Coffee Break: American Science in the Crosshairs, Nuclear Nightmares, and a Vision of a Good Life

Part the First: The Attack on American Science Continues, Unabated.  A few days ago the president fired the National Science Board (NSB), all twenty-two members of a statutory twenty-five, who served staggered six-year terms that preserved institutional memory.  The NSB was created pursuant to the National Science Foundation Act of 1950 to “recommend and encourage the pursuit of national policies for the promotion of research and education in science and engineering.”  In addition:

The National Science Board (NSB) has two additional roles. First, it establishes NSF’s policies within the framework of applicable national policies set forth by the president and the Congress. In this capacity, the board:

• Identifies issues that are critical to NSF’s future.
• Approves NSF’s strategic budget directions and the annual budget submission to the Office of Management and Budget.
• Approves new major NSF programs and awards.

The second role of the board is to serve as an independent body of advisors to both the president and Congress on policy matters related to science and engineering and education in science and engineering. In addition to major reports, NSB also publishes occasional policy papers or statements on issues of importance to U.S. science and engineering.

…

NSB members are drawn from industry and universities and represent a variety of science and engineering disciplines and geographic areas. The board is apolitical.

The “NSF Act of 1950,” as amended, states that nominees to the board:

1. “[s]hall be eminent in the fields of the basic, medical, or social sciences, engineering, agriculture, education, research management or public affairs.”
2. “[s]hall be selected solely on the basis of established records of distinguished service.”
3. “[s]hall be so selected as to provide representation of the views of scientific and engineering leaders in all areas of the Nation.”

The NSB elects its own chairman and vice chairman. The chairman, in turn, is authorized to make appointments to the NSB staff. The NSB office is headed by the board’s executive officer.

Sensing what was coming, I downloaded the page that listed the NSB members.  The next day that page goes to Pending New Appointments.  Of course, it does.  Were these members “eminent” in their various fields?  Yes, which means they also had long records of “distinguished service.”  I have personally met only one, Roger Beachy, who is a plant scientist at Washington University-St. Louis and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.  All NSB members were also well placed to “provide representation of the views of scientific and engineering leaders in all areas of the Nation.”

Who knows what the real reasons for this are?  Well, everyone should know.  But one thing is clear.  The former NSB members represented the best of the United States and came from institutions ranging from Caltech to Berkley to Michigan State to Tuskegee to the US Air Force Academy to Oxford to Morgan State.  They were Black, White, Hispanic, Asian, men, women, young, and old(er).  They looked just like the people of the United States of America in all its glory.  The make-up of the next National Science Board will tell the tale.  Jim O’Neill, the biotech investor who is the incoming Director of the National Science Foundation, will be the first in the long and successful history of NSF who is not a scientist or engineer.  Expect more of the same for the NSB, in every way.  And there will be no institutional memory going forward, which is a feature, not a bug.

Part the Second: Whither, or Wither, the EPA?  I grew up among chemical workers who believed, at first, that OSHA (1970) and the EPA (1970), two creations of our last liberal president Richard Nixon, were unnecessary.  These were very competent and strong men, who expected to be listened to.  They taught me a lot in and outside the heavy chemical plant, where I worked for much of my first two years after graduating from high school.  Then the EPA and OSHA did something.  The EPA showed that the seemingly pristine tidal creeks, the central pillar of an ecosystem that has the highest primary productivity of any on earth aside from industrial pineapple fields in Hawai’i according to Eugene Odum, who is the father of modern ecology, that many of these men (they were all men at the time) fished in were becoming chemical sewers that poisoned their seafood (speckled trout, flounder, redfish, shrimp, blue crabs) with toxins such as toxaphene and heavy metals, most notoriously mercury.  This meant that they and their families were in turn being poisoned.  They were not amused.  A few of them pondered their indirect responsibility, but in my experience none of them rejected this new knowledge and they still find it useful to know where not to fish or crab.

