https://spectator.org
JON CASSIDY
May 12, 2017, 12:04 am
Article:
Somewhere in the wilds of Utah, there’s a scientist making thermal infrared images of rivers, and turning them into exhibits for a museum. Your tax dollars are involved, of course, but trust that somebody’s awareness is being raised.
Some of her colleagues at a science thing called iUTAH have more empirical pursuits. They recently did a water use survey and discovered that large majorities of Utah residents care about preventing brown spots on their lawns.
That’s an official scientific fact, and there’s more where that came from.
So why did President Trump go and fire Science this week?
The Environmental Protection Agency’s Board of Scientific Counselors has been decimated. Will we ever learn what lawncare is like in Idaho? Or Montana?
Yet the EPA must stumble forward, with nobody to advise it on lawns, or “the integration of social dynamics in multi-scalar assessments of environmental problems,” which is almost certainly something it ought to do.
At the EPA, there will be no voice representing the perspective of maize and legume croppers in Malawi.
The New York Times and Washington Post were all over the story, and got Salon and GQ screeching.
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Yes, of course. We all know that Republicans love their polluting cronies almost as much as they hate facts. That’s obviously why EPA administrator Scott Pruitt decided to replace half the board (according to the Post), or maybe just five of the 18 members (sayeth the Times), instead of inviting them back for a second term.
We were so close. Under President Obama, the EPA located and appointed a professor who promised “place-based insights, woven with theories and observations from social and biophysical science,” about water in Utah, which provide what we’ve all been longing for — yes, “a transdisciplinary basis for collective understanding and taking action to mitigate risks and threats and enhance value in lived experiences.”
Now, your experiences, lived and otherwise, shall remain unenhanced, naked to the unmitigated threat of your solitary mind, whose unwoven thoughts have no basis in transdisciplinary place-based… help, somebody! I can’t get this sentence to stop!
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