Galileo Galilei (1564 — 1662) could see beyond the horizon

Essay by Peter Dykstra, Editor, Environmental Health News, May 2, 2020

Make no mistake, Americans didn’t invent this form of persecution. If you don’t believe me, ask Galileo. But when it comes to war, peace, racial equality, gender equality, marriage equality, pollution, climate change, and many more issues, damn, we’re good at it.

Martin Luther King, Jr. got red-baited, wiretapped, spied upon, and, of course, murdered before his complete vindication.

Nearly six decades after the publication of her book Silent Spring, Rachel Carson still has the distinction of being accused of mass murder for inspiring the ban on the pesticide DDT. Linked to the endangerment of bird species ranging from peregrine falcons to ruby-throated hummingbirds, DDT rose to international fame as a mosquito killer during World War II.

Back in the early 1960′s, the chemical industry led the assault on Carson, led by a young public relations executive named E. Bruce Harrison.

From his perch at the Chemical Manufacturers Association, Harrison steered a whisper campaign that suggested Carson was a Communist and a lesbian — twin kisses of death in early 1960′s American culture. Carson soon succumbed to breast cancer. The U.S. banned DDT in 1972. The bald eagle and others recovered, but attacks on the late Rachel Carson continued. In 2010, noted publisher and former Presidential candidate Steve Forbes charged that the mild-mannered Carson was a mass murderer who helped birth “environmental barbarism.” His reasoning was that DDT had helped curb malaria’s death toll in the developing world.

Today, Rachel Carson has a bridge named after her in Pittsburgh. Bruce Harrison went on to a lucrative career in anti-environmental public relations. He was a founder of the original climate-denying lobby group, the Global Climate Coalition. For his labors, he was elected to the National Capital Public Relations Hall of Fame in 1999.

Hanoi Jane and Ralph Nader are well known cases of dissent

Jane Fonda was part of a Hollywood acting dynasty, with her dad Henry and brother Peter. She was also an outspoken activist on women’s and Native American issues, and, perhaps most notably, for her opposition to the Vietnam War. In 1972, she visited North Vietnam and the men who were fighting, killing, and imprisoning U.S. troops. One photograph, with Fonda astride an NVA anti-aircraft gun, has lived forever.

Fonda has apologized for the North Vietnam visit repeatedly, but with little apparent impact. Despite an exemplary life of supporting subsequent causes, notably fighting teen pregnancy and advocating for action on climate change, she’s still known to millions of Americans only as Hanoi Jane. No American before or since has developed such an immunity to Christian forgiveness.

Of course, Fonda was right about the lies and amorality of American leadership’s lies over Vietnam. But to millions, she’s still Hanoi Jane.

Ralph Nader was a crusading young attorney, bent on haranguing major American companies to stop killing so many of their workers and customers. His 1965 book “Unsafe at Any Speed” was a devastating indictment of the Chevrolet Corvair, which he argued was the deadliest American car on the road.

Nader also headed a successful effort to make seat belt use mandatory. Nader led the charge against the Big Three automakers’ “planned obsolescence” — the business strategy of building less reliable cars to force consumers into a cycle of buying replacement vehicles every few years. Ralph Nader the gadfly saved an incalculable number of lives.

Alas, forgiveness has its limits. In one of her many apologies, Jane Fonda herself called her Hanoi trip “unforgivable.” And Ralph Nader enraged many of his staunchest admirers with his third-party presidential run in 2000. He tallied more than 2.8 million votes, including 97,000 in Florida, where Bush won by less than 200 — turning a likely Al Gore victory into eight years of George W. Bush.

Climate scientists have been subject to ridicule

And what of Al Gore? He took the lead in climate advocacy as early as 1988, when his congressional hearings prompted some of the first headlines for global warming. But even as climate change hastens its conversion from startling theory to tragic reality, Al Gore is still more punchline than prophet to conservative ideologues, including President Trump.

Let’s not forget climate scientists. Last week, climatologist Mike Mann was elected to the exclusive National Academy of Sciences.

His path there included years of attacks from well-funded political operatives accusing him of only being in it for the money; lawsuits—none successful—intended to muscle a vocal scientist into silence; and a hallucinatory attack likening Mann to a child molester because he works at Penn State, the former workplace of the infamous convicted child-molesting football coach, Jerry Sandusky. Ever the good-natured warrior, Mann is suing back on that one.

