Why Science Matters: March For Science 2017

A bank robber can make a lot of arguments about why he or she should be allowed to rob a bank. "The money in the bank is just sitting there, it's not aiding the economy by being circulated", or "By taking this money and spending it, I'll be creating jobs", or "But I'll give some of the money to charities". A bank president, and for that matter, the people who have been robbed, would never agree that this justifies stealing the money. So why would anyone acquiesce their right to clean water and air, safe food and drugs, and their very environment to those who would steal those things from them? Sometimes it's because they are kept in the dark about the dangers that they face. Ignorance is a valuable tool for those who would profit off of our birthright to clean air and water, and a livable environment.

Sometimes the dangers in our environment are obvious. Earthquakes, floods, or volcanic eruptions are events whose existence cannot be denied. In other situations the problem is not so obvious. Lead in water causes damage over longer terms. Cigarettes or radiation may take years to produce lung cancer. The loss of ozone or rising world temperatures have taken years to manifest changes in our living environment. Such gradual changes are harder to recognize in our day to day lives even though the changes are very real. Yet these phenomena can kill people every bit as much as an earthquake, just not all at once. The recognition of these dangers are critical to keeping society safe, but there is a serious problem. Someone is making money by keeping society ignorant.

Corporations make their profits selling cigarettes. They make profits by cutting corners in food safety and by avoiding air and water pollution controls. They make profits by maintaining dependence on fossil fuels as a primary energy source. We live in a society based on capitalism, but unrestrained capitalism is ultimately not in our best interest. Corporations cannot be trusted to police themselves, a fact they've proven over and over.

We instituted federal and state governments to protect us and to work for the common good. When corporations killed and injured citizens, the government stepped in to limit the damage by regulating dangerous industries. And it worked. The workplace environment is much safer these days than it was a century ago. Politicians, for better or worse, represent us and design the laws and the government programs that protect our citizens from harm. They hear from lobbyists all the time as they make decisions on legislation and sometimes they hear from constituents. But there is another voice, and I've always taken it for granted that it would be heard: the voice of science.

Why is science needed? Scientific research is the unbiased source of information and data on issues of environmental protection and safety. Corporate scientists may do important research, but the profit motive ultimately influences their findings. It is only through independent inquiry that we can trust the accuracy of research. In so many ways, government-funded scientific research has been a huge success, one that has driven innovation in our economy and made our society one of the richest and safest in human history. The U.S. Geological Survey, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and NASA have done incredible work, and have informed public decision-making for many decades. And...they have led the human adventure. Without government funding for the big endeavors, the exploration of space, the exploration of the interior of the atom, the inner workings of the Earth, we would be unable to continue the quest for knowledge.

So why are scientists marching in the streets? Because unbiased scientific research is under attack. Corporations have finally achieved their aim and have one-party control of Congress, the Presidency, and the Supreme Court. There are intensive efforts underway to destroy the effectiveness of independent government-sponsored research, with draconian cuts to the EPA, CDC, USGS and other science-based government institutions. We have a president and a Congress who deny that global warming and climate change are even happening, despite the ongoing damage occurring in coastal environments and alpine habitats. The spread of tropical diseases is accelerating. Millions of trees across the American west are dying.

I've lived through the birth of the environmental movement in the 60s and 70s, and felt great pride that my country took the lead in designing laws that protected people from toxins and poisons in the air and water. I am dismayed that we must fight these battles all over again, but unfortunately we don't get to choose the times we are living in. So it was that I took to the streets on Saturday.

It was a marvelous thing to see tens of thousands of people in the large urban areas like LA, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York, but I was even more inspired that marches for science took place in small towns all across the country, and across the world (scientific knowledge does not stop at international borders, even if there are walls). I marched in the small California town of Hemet along with perhaps forty or fifty people. There were smaller such marches all across the country. People understand the need for unbiased research, and are ready to fight for it politically.

Ansel Adams said it well: "It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment". And yet that is the place to which we have come, although I find hope that those who still work in the EPA and other government institutions are in agreement with the aims of the March for Science. The protests must continue, and citizens need to hold the feet of their representatives to the fire. Unbiased scientific research must continue for the sake of our health and the environment in which we live.

