 |
BUNCH OF BULLS: Increased drilling
in Alaska could disproportionately affect female
caribou.
Joel W. Rogers/Corbis |
Photographs of caribou
grazing in the shadow of the Alaska oil pipeline can
be deceiving, says graduate student Stephen Porder.
By using pastoral shots to suggest that herds of caribou
would not be affected by drilling for oil in the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge, the Bush administration is
misrepresenting scientific evidence, Porder says. “They
will say, ‘Look, the pipeline is, in fact, beautiful,
and the caribou don’t mind it at all,’”
he says. “But what’s interesting is that
while male caribou are not disturbed by the pipeline,
female caribou are—and they stay away from it.”
That’s why cows are less commonly seen in photographs
of oilfield infrastructures, particularly in the two
weeks after they drop their calves. That’s why
many scientists argue that digging for crude in ANWR
could disrupt the size and movement of entire herds.
And that’s one reason why Porder and like-minded
graduate students argue in a website statement that,
“In reality, the best available science indicates
that President Bush’s policies will cause and
exacerbate damage to the natural systems on which we
all depend.”
More than 1,600 scientists and researchers worldwide
have signed the challenge to the White House that was
posted at www.scienceinpolicy.org
last November. The website argues that the Bush administration
is distorting and disregarding scientific evidence on
a scale “far beyond” its recent predecessors.
“The administration’s harmful positions
on climate change, pollution, forest management, and
resource extraction ignore widely accepted scientific
evidence,” reads the six-sentence statement, in
part. “When the administration invokes science,
it relies on research at odds with the scientific consensus,
and contradicts, undermines, or suppresses the research
of its own scientists.”
Porder, a fourth-year graduate student in biological
sciences, was a principal author of the statement along
with postdocs and graduate students Paul Higgins, MS
’96, Kai Chan, Jai Ranganathan and Virginia Matzek.
“It’s [the Bush administration’s]
right to make whatever policy they want, and it’s
their right to disregard science,” Porder says.
“But where we feel they step over the line is
where they say, ‘Science supports us.’ That’s
often not the case.”
Because debates about climate change and energy consumption
have become
so politically charged, Porder asserts that scientists
have an obligation to clarify complex issues. “Often
we’re the only ones who can detect the misuse
of science.”
The students’ statement preceded one issued in
February by the Union of Concerned Scientists that also
charged the White House with misrepresenting science.
The UCS statement was signed by 62 scientists, including
four Stanford faculty members: Nobel Prize-winning biochemist
Paul Berg, conservation biologist Paul Ehrlich, biologist
Chris Field and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Wolfgang
Panofsky.
“What I think is really impressive about scienceinpolicy.org
is that it’s a fundamentally grassroots, bottom-up
effort,” says Field, PhD ’81, a professor,
by courtesy, of biological sciences and director of
the department of global ecology at the Carnegie Institution
on campus. “The evidence for the kinds of distortion
that they’re concerned about is very clear, and
scientists from across the political spectrum are concerned
about this.”
As one example, Field cites the annual state of the
environment report issued by the Environmental Protection
Agency, which traditionally has included a sizeable
section on climate change. “Last year the administration
asked for so many qualifiers to be inserted that the
EPA left out all mention of climate change.”
Although Porder and his peers are not affiliated with
the UCS, which addresses issues from health policy to
terrorism, they talk regularly with staff at the nonprofit
organization. “They have Nobel laureates and fancy
scientists, while we’re focused purely on environmental
science,” Porder says. “[The website] is
totally run in our spare time, while we’re trying
to get our phds finished.”
The president’s science adviser, John Marburger
III, PhD ’67, has dismissed the UCS claims as
“false,” “misleading” and “wrong.”
He did not respond to a request for comment on the scienceinpolicy.org
statement.
But Porder isn’t giving up. He’d like to
sit down with Marburger in a public forum and talk through
environmental issues. Or perhaps help organize a national
day of action or teaching. There’s more, he says,
than caribou at stake. |