Mann is not alone. Other climate scientists endure personal attacks; some have to cope with online harassment, including publication of their home addresses.

Scientists studying endocrine-disrupting chemicals have to dodge incoming rhetorical fire from ideologues or corporate hired guns. Many environmental journalists cope with similar flak or worse. In some cases, activists get it worst of all, with international activists in places like Brazil and Honduras paying with their lives.

In 1633, the Roman Catholic Church wrapped up its persecution of Galileo, commuting his prison sentence to house arrest. In exchange, Galileo agreed to recant his heretic view that the Earth revolved around the sun.

In 1992, the Church finally got around to formally acknowledging that Galileo was right. If there’s a 339-year vindication timetable for the likes of Al Gore and Michael Mann, we’re toast.

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See also: Welcome to Kent State University’s 50th Commemoration of May 4, 1970

On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard fired on Kent State students during an anti-war protest, killing four students and wounding nine other students. In keeping with the commitment to honor and remember those tragic events, Kent State is hosting a virtual program to mark the historic 50th Commemoration of May 4, 1970.

Virtual Commemoration Events — The May 4 50th Commemoration includes the virtual noon program on May 4, 2020, the virtual candlelight vigil, special videos, online exhibits, interactive mobile apps and more.

Public review of UNFRACTURED in WV

From a Biography provided in Honor of a Life of Honesty and Courage

Sandra Steingraber said: “We are all musicians in a great human orchestra, and it is now time to play the Save the World Symphony. You are not required to play a solo, but you are required to know what instrument you hold and play it as well as you can. You are required to find your place in the score. What we love we must protect. That’s what love means. From the right to know and the duty to inquire flows the obligation to act.” (And to VOTE! dgn)

Sandra Steingraber spent most of her childhood in Tazewell County, Illinois, an area dominated by industrial agriculture and manufacturing. Her mother, a microbiologist and her father, a community college professor was influenced by Rachel Carson. He stimulated his daughter’s interest in sustainability and organic agriculture. When Steingraber was diagnosed with bladder cancer in college, she suspected that there was a cancer cluster in her hometown and her family. Once in remission, she began her life-long exploration of the environmental links to cancer and human health.

During her search, Steingraber began to study Rachel Carson. “For my father, who served as a teenage soldier in Naples where the pesticide DDT was first deployed, Silent Spring was an antidote to wartime thinking…. For me… Silent Spring was the reason I left the laboratory and became a science writer. Silent Spring was my father’s armistice. It was my call to arms.”

Steingraber calls Carson her “guiding spirit” and portrays herself as “laboring away in the vineyards that Rachel Carson planted, trying on a daily basis to find a language to talk with the public about various technical subjects.”

Steingraber’s highly acclaimed book, Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment, presents cancer as a human rights issue. Originally published in 1997, it was the first comprehensive effort to bring together data on toxic releases from US cancer registries. It won praise from the national and international media.

A 2010 documentary by The People’s Picture Company of Toronto, Living Downstream, is based on the book and follows Steingraber’s travels across North America, as she works to break the silence about cancer and its links to the environment.

Steingraber’s next book, Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood, explores the intimate ecology of motherhood. Both a memoir of her own pregnancy and an investigation of fetal toxicology, Having Faith reveals the extent to which environmental hazards now threaten each stage of infant development. In the eyes of an ecologist, the mother’s body is the first environment for life. The Library Journal selected Having Faith as a best book of 2001, and it was featured in a PBS documentary by Bill Moyers.

In her most recent book, Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis, published in 2011, Steingraber identifies a safe environment as a human rights issue and explores the challenges and solutions to the ongoing chemical contamination of our children and our biosphere. Through individual stories, she relates how family routines are inextricably connected to public health issues: “Sunburn at the beach is linked to the stability of the ozone layer, which, in turn, is threatened by particular pesticides used in the production of tomatoes and strawberries.” Through her explorations, Steingraber suggests that we must realign our environmental policies to protect our children’s healthy development and free ourselves from dependence on fossil fuels in all their toxic forms.