As I went through the pictures of the march, I noticed the huge high ridge of San Jacinto Peak in the distance above town. Southern California is largely a desert or near-desert, but the high mountain ridges surrounding the arid valleys reach elevations in excess of 10,000 feet. They are islands above the desert, and they are under assault from the ravages of global warming. The continuing drought has caused intense wildfires that have stripped away the cool conifer forests. The environment is changing in ways that we are only just beginning to recognize, and we need the research and data to understand the future and how to prepare for it. It's not of the sake of some endangered butterfly, although that is important too. It's for the sake of all of us humans, who will pass this planet on to our children. We need to care.

Thoughts for Earth Day 2013: There is a price to pay

Andrew Alden at About Geology notes today that he hosted an Accretionary Wedge on Earth Day in 2008. I had only been blogging a few months at the time, but I contributed, and in reading over my post from back then, I see that things haven't changed all that much. In just two months, I'll have the chance to return to my favorite spot on the planet at Cedar Mesa, and hopefully it will look as pristine as it did five years ago. Thanks, Andrew, for the reminder!

Here is my post from April, 2008:

This month's Accretionary Wedge (Accretionary Wedge #8 ) is hosted by Andrew Alden at About Geology, and the entries involve our responses to Earth Day. Mine is a bit late in coming; I reward myself with a blog entry if I get my other work done, and this has been finals week. It's been a bit hectic!

I offer today a picture of my most sacred spot on the planet (so far): the edge of Cedar Mesa at Muley Point. The cliff below the rocks drops 800 feet straight down to a flat plain which is then carved by the San Juan River into intricate canyons some 1,200 feet deeper still. Monument Valley and the Raplee Anticline lie in the distance, as well as the towns of Cortez CO and Farmington NM. It is a precious place to me, full of mystery, beauty and solitude. Ghosts of the Ancestral Pueblo people lurk here, and the fossils of Permian reptiles as well.

But...hidden in the bottom of the deep canyon is the greatest upstream extent of the artifical evaporation pond of Lake Powell. On a 1964 topographic map of the National Recreational Area, there is a notation at Muley Point: "slated for development". In the distance, at Mexican Hat, oil wells pump the black liquid from the ground, and around Farmington, a GoogleEarth view reveals hundreds or thousands of gas wells. Coal is mined from Black Mesa, off to the south, and evaporite minerals are torn from the ground to the north of Canyonlands National Park. Power lines criss-cross the region. My favorite place is under siege.

Of course, we need all these things to live, but the point of my entry today is this: there is a price to be paid. The price takes many forms, from high prices on commodities, in foul air, polluted rivers, extinct plants and animals, and in the almost never recognized loss of the wild places of our planet, the gauntlet in which our ancestors survived and thrived. We have lost touch with the earth that gave us our birth, and which continues to nurture us, despite our abuse. And our abusive ways are about to come to an end, one way or another: we will finally destroy the last of the wild places, drill the last drops of oil and shovel the last lumps of coal, we will melt the last glaciers, and deplete the last soils. Or, we will choose not to do these things, and exist on our planet in a new way: a sustainable existence that finds a way to give something back to our planet.

The environmental movement on our planet has been demonized, trivialized, and marginalized, because, I suppose, it has always threatened the perceived profits of somebody. What have environmental groups tried to do since the hey-day of the 1970's and the first Earth Day? A short list might include:

• Increase mileage standards and encourage the use of mass-transit
• Encourage the development of alternative energy resources
• Decrease emissions from our vehicles, including greenhouse gases and ozone destroying compounds
• Encouraged laws to protect our water, air and soil
• Protect the wild places that still remain on our planet

Environmentalists have been the visionaries and the prophets for our planet. They have seen the things we do today to abuse our planet, and offer an alternative path for the future, one based on sustainability. Such ideas run counter to the profit motive of particular industries, and thus environmentalists are attacked as elitists and flakes, while the money continues to flow into the coffers of the energy companies and the developers. But the bills for all of us are coming due...

