange or weird. It’s a way of life.

Notwithstanding his tired, ironic use of stereotypes to challenge stereotypes, and despite the xenophobia underlying his division of our ethnically and racially diverse country into “us” (the meat-and-potatoes real Americans) and “them” (the spices in the melting pot, who don’t keep Bibles in their homes) — despite all this, I think Huckabee has done us a favor.  Because what he’s done is reveal his resistance for what it really is: not legitimate scientific doubt, but a culture war between the fundamentalist Christian value system and everything in between.

A recurrent theme, this conflict.  I was in the eighth grade when I read the play, Inherit the Wind, for school. Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee wrote the play in 1955, in response to the irrational climate of fear surrounding McCarthy-era censorship, and is largely based upon the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial” — in which Tennessee high school teacher John Scopes was prosecuted and convicted for teaching evolution in his classroom, a violation of the state’s (now defunct) Butler Act.  The trial was one of the biggest of the century, and though its intent was to examine whether a teacher was guilty of violating state law, the real issue on the stand (we eighth-graders were encouraged to note) was the growing tension between fundamentalist Christian society and the influence of industrialization, urbanization, higher education, and immigration on that traditional way of life.

Fast forward 90 years, and we’re seeing the same stubborn resistance to science in the face of similar societal pressures on this blessed “way of life.”  The science is uncertain, they say.  An unproven theory.  The issue is too controversial to require our response.

Climate change is the new evolution — not because the science is controversial, but because this issue, like evolution, threatens the very foundation of traditional rural American culture.  It challenges the Manifest Destiny doctrine upon which this country was based, threatens a standard of living to which we’ve become accustomed, and —like children first the leaving the nest— requires us to accept that we, as humans, are responsible for the consequences of our actions.

I’m not the first one to notice this parallel between the lingering anti-evolution movement and the persistence of current-day climate-change deniers.  Andrew Cohen’s “What the Scopes Trial Teaches Us About Climate-Change Denial” provides a thorough examination of the phenomenon, as well as the fear beneath it all.

And let’s face it: confronting the large-scale, potentially catastrophic consequences of human-caused climate change IS scary, especially when the science shows that those of us not well adapted to the environmental struggle are at risk of becoming extinct — whether or not we are in favor with God.  Much easier to stick our heads in the sand, or suggest that evolution and climate change are —as Cohen reports— simply “wild guesses dressed up as scientific proof.”

But here’s the terrifying irony: science, unlike fundamentalist religion, is indifferent to that fear. Bubba-ville’s failure to accept and address this threat may just become the most convincing illustration of evolution yet.

photo credits:

President Obama from whitehouse.gov

Mike Huckabee from thinkprogress.org

Evolution image from whenintime.com

Scientific Method verses Creationist Method comic from pinterest.com

The post Climate Change is the New Evolution appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

I know a thing or two about doubt.  I know the feeling, as an environmental scientist, of second-guessing my calculations, the nagging paranoia that I’ve based important regulatory decisions on incorrect assumptions.  And as a writer, I am well-acquainted with the metallic taste of self-doubt — of sharing too much, or not enough, or misjudging my aesthetic.  To a certain degree, I think it’s healthy to second-guess.  Keeps one from settling too comfortably on their haunches, so to speak.  But sometimes, the tendency to be uncertain can be hijacked by others with thinly veiled agendas.

In February of this year, right before I was to deliver a reading of an essay from Creative Nonfiction’s The Human Face of Sustainability contest, I was alerted by CNF editor Lee Gutkind and someone from the marketing staff of Arizona State University’s Global Institute of Sustainability that there was some controversy regarding my piece.  Not to worry, they said, discussion is good.  But they wanted me to know in case something came up during my reading.  Then they shared what others had said.

For those who haven’t read the piece, “Acts of Courage” explores the increasing incidence of childhood cancers juxtaposed against our increased use of toxic chemicals — the evidence of which is documented by the presence of chemicals in our water, soil, food, and other consumer products (listen to the podcast reading of the essay here).  Many of these chemicals are known and suspected carcinogens, others have been released into the marketplace and environment without sufficient testing.  In the piece, I make no specific accusations about cause and effect; rather, I simply weave the facts together, shine a light into a dark corner and ask, “Shouldn’t we be looking here?”

The news of my essay winning The Human Face of Sustainability contest ruffled some feathers — a few scientists and scholars (whose identities I choose not to reveal in the interest of professional dignity) who read the blurb about my piece in ASU’s press release and responded with surprising disdain.  I will spare you the details, but here are some of the phrases that were being kicked around: “Of course this is junk… I don’t know of any science that supports this scare mongering.”  “We don’t need science becoming magic. Traces of this and that will kill you.”  And my favorite: “It would seem that any prize for creative non-fiction should be for something that is actually non-fiction.”

Ouch.  I was certain I was about to be ambushed.

The threat of attack sent me into a manic state of self-doubt, and I scoured my research to double-check the statistics and prepare for my reading as if it were a thesis defense.  These were scholars, after all, people with a helluva lot more academic credentialing than me.  At some point though, late in the night before my reading, when my anxiety had reached critical mass, I decided to focus my research on my attackers instead.

Sure enough, the special interests began to emerge — representatives of, and affiliations with institutes and organizations against chemical regulation, funded by petroleum, chemical, and pharmaceutical industries.  I had just experienced firsthand the strategic employment of doubt, the attack-via-uncertainty.  The defensive offensive.

This is a card frequently played in the environment-verses-industry game, the latest round evident in Steven E. Koonin’s “Climate Science is Not Settled” piece — which is, of course, being applauded by fossil fuel lobbyists (for more discussion, see Andrew Revkin’s blog post “Certainties, Uncertainties, and Choices with Global Warming” at Dot Earth).  Better not do anything about climate change… the science is still uncertain.  Score one for the status quo.

But here’s the thing we need to understand: while scientific uncertainty is a valid topic to wrestle and discuss, it is currently being (ab)used as a ploy to distract from the real issue at hand — by which I mean the ethics behind our culture’s approach to things like chemical regulation and climate change.  Ethical questions such as: Is it morally acceptable to burden future generations with providing the evidence of harm?  Or as Kathleen Dean Moore and Michael Nelson have asked in their co-edited book, Moral Ground: Do we have a moral obligation to leave future generations with a world as rich in possibility as the one that was left to us?  These are the questions that should drive our actions, and they are exactly the ones environmental opponents seek to avoid.  Why? Because their answers are less susceptible to doubt.

Despite the uncertainty, I do believe that the scientific evidence of human-caused global climate change is solid, as is the scientific argument for using the precautionary principle in chemical regulation.  The data glare at us like a mid-day sun, and the doubt cast by climate deniers and other industry loyalists is a tactic — just a moment in time when the sun is obscured by the moon.  There was a time when people were afraid of the solar eclipse.  Today we should know better than that.

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