Called “a poet with a knife” by Sojourners magazine, Steingraber was named a Ms. Magazine “Woman of the Year” and later received the Jennifer Altman Foundation’s first annual Altman Award for “the inspiring and poetic use of science to elucidate the causes of cancer.” The Sierra Club has called Steingraber “the new Rachel Carson,” and Carson’s own alma mater, Chatham College, awarded her its biennial Rachel Carson Leadership Award. In 2006, Steingraber received a Hero Award from the Breast Cancer Fund, and in 2009, the Environmental Health Champion Award from Physicians for Social Responsibility, Los Angeles. Steingraber was the 2011 recipient of the Heinz Award for extraordinary service to the environment.

Steingraber has delivered the keynote addresses at conferences on human health and the environment throughout the United States and Canada and has lectured at many universities, medical schools, and hospitals—including Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Columbia, and the Woods Hole Research Center. She is recognized for her ability to serve as a translator between scientists and activists. She has testified in the European Parliament, before the President’s Cancer Panel, and has participated in briefings to Congress and before United Nations delegates in Geneva, Switzerland. She is currently a regular columnist for Orion Magazine.

For a number of years Sandra Steingraber and her family lived just east of Ithaca in a log cabin in the woods, adjacent to wetlands where the “frogs kept them awake at night.” They drew their water from a well and belonged to a community organic farm and a cooperative grocery store. Although they loved the rural nursery school that their daughter Faith attended, Sandra and her husband Jeff felt compelled to withdraw her when they learned that the play structures were impregnated with dangerous amounts of arsenic.

When they discovered during a move that their television set had been stolen out of the back of their truck, they decided not to replace it. The result is that their children don´t experience television advertising. As a result, their food preferences have been shaped by their direct experience with the food itself and the farmers who grow it. No television commercials attract them with pictures of sweetened cereals and bubbly colas. Currently the family lives in a 1000 square foot house with a push mower, a clothesline, and a vegetable garden.

Sandra Steingraber has devoted her life to advocating for the human right to a toxic free environment. In an essay entitled “Mind Games” (Orion Magazine, March/April 2011), she wrote:

“So don’t give me any more shopping tips or lists of products to avoid. Don’t put neurotoxicants in my furniture and food and then instruct me to keep my children from breathing or eating them. Instead give me federal regulations that assess chemicals for their ability to alter brain development and function before they are allowed access to the marketplace… Give me chemical reform based on precautionary principles. Give me an architectural system that doesn’t impair our children’s learning ability or their future.”

Washington Monument (555 feet high)

George Washington Quotes For Presidents Day

This Holiday Was Originally In Honor Of Washington’s Birthday

Nearly two and a half centuries ago, George Washington became the first President of the United States. To help commemorate the man behind the chopping of the cherry tree, I’ve collected 13 of the best George Washington quotes for Presidents Day.

These quotes cover a lot of territory. From the topics of happiness and labor to freedom of speech and discipline, it seems that George Washington had quite a few things to say. This man’s words are simple yet striking, and it’s apparent from reading over these quotes that he was way ahead of his time in so many ways.

While Presidents Day is meant to commemorate all of the United States’ Presidents, it specifically falls in February because of George Washington’s birthday, so it only seems appropriate to give the guy a bit more attention than the rest this Feb. 20.

Be sure to set aside some time today to reflect on America’s history and the many men who first helped to lead this country. If you’re really feeling inspired, share a quote or two with your friends and family via social media. George Washington may have never known what Facebook or Twitter are, but that doesn’t have to stop his influence from being shared on their platforms.

1. “If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”

2. “The Constitution is the guide which I never will abandon.”

3. “Happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.”

4. “It is far better to be alone, than to be in bad company.”

5. “Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire, called conscience.”

6. “Associate with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation; for it is better to be alone than in bad company.”

7. “I had rather be on my farm than be emperor of the world.”

8. “Observe good faith and justice toward all nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all.”

9. “Discipline is the soul of an army. It makes small numbers formidable; procures success to the weak, and esteem to all.”

10. “To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.”

11. “Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.”

12. “Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair; the rest is in the hands of God.”

13. “Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.”