OSHA made it much more difficult for the company to expose workers to dangerous chemicals by setting objective rules for exposure and requiring testing to monitor exposure (although it would not have surprised me if my weekly urine sample had been flushed without analysis; it was the 1970s).  The requirement that chemical workers change into company-provided coveralls before beginning work and change out of them before leaving work eliminated incidental but potentially hazardous chemical exposure in these men’s families.  Perhaps one of the reasons that chemical smells in the laboratory never bothered me, as they did others, is that I had been accustomed to them for as long as I could remember?  At home.

Elizabeth Kolbert of The New Yorker and author of The Sixth Extinction has looked at the current EPA in long form: Can the E.P.A. Survive Lee Zeldin? (archived) after the agency, “which was founded to protect the environment and human health, has cancelled safety regulations, supported coal, and stopped caring about climate change.” I will guess the answer to her question is “No,” and more’s the pity:

Last summer, more than a hundred and fifty staff members at the Environmental Protection Agency sent a letter to the agency’s head, Lee Zeldin, outlining their concerns about his leadership. Topping the list was Zeldin’s naked partisanship. The administrator often used his official communications to trash Democrats. This “politicized messaging,” the letter said, was undermining trust in the agency. So, too, were Zeldin’s gutting of the E.P.A.’s research division and his tendency to ignore the findings of its scientists. The missive noted that it reflected the staffers’ personal, rather than professional, opinions, and had been written on their own time. It ended by urging Zeldin to “correct course.”

“Should you choose to do so, we stand ready to support your efforts,” it said.

The employees who signed the letter did not expect it to have much effect. “I thought, Here’s a letter the staff is going to present to the administrator,” one told me. “He’s going to take a look at it and put it in the wastepaper basket. And we will go on with our work.”

That’s not how things played out. Zeldin, or at least his deputies, launched the electronic equivalent of a manhunt. In e-mails that were eventually obtained by E&E News, a lawyer at the E.P.A.’s Office of General Counsel told colleagues that the letter to Zeldin raised no ethical concerns, because the signatories were “simply exercising their first amendment right to express their opinions.” Another lawyer in the general counsel’s office warned against any sort of retaliatory action, because “government employee speech is protected.” The agency nonetheless kept up the pressure. It soon announced that it was placing a hundred and forty-four of the signatories on administrative leave.

“We have a ZERO tolerance policy for agency bureaucrats unlawfully undermining, sabotaging, and undercutting the agenda of this administration,” Zeldin said in a statement justifying the move. “The will of the American public will not be ignored.”

President Donald Trump has referred to Zeldin as “one of the superstars” of his second Administration and, perhaps even more glowingly, as “our secret weapon.” In a little more than a year, Zeldin has transformed the E.P.A. from an agency devoted to protecting human health and the environment into one that, more or less openly, sides with polluters. He has packed the E.P.A.’s upper echelons with former industry lobbyists, scrubbed entire databases of information from its website, and dissolved whole departments. Under his leadership, the agency has ditched a long list of rules that industries had objected to, including regulations aimed at cutting Americans’ exposure to arsenic, a known carcinogen; mercury, a potent neurotoxin; and PM2.5, a form of very fine soot that has been shown to cause asthma and lung disease. The E.P.A. has not only abandoned its own efforts to rein in greenhouse-gas emissions; it has stepped in to prevent states from taking action. It has come out officially, if astonishingly, pro-coal.

The will of the American public.  What does that mean?  The will (or perhaps willful ignorance) of the American public of my youth held that planet Earth was an infinite sink for waste of all kinds, in the air, on land, and in our waters.  However, my parents’ generation learned different, and it was a hard lesson.  Now, their children and grandchildren and great grandchildren should be prepared to pay a steeper price than has already been paid.  Suffice it to say, obviously, that Lee Zeldin is no William Ruckelshaus, Nixon’s first director of the EPA:

To run the infant E.P.A., Nixon chose an Assistant Attorney General named William Ruckelshaus. Ruckelshaus—Ruck to his friends—was the sort of moderate Republican once common in Washington. He rushed to come up with an organizational plan for the agency and, at the same time, to establish its authority—a task he compared to “trying to run a hundred-yard dash while undergoing an appendectomy.” Just a few weeks after Ruckelshaus became its leader, the E.P.A. initiated a string of headline-grabbing enforcement actions, including one against a steel company that was spewing cyanide into the Houston Ship Channel and several against major cities—Atlanta, Cleveland, Detroit—that were dumping raw sewage into their own waterways.