The oil is running out, and thus the price spikes. We will never see cheap oil again. The mass conversion of agricultural fields to the growth of biofuels is causing grain prices to spike, and we are becoming less and less able to feed the hungriest people on the planet (Malthus is in the air; "Running Out of Planet to Exploit," ). The prices of metals are climbing.

Change is possible, and I sometimes see hopeful signs, and part of my optimism comes from Earth Day, and the works of good people to bring awareness to those who are waking up to the spectre of high prices and resource limits. We have a choice though...we can let the decisions about the future to be made by energy companies and their political lackeys, or we can demand a future based on sustainability. It will take education, and an end to the corporate media's obsession with Britney and Paris, and kidnapped white women, and American Flag Lapels. People, when given the right information, can make the right choices.

Those are my thoughts this week. You are welcome to comment!

Only a Little Planet...

I'm kind of hesitant about writing about Earth Day, 2012. There are many things I could talk about concerning our occupancy on planet Earth and what we a doing to ourselves and the ecosystem to which we belong. But I feel a certain sense of hopelessness, like I am trapped in a bus hurtling towards an abyss, and I am not in the driver's seat. In fact I am sitting way in the back, and no one seated up front is aware of what is happening. They're not paying attention, and wouldn't believe their peril if they were. The drivers of the bus have different priorities. I don't know if it is ignorance, or recklessness, but they are driving ever faster and faster, sure in themselves that they can make the turn before going over the edge.

The original Earth Day in 1970 caught businesses and politicians off-guard. Before they knew what was happening, Congress much to their own surprise had passed the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, and formed the Environmental Protection Agency. They passed the Endangered Species Act. And it made a difference. Our air and water are cleaner, despite vast numbers of more people and cars on the road. Dams and power plants and other mass developments have to consider their affect on the environment before they can proceed. It made a difference, and the enemies of this progress have been counter-attacking with a vengeance. 

Today, we face some of the greatest challenges ever faced by our species: the deeply intertwined problems of energy use and global climate change. Unfortunately, instead of facing the crisis head on, we instead have to listen to politicians deny the very existence of a problem. Despite the clear record of sea level rise, loss of glaciers worldwide, and direct measurements of worldwide temperatures, the politicians listen to their corporate lobbyists who pay for their re-election campaigns and then impugn the motives of climate scientists and environmental groups. The Supreme Court is complicit in this, with their recent Citizens United ruling that allows unlimited donations by corporations to political candidates. Our politicians represent their corporate sponsors, not their constituents.

We don't have many tools to fight back with. There is education, but political support for education is also disappearing. For all their words about competing in a global economy, politicians are letting our universities, colleges and high schools wither on the vine.

We still have the right to vote, but politicians are attempting to restrict that right to those who will vote they way the politicians want. Not enough people vote these days anyway, and many who do are "low-information" voters who are ignorant of the issues, and are easily swayed by sophisticated and well funded media campaigns.

So here I am, a blogger with a few hundred readers, and a teacher with a few hundred students each year. Did I say hopeless? Yeah, that's the way I feel sometimes. But I also know that education is a powerful tool, and I have to believe that politicians can only deny what is happening right before their eyes for so long (and then when the predicted catastrophes occur, they will say "no one could have foreseen this"). And change will come.

I wish the change wouldn't be wrenching. I wish it could be planned and carried out in a way that upholds human dignity and doesn't result in suffering, starvation and permanent economic depression. We will have to leave petroleum and fossil fuels behind, and embrace renewable energy if our standard of living is to continue as it is now, if there is to be an economic future for the children being born today, and if there is to be a healthy ecosystem on our planet. There is still time to plan, if the politicians would learn from someone besides their corporate sponsors.

Get involved and make a change! We did it in 1970, we can do it again.

Accretionary Wedge #24: Our Geological Heroes

Callan Bentley at Mountain Beltway is hosting this month's Accretionary Wedge, with the goal of paying tribute to the extraordinary individuals who helped make our life, our science, and our planet better than they would otherwise have been: our geological heroes.


