Читать книгу Ecosystem Crises Interactions - Merrill Singer - Страница 13

In an essay entitled “The Danger of Environmentalism,” Michael Berliner (2020), senior advisor to the Ayn Rand Archives, writes: “Earth Day approaches, and with it a grave danger faces mankind. The danger is not from acid rain, global warming, smog, or the logging of rain forests, as environmentalists would have us believe. The danger to mankind is from environmentalism.” The perception, by some, of the danger inherent in being concerned about the industrial destruction of the environment is what has led covering the environment to be one of the most risky assignments in journalism. It is estimated that 40 reporters around the world died between 2005 and 2016 because of their environmental reporting. This is more than were killed covering the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Notes journalist Saul Elbein (quoted in Warren 2016): “In Cambodia and in remote forests elsewhere, a rising boom in the illegal sale of wood, land and minerals has turned the environmental beat into a new sort of conflict journalism. The dead have overwhelmingly been local reporters, covering illegal mining or logging. They are largely independent, poorly educated, untrained and despised by their nations’ establishment media. Reporting on a violent, corrupt frontier, they are never sure when they’ll cross a line and end up dead. Their lives in their hands, they head into the woods.” Newsworthy environmental controversies often involve powerful business and economic interests, explosive political clashes, criminal gangs, anti‐government rebels, or outright corruption. Often, they focus on struggles between elites and local people over indigenous rights to land and natural resources. In wealthy and developing countries alike, journalists covering environment issues find themselves the targets of attack by military, police, and paramilitary forces. In 2013, for example, independent journalist Miles Howe was assigned to cover protests by the Elsipotog First Nation in New Brunswick, Canada against hydraulic fracturing for natural gas. In his reporting, Howe sought to highlight unreported and underreported incidents. He recalls (quoted in Freedman 2018): “Many times I was the only accredited journalist witnessing rather violent arrests, third‐trimester pregnant women being locked up, guys tackled to the ground.” On one occasion, a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police pointed at him and shouted, “He’s with them!” His equipment was taken and the police searched his home. In addition, they offered to pay him to spy on the protesters—an offer that he rejected. In 2014, the body of Taing Try, a journalist covering the illegal logging of the forests of Cambodia, was found by local farmers in Kratie Province. He was lying face down in the mud on a logging road, a bullet in the back of his head. Try’s fate was not his alone. In 2008, Mikhail Beketov, a Russian journalist who wrote about the destruction of the Khimki Forest, part of the green belt surrounding Moscow, to make way for the Moscow–Saint Petersburg motorway, died of injuries suffered several years earlier after unknown attackers crushed his skull, broke his legs, and left him for dead in his own front yard. Similarly, in 2012, Chandrika Rai, an Indian reporter for the Hindi‐language newspaper Navbharat and the English‐language The Hitavada, who covered illegal coal mining, was bludgeoned to death along with his wife and their two teenage children in their home in Umaria, a small city in Madhya Pradesh state in central India. In 2017, Colombian radio journalist Efigenia Vásquez Astudillo was shot to death while covering the emergence of an indigenous movement to reclaim ancestral land that had been stolen and converted to large farms, resorts, and sugar plantations (Elbein 2016; Freedman 2018). The list goes on. Environmental reporters are often put at risk because they stand between the public and its need to know about environmental destruction and business interests or corrupt and criminal organizations intent on profit or personal gain. Degraders of the environment have a great deal invested in preventing the public from knowing the truth, or from knowing that is unencumbered by corporate spin (Conway 2018).

While environmental journals have been subjected to the most brutal forms of violence, environmental scientists—especially climate scientists—have been the targets of violent intimidation. The Climate Science Legal Defense Fund (2019), which has assisted numerous researchers who have been harassed and attacked through email, social media, and other online platforms or subjected to more explicit politically motivated personal threats, notes that:

Vicious hate mail and death threats are common occurrences for climate scientists: One was the victim of an anthrax scare. Another had a dead animal dropped on their doorstep—while their child was at home. There are websites devoted to publishing scientists’ contact information, a practice known as doxxing, so that the followers of these sites can flood scientists’ inboxes with threatening messages. Other internet harassment tactics involve posting private details about researchers, such as the names of their family members or home addresses, for harassers to use against them.

These forms of intimidation have also been directed at other kinds of scholars who have written about climate change. A founding member and current board member of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, Naomi Oreskes, a science historian at Harvard University, became a target of the anti‐climate science movement in 2004 when she published an article in Science documenting the broad scientific agreement on climate change. Based on an analysis of 928 scientific abstracts with the keywords “global climate change,” she concluded that “there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Climate scientists have repeatedly tried to make this clear. It is time for the rest of us to listen” (Oreskes 2004, p. 1686). In response to her publication, Oreskes began receiving hate mail, and extremely hostile letters were sent to Science. Many of the letters to the journal were penned by economists and others affiliated with pro‐free market think tanks, such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute. James Inhofe (R‐Oklahoma), a recipient of significant campaign funding from the fuel industry and a science denier who has called global warming a “hoax,” attacked Oreskes by name on the floor of the U.S. Senate. He cited Benny Peiser, a British social scientist, who claimed that his own review showed that fewer than 2 percent of climate studies endorsed the so‐called “consensus view” that human activity is driving global warming, and some actually opposed it. Inhofe was unaware of or failed to acknowledge the fact that Peiser later admitted he could only find one “peer‐reviewed” article that challenged the anthropogenic climate change consensus; this turned out to be published in a journal that is not peer‐reviewed and is owned by a fuel industry organization, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (Littlemore 2006). Moreover, not a single climate scientist subsequently disputed Oreskes’ finding. Oreskes concluded: “We weren’t being attacked because we’d done something wrong … We were being attacked because we’d done something right. Because we’d explained something significant, we’d laid facts on the table, those facts had implications, and some people were threatened by those implications” (quoted in Cho 2018).