“It will be our job in the Environmental Protection Agency to be an advocate for the environment wherever decisions about our common future are made, whether it be in the councils of government, in the boardrooms of industry, or the living rooms of our citizens,” Ruckelshaus said.

Read the whole thing when you have time, and be reminded of the words of Terry Tempest Williams, who is one of Robert Shetterly’s Americans Who Tell the Truth: “The eyes of the future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time.”  And one other thing: Is it just me, or does the president really think coal is clean because he was told it is washed before being burned in industrial furnaces?  Oh, and The New Yorker still brings it on occasion.

Note added in proof: Video from Breaking Points with a colloquy between AOC and Lee Zeldin in a Congressional hearing on EPA and Bayer (Monsanto).  AOC brings receipts, beginning at 1:04:29.  One other thing, when expertise is dismissed, recovery can be well nigh irreversible.  Another feature instead of bug.

Part the Third: Nuclear Power and Our Energy Future.  One of the funniest things I have ever read is that AI Data Centers will be powered by “pocket” nuclear reactors, or some such nonsense.  Yes, small nuclear reactors do power aircraft carriers and submarines, but that is something altogether different, or so it would seem.  I know the nuclear engineers out there disagree, but no one has yet come up with a plan that can be counted on to sequester high-level nuclear waste, well, forever on a human timescale.

Chernobyl and Fukushima were accidents waiting to happen, and as Paul Josephson explains in his note at Engelsberg Ideas, Chernobyl is the price of nuclear hubris:

Chernobyl created new categories of radioactive people. Roughly 700,000 ‘liquidators’ were ordered into the battle to extinguish the reactor. They razed contaminated buildings, felled forests and bulldozed contaminated topsoil and irradiated materials. ‘Biorobots’ worked in one-minute shifts on the roof of the adjacent reactor, shovelling uranium fuel rods and steaming graphite into the gaping hole below. To subdue radiation, workers covered the destroyed reactor with a fragile concrete ‘Sarcophagus’ that was entombed again by a second covering in 2017. Russian invaders in Ukraine occupied Chernobyl briefly in 2022, stirring up radiation. They recently damaged the second covering with drones; it must be repaired. They shelled and occupied Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, turning it into a dirty nuclear bomb waiting to happen.

Nuclear disasters destroy ecosystems. The authorities sent soldiers into the 1,000-square-mile Chernobyl exclusion zone to track, shoot and bury family pets, farm animals and wild creatures so they would not carry radiation on their fur into other towns. Much of the region will remain radioactive for centuries, and only several large mammals have recovered in population. Ultimately, the disaster led to between 5,000 to 50,000 excess cancer deaths, and untold cases of childhood leukaemia and thyroid cancer. At least 58,000 square miles of land – the size of Illinois or Georgia – were contaminated.

Besides, as Plant Vogtle in Georgia has shown, nuclear reactors are an idea whose time should never have come and now should be gone, although Georgia Power customers will be paying for Vogtle for a very long time.  Or as Josephson puts it:

In a word, hubris pervades the nuclear industry. The cost of construction for one reactor has reached $20 billion, waste is at risk of a terrorist attack, and clean-up lags decades and trillions of dollars behind. No accident will be named after a mishap at a wind or solar farm, but Chernobyl will be synonymous with technological failure for centuries to come.

Technology is either our servant or our master.  The former is better, but the latter is more likely.  However, that still remains up to us.

Part the Fourth: Life as It Was or Should Be, No Matter Where You Grew Up.  Jason Peters on the true meaning of nostalgia has much to teach us in his introductory essay in the upcoming issue of Local Culture, a short excerpt:

Christopher Lasch once suggested that nostalgia is a falsification of memory. My quibbles with Lasch are few, maybe next to nil, but here I must dissent. If for the moment we leave aside the complicated business of memory—and I am not alone in taking the Augustinian view that memory is, inter alia, the human faculty that reveals divine intention in the world—we are nevertheless obliged to treat nostalgia with some strictness of expression. Nostalgia, properly speaking, is homesickness. In its etymologically precise sense it is a longing not for a time but for a place. Odysseus is nostalgic for Ithaca. The wild civility of Ogygia and the island goddess won’t do for him.