It took me awhile to consider who that hero would be, because I have had quite a few in my life...I've written about some of them, especially here and here. But given the coincidence of the Wedge and fortieth anniversary of Earth Day, I thought I would talk about one of the more important literary influences that led me to where I am today: a teacher, a geologist, and an unapologetic environmentalist: an advocate for the Earth, not because I love it more than the people that live on it, but because a healthy planetary ecosystem is a better place for people to live.

With that in mind, I offer up my geological hero: Edward Abbey. Anyone my age in the outdoor sciences probably traces their love of the outdoors to his rants in books like Desert Solitaire and the Monkey Wrench Gang, and it might seem odd to consider his screeds to be a celebration of humanity. In fact, one feels he would have preferred a world without humans (from the last chapter of Desert Solitaire):

"In deep stillness, in a somber solemn light, these beings stand, these fins of sandstone hollowed out by time, the juniper trees so shaggy, tough and beautiful, the dead or dying pinyon pines, the little shrubs of rabbitbrush and blackbrush, the dried-up stalks of asters and sunflowers gone to seed, the black-rooted silver-blue sage. How difficult to imagine this place without a human presence; how necessary. I am almost prepared to believe that this sweet virginal primitive land will be grateful for my departure and the absence of the tourists, will breathe metaphorically a collective sigh of relief - like a whisper of wind - when we are all and finally gone and the place and its creations can return to their ancient procedures unobserved and undisturbed by the busy, anxious, brooding consciousness of man.

Grateful for our departure? One more expression of human vanity. The finest quality of this stone, these plants and animals, this desert landscape is the indifference manifest to our presence, our absence, our coming, our staying or our going. Whether we live or die is a matter of absolutely no concern whatsoever to the desert. Let men in their madness blast every city on earth into black rubble and envelope the entire planet in a cloud of lethal gas - the canyons and hills, the springs and rocks will still be here, the sunlight will filter through, water will form and warmth shall be upon the land and after sufficient time, no matter how long, somewhere, living things well emerge and join and stand once again, this time perhaps to take a different and better course. I have seen the place called Trinity, in New Mexico, where our wise men exploded the first atomic bomb and the heat of the blast fused sand into a greenish glass - already the grass has returned, and the cactus and the mesquite. On this bedrock of animal faith I take my stand, close by the old road that leads eventually out of the valley of paradox.

Yes. Feet on earth. Knock on wood. Touch stone. Good luck to all."

A world without people? Maybe. But Abbey wrote his books to all of us, in hopes that his readers would come to understand the Earth in a different way. I grew up in the sixties, when the very idea of limiting our emissions from cars and factories was a laughing matter. Plumes of filth rising from smoke stacks was a sign of financial security. Dumping waste in our rivers was a convenient way to make bad things disappear. Paving over wildlands was a sign of success, of human domination over the land. Earth Day was first seen by many as another amusing hippie protest, all wrapped up in other protests over wars in faraway places.

In 1967, the first picture of the entire Earth was taken from space. In 1968, Edward Abbey published Desert Solitaire. In 1970, the first Earth Day took place. I don't know that Abbey's book was as influential as the other two events, but when I picked up the book for myself in the early 1970's, it provided me a new way to look at the planet, and was one of several events that led me on the path into geology, and even more importantly, into teaching.

We as a people made progress towards a cleaner and safer world in the 1970's, with the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the EPA (plus the Wilderness Act of 1964). There was a backlash in the 1980's, as the military-industrial complex caught on to the PR game. We lost many critical years in our fight for a sustainable clean energy future after 2000, but we may find ourselves forced to confront the issue as oil runs short. We appear to have confronted the problem of ozone depletion successfully.

But there are still so many problems. Today, humanity faces a craven political stalling game over global warming by those who stand to lose profits in the energy industry. That global warming is happening is not in doubt. That we have caused it is also not in doubt. Finding solutions will be difficult, especially in the face of a well-funded manufactured doubt "controversy". We face an appalling problem of soil erosion and loss. The agricultural soil base of our food supply was greatest some 10,000 years ago, and we have been losing it ever since. The vast increase in production of the last century has come from an intense application of energy and chemicals that will soon be in short supply.