Source: https://www.bustle.com/p/george-washington-quotes-for-presidents-day-because-the-holiday-was-originally-in-honor-of-his-birthday-35473

Commentary — Two Kinds of Truth for Your Consideration

Truth is elusive with consequences

Written by S. Tom Bond, Retired Chemistry Professor & Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV

Observers have been amazed with the division of attitudes toward modern high volume, horizontal, hydraulic fracturing which has come into use since the year 2000. It is as though one party says something is yellow and another, looking at the same thing, says it is blue. The obvious answer is, “Who is making money from it and who is paying a price?” That goes for people actually in contact with it, but what about the millions who form opinions in spite of no contact?

I think that is related to two kinds of truth, which I hope to distinguish. What is needed is to sort out a general idea, truth, and how one arrives at “truth.”

As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, “Truth is one of the central subjects in philosophy. It is also one of the largest.” So I must define truth to begin with: Truth is a belief which serves as a basis for individual action. If you believe something, that is your mental map of what is. Truth is one’s understanding of the real world, the guide for ones action.

Most works on philosophy include several definitions of truth. Almost all of them have one which has to do with verifiability. That means the ability to check, item by item, the contents of the verbal map of reality. Lets call this verifiable truth.

A second kind of guide for action is to respond to authority. If you believe some authority, it is a kind of truth. This may be a King, a religious leader, or simply “the boss,” who in our era (and many others), is whoever controls pay for your labor. This we will call authoritarian truth. Such a believer’s action is determined by a mental map provided by the authority.

What does this have to do with the understanding of the nature of fracking? A lot, really.

Concerning fracking the general public (including officials) must choose between the claims of the banks and the drilling companies on the one hand , and the cries from the injured on the other. The individual who is not directly affected, and cannot see what is going on, must choose what to believe.

Those in the field can see what is happening. People are hurting, and loosing what is theirs. For some who gain even a slight advantage it is easy to ignore another’s pain. That is also a human attribute. It makes possible wars, racism and genocide. It also makes it possible for some to be rich while others are poor. Those who aren’t seriously affected can adopt the authoritarian truth as a psychological defense.

One of the principal characteristics of authoritarian truth is that it is not constrained by verifiability. It offers an explanation, and suggests a course to follow for the believer’s advantage. It causes an expected reward for action. It may, and often does, involve deception about verifiability, however. Left out details don’t exist for the authoritarian believer. It is received truth.

Verifiable truth comes from direct sensory experience of the phenomenon, or from observers judged by the individual to be reliable. Who is reliable? Direct observers who don’t have an advantage by being untruthful and are able to understand what effects them. Simultaneous changes are a strong key to understanding.

If one thinks rural people are willing to lie about what affects them, or are too dumb to understand, or are people whose interests aren’t a significant part of the commonwealth, the economic whole of our state and nation, you might adopt such a view. You might be more willing to adopt a story put out by some authority.

In a situation where people need to act, people who are not where they can observe facts themselves, perhaps by voting or by buying, it becomes a considerable labor to decide what action they should take – in other words who to believe. We humans have a long history of cooperation with each other. Frequently it has been the best path to simply follow some leader, rather than to try to go it alone or join a minority. Most of our past has involved a choice between leaders without reference to verifiability of claims, or perhaps no choice between leaders at all; the choice is simply the degree or enthusiasm with which we follow some designated leader of our group. Consequently, we humans have developed no easy way to distinguish which kind of truth one is following. It is a labor and a learned skill not necessary for survival of the human race.

Because of this bit of human nature, those who can form belief on the basis of our own observation, and the observation of people we trust because we understand them, must aggressively present the story of what is going on to the wider public, who invest, who vote, and who regulate the world we live in.

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing it, doesn’t go away.”

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Fact to fiction — A twisted tale of how good research became bad information

By Elizabeth Miller, Boulder Weekly, November 20, 2014

The philosophy that University of Colorado research associate E. Michael Thurman applies to scientific research, he says, is: “You can sort the error from the truth if you work hard enough.” This week, that task became far more difficult as Thurman and his research associates came under fire for apparently declaring the fluid used in hydraulic fracturing operations to be harmless.

But it wasn’t true. The researchers never said anything like that, nor did they intend to. Like the children’s game of telephone, as word spread from one mouth to the next, the truth got so mired in errors it was nearly invisible by the end.

So how did a study designed to analyze traceable components of fracking fluid so potential contamination in groundwater could be identified get transformed into a headline that declared fracking fluid safe? The answer is poor communication and bad journalism.

…… the details are in the Article on hydraulic fracturing ……