Tyrone Hayes, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, notes that the history of such abuse predates the Internet: “Especially in the area of environmental science, it’s mostly been women that have been the target, going all the way back to Rachael Carson” (quoted in Begos 2014). When her book Silent Spring—a groundbreaking science‐based exposé of the environmental harms of pesticide use—was published in 1962, Carson was subjected to vicious personal assaults. The late novelist Michael Crichton—himself an outspoken climate change denier—even branded her “a mass murderess,” directly responsible for the deaths of millions of African children from malaria because her efforts led to a ban on the pesticide DDT in the United States (a chemical to which mosquitoes in Africa already were evolving resistance) (Graham 2012).

Hayes came to personally experience the vitriol of the agricultural chemical industry when he began publishing his research showing that the widely used herbicide atrazine (2‐chloro‐4‐(ethylamino)‐6‐(isopropylamino)‐S‐triazine) is an endocrine disruptor that demasculinizes and feminizes male frogs. He even wrote a poem, “The Atrazine Rap” (Hayes 2008), about ecocrises interaction, which includes the lyrics:

Atrazine ain’t a good thing

it causes male frogs to grow eggs

contributes to extra legs

and exposed males don’t want to sing

If that ain’t enough

when you combine the stuff

with a few other pesticides

it causes greater than additive effects

unpredictable defects

exposed larvae don’t grow

and they develop slow

and they contract diseases that otherwise could be beaten

Appreciating neither his well‐documented science nor his lyricism, Syngenta Crop Protection, the Basel, Switzerland‐based manufacturer of atrazine and initial funder of Hayes’ research, unleashed a barrage of attacks against him through press releases, letters to the editor, and a formal ethics complaint filed with the University of California, Berkeley (Aviv 2014). Internal memos, notes, and e‐mails from Syngenta released during a subsequent class‐action lawsuit revealed how it had conspired to discredit Hayes, including attempting to get scientific journals to retract his publications, investigating his funding, and examining his private life. The documents also showed that Syngenta’s P.R. team had proposed that the company purchase “Tyrone Hayes” as a search term on the Internet, so that any time someone searched for Tyrone’s research findings, the first thing they saw was an advertisement saying, “Tyrone Hayes Not Credible.” Finally, Syngenta launched a multimillion‐dollar no‐holds‐barred campaign to protect its considerable atrazine profits, hiring a detective agency to investigate scientists on a federal advisory panel, digging into the personal life of a judge, and commissioning a psychological profile of Hayes. In 2003, Hayes received a job offer from Duke University. Duke is close to Syngenta’s headquarters in Greensboro, North Carolina and the company’s research center in Research Triangle Park. When Syngenta officials got wind of the offer, they contacted university administrators and had it withdrawn (Howard 2013; Rohr 2018). Subsequently, Steven Milloy, a freelance science columnist and lobbyist with ties to the tobacco and fossil fuel industries and the head of a nonprofit organization, CSRWatch.com, to which Syngenta has given tens of thousands of dollars, wrote an article for Fox News titled “Freaky‐Frog Fraud” in which he attacked a Hayes paper published in Nature, characterized Hayes as a “junk scientist,” ridiculed his “shoddy write‐up [and] shaky research,” and dismissed his “lame” conclusions as “just another of Hayes’ tricks” (Milloy 2015). Hayes weathered the storm and continued his research and publications. By 2001, atrazine was the most commonly detected pesticide contaminating U.S. drinking water, and its safety remains controversial. Ultimately, Syngenta was forced to pay $105 million to more than a thousand Midwestern water utilities in reimbursement for the cost of filtering atrazine out of public drinking water (Duhigg 2009).

The eminent novelist and journalist George Orwell (1953) explained that there were four reasons why he wrote: sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm in words and their right arrangement, a historical impulse to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity, and political purpose: to push the world in a certain direction. This book was motivated by similar impulses. The degree to which it is deemed to be dangerous is the degree to which it succeeds in effectively communicating to readers the true and pressing dangers of anthropogenic environmental destruction and motivating them to action. Most desirably, it will be a book of the sort Mary Harris “Mother” Jones (1837–1930), a beloved activist and union organizer who was committed to pushing the world in a certain direction, had in mind when she advised, “Sit down and read. Educate yourself for the coming conflicts” (quoted in Fetherling 2010).