Those who would avoid a proper understanding of nostalgia have the usual routes available to them: a careless and slovenly use of the mother tongue, the lethargy of custom, a weak capitulation to convention, an indifference to the rich history in words that waits patiently, like a genie in a bottle, to be set free. (There are wishes that that rich history fain would grant.) What I have so far been recounting, what I have been remembering, certainly qualifies as nostalgia, but it is not nostalgia in the sense that its future-mad naysayers mean by it: a “longing for a past that never existed,” which is a phrase nearly as idiotic as “the right side of history.” Nostalgia provides occasion for the attentive man, thinking back on his past and on his pastimes, to be a worthy pupil of his recollections.

Consider for the moment Wordsworth’s proposition that the child is father of the man and that any one of us might wish our “days to be / Bound each to each by natural piety.” Does it not seem that children—I mean children set loose into the given world, not into the world dominated by the devices and diversions emanating from hell and Silly Con Valley—does it not seem that they will perforce adapt their play to their places? This assumes, I grant, that they have actual places to be set loose into. I grant, further, that such places are rarer these days than no-hitters, academic standards, and frat-house virgins. But it is not only for children to honor the law of local adaptation. It is for children to father such men and women as are likewise capable of such honor.

And grownups are, or at least were, capable of it. Do you remember uncles and their horseshoe pits? Hayracks and hayrides? Rims and fan-shaped backboards tacked on garage roofs? Bike ramps made of plywood and a single log? Strawberries on your hips from sliding into second?

I remember not only the athletic contests of my childhood but the rich exhilarating culture of men’s fast-pitch softball that I watched as a young boy. I remember Big Herm Williams on the mound for Steve’s Amoco at a lighted park on US 10 in Scottville, Michigan, where all summer long you could see some really great battles. Across the road a boy could buy a stick of beef jerky at the Dairy Barn and pretend as he sat in the bleachers that it was chewing tobacco. What a marvelous local pastime this was; what possibilities for local cohesion it afforded that small community, land of my mother’s birth. The funeral games for Anchises were no more communal than these.

An equivalent humane life can also be the urban life in small city or megalopolis and anyplace in between.  It is up to us to make it so.  And on that note…

Part the Fifth: Our World and What Must Be Done.  In my previous review-essay of Feed the People: Why Industrial Food is Good and How to Make It Even Better, I took Jan and Gabriel to task for their shallow understanding of Wendell Berry that is based on his enduring 50-year-old polemic, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, rather than the totality of his work.  Here is just one of his messages that was delivered to me last week as an Earth Day greeting from The Berry Center:

The need comes on me now

to speak across the years

to those who will finally live here

after the present ruin, in the absence

of most of my kind who by now

are dead, or have given their minds

to machines and become strange,

“over-qualified” for the hard

handwork that must be done

to remake, as far as humans

can remake, all that humans

have unmade.  To you, whoever

you may be, I say: Come,

meaning to stay.  Come,

willing to learn what this place,

like no other, will ask of you

and your children, if you mean

to stay.  “This land responds

to good treatment,” I heard

my father say time and again,

in his passion to renew, to make

whole, what ill use had broken.

And so to you, whose lives

taken from the life of this place

I cannot foretell, I say:

Come, and treat it well.

Wendell Berry

“2010, XI.” This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems, Counterpoint, 2013, p. 355

Happy May Day!  Thank you for reading.  See you next week from Scotland, if Delta has enough jet fuel to get us there.  In the meantime, read more poetry while keeping up with the world through our portal here.  Mary Oliver, for example:

I WAKE CLOSE TO MORNING

Why do people keep asking to see

God’s identity papers

when the darkness opening into morning

is more than enough?

Certainly any god might turn away in disgust.

Think of Sheba approaching

the kingdom of Solomon.

Do you think she had to ask,

“Is this the place?”