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.