The Earth is an impassive mother. She doesn't exactly care if we survive or not, and 99% of all the species that ever emerged on our planet are extinct, for many different reasons. We humans are apparently the first species ever to be aware of that fact. What choices will we make with that knowledge?

Today's picture is moonset under Landscape Arch, the largest span (290 feet) in Arches National Park, and the either the largest or second largest in the world.

Accretionary Wedge #8: There Will Be a Price to Pay

This month's Accretionary Wedge (Accretionary Wedge #8 ) is hosted by Andrew Alden at About Geology, and the entries involve our responses to Earth Day. Mine is a bit late in coming; I reward myself with a blog entry if I get my other work done, and this has been finals week. It's been a bit hectic!

I offer today a picture of my most sacred spot on the planet (so far): the edge of Cedar Mesa at Muley Point. The cliff below the rocks drops 800 feet straight down to a flat plain which is then carved by the San Juan River into intricate canyons some 1,200 feet deeper still. Monument Valley and the Raplee Anticline lie in the distance, as well as the towns of Cortez CO and Farmington NM. It is a precious place to me, full of mystery, beauty and solitude. Ghosts of the Ancestral Pueblo people lurk here, and the fossils of Permian reptiles as well.

But...hidden in the bottom of the deep canyon is the greatest upstream extent of the artifical evaporation pond of Lake Powell. On a 1964 topographic map of the National Recreational Area, there is a notation at Muley Point: "slated for development". In the distance, at Mexican Hat, oil wells pump the black liquid from the ground, and around Farmington, a GoogleEarth view reveals hundreds or thousands of gas wells. Coal is mined from Black Mesa, off to the south, and evaporite minerals are torn from the ground to the north of Canyonlands National Park. Power lines criss-cross the region. My favorite place is under siege.

Of course, we need all these things to live, but the point of my entry today is this: there is a price to be paid. The price takes many forms, from high prices on commodities, in foul air, polluted rivers, extinct plants and animals, and in the almost never recognized loss of the wild places of our planet, the gauntlet in which our ancestors survived and thrived. We have lost touch with the earth that gave us our birth, and which continues to nurture us, despite our abuse. And our abusive ways are about to come to an end, one way or another: we will finally destroy the last of the wild places, drill the last drops of oil and shovel the last lumps of coal, we will melt the last glaciers, and deplete the last soils. Or, we will choose not to do these things, and exist on our planet in a new way: a sustainable existence that finds a way to give something back to our planet.

The environmental movement on our planet has been demonized, trivialized, and marginalized, because, I suppose, it has always threatened the perceived profits of somebody. What have environmental groups tried to do since the hey-day of the 1970's and the first Earth Day? A short list might include:

• Increase mileage standards and encourage the use of mass-transit
• Encourage the development of alternative energy resources
• Decrease emissions from our vehicles, including greenhouse gases and ozone destroying compounds
• Encouraged laws to protect our water, air and soil
• Protect the wild places that still remain on our planet

Environmentalists have been the visionaries and the prophets for our planet. They have seen the things we do today to abuse our planet, and offer an alternative path for the future, one based on sustainability. Such ideas run counter to the profit motive of particular industries, and thus environmentalists are attacked as elitists and flakes, while the money continues to flow into the coffers of the energy companies and the developers. But the bills for all of us are coming due...

The oil is running out, and thus the price spikes. We will never see cheap oil again. The mass conversion of agricultural fields to the growth of biofuels is causing grain prices to spike, and we are becoming less and less able to feed the hungriest people on the planet (Malthus is in the air; "Running Out of Planet to Exploit," ). The prices of metals are climbing.

Change is possible, and I sometimes see hopeful signs, and part of my optimism comes from Earth Day, and the works of good people to bring awareness to those who are waking up to the spectre of high prices and resource limits. We have a choice though...we can let the decisions about the future to be made by energy companies and their political lackeys, or we can demand a future based on sustainability. It will take education, and an end to the corporate media's obsession with Britney and Paris, and kidnapped white women, and American Flag Lapels. People, when given the right information, can make the right choices.

Those are my thoughts this week. You are welcome to comment!