http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040308&s=kennedy
The Junk Science of
George W. Bush
by
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
As Jesuit schoolboys studying world history we
learned
that
Copernicus and Galileo self-censored for many
decades
their proofs that the earth revolved around the
sun and
that a less restrained heliocentrist, Giordano
Bruno, was burned alive in 1600 for the crime of
sound
science.
With the encouragement of our professor, Father
Joyce, we marveled at the
capacity of human leaders to
corrupt
noble institutions. Lust for power had caused
the
Catholic hierarchy to subvert the church's most
central
purpose--the search for existential truths.
Today, flat-earthers within
the Bush
Administration--aided by right-wing allies who have
produced
assorted hired guns and conservative think
tanks
to further their goals--are engaged in a campaign
to
suppress science that is arguably unmatched in the
Western world since the Inquisition. Sometimes, rather
than
suppress good science, they simply order up their
own.
Meanwhile, the Bush White House is purging,
censoring
and blacklisting scientists and engineers
whose
work threatens the profits of the Administration's
corporate
paymasters or challenges the ideological
underpinnings of their radical anti-environmental
agenda.
Indeed, so extreme is this campaign that more
than
sixty scientists, including Nobel laureates and
medical
experts, released a statement on February 18
that
accuses the Bush Administration of deliberately
distorting scientific fact "for partisan political
ends."
CLIP
In a similar case, last November the EPA cut a
private
deal
with a pesticide manufacturer to take over federal
studies
of a pesticide it manufactures. Atrazine is the
most
heavily utilized weedkiller in
approved
in 1958, by the 1980s it had been identified as
a
potential carcinogen associated with high incidences
of
prostate cancer among workers at manufacturing
facilities. Testing by the
regularly
finds alarming concentrations of Atrazine in
drinking
water across the corn belt. Even worse, last
year
scientists at the
government's "safe" 3 parts per billion level causes
grotesque
deformities in frogs, including multiple sets
of
organs. And this year epidemiologists from the
in
humans associated with Atrazine, including male semen
counts
in farm communities that are 50 percent below
normal.
current
study.
The Bush Administration reacted to the frightening
findings
not by banning this dangerous chemical, as the
European Union has, but by taking the studies away
from
EPA scientists and, in an unprecedented move, giving
the
chemical's manufacturer, Switzerland-based Syngenta,
control
over federal research. In an interview with the
Los Angeles Times, Sherry Ford, a spokesperson for
Syngenta,
praised without irony the advantages of having
the
company monitor its own product. "This is one way we
can
ensure it's not presenting any risk to the
environment."
In a dramatic expansion of this disturbing strategy,
the
Bush Administration now plans to systematically turn
government science over to private industry by
contracting out thousands of science jobs to compliant
consultants already in the habit of massaging data to
support
corporate profits. The National Park Service is
preparing
a first phase of contracting reviews,
involving
about 1,800 positions, including biologists,
archeologists and environmental specialists. Later
phases
may entail replacement of 11,000 employees, more
than
two-thirds of the service's permanent work force.
CLIP
Science, like theology, reveals transcendent truths
about a
changing world. At their best, scientists are
moral
individuals whose business is to seek the truth.
Over the past two decades industry and conservative
think
tanks have invested millions of dollars to corrupt
science.
They distort the truth about tobacco,
pesticides, ozone depletion, dioxin, acid rain and
global
warming. In their attempt to undermine the
credible
basis for public action (by positing that all
opinions
are politically driven and therefore any one is
as true
as any other), they also undermine belief in the
integrity
of the scientific process.
Now Congress and this White House have used federal
power
for the same purpose. Led by the President, the
Republicans have gutted scientific research budgets
and
politicized science within the federal agencies. The
very leaders
who so often condemn the trend toward moral
relativism are fostering and encouraging the trend
toward
scientific relativism. The very ideologues who
derided
Bill Clinton as a liar have now
institutionalized dishonesty and made it the reigning
culture
of
The Bush Administration has so violated and corrupted
the
institutional culture of government agencies charged
with
scientific research that it could take a generation
for
them to recover their integrity even if Bush is
defeated
this fall. Says
Michael Oppenheimer, "If you believe in a
rational
universe,
in enlightenment, in knowledge and in a search
for the
truth, this White House is an absolute
disaster."
---
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., senior
attorney for the Natural
Resources Defense Council (http://www.nrdc.org/)
and
president
of the Waterkeeper Alliance
(http://www.waterkeeper.org/), is working on a book
about
President Bush's environmental policies, Crimes
Against Nature, to be published this spring by
HarperCollins.