“Whatever you do, be a Seeker!”

It’s been a long time since I published anything on my blog. It’s not that I haven’t started about a dozen blogs, it’s just a matter of me finding the time to complete one before the next idea for a blog post supplants the previous. My WordPress site is littered with half-written posts. In recent weeks, I’ve been thinking some about the speech I gave to Colgate’s incoming class last year. Given this particular moment in our history and on a day when astronomers and physicists are taking time to educate one another about the systems that promote racial inequality and limit participation in the sciences, I feel like these words are important. Some months after this address, one of my colleagues shared with me a comment from her students, which expressed surprise that a scientist would choose to focus on race in a talk of this nature. That student’s surprise illustrates exactly why it is so important that scientists educate themselves and be agents for change, real structural change within our scientific communities as well as the communities in which we live.

The title of this blog is the title of my speech, which ran 15 minutes. It’s longer than my typical blogpost.

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Colgate Convocation Keynote Address

August 28^th, 2019

It is a pleasure and such an honor to give the Founder’s Day Convocation address to the incoming Colgate Class of 2023. And to say to y’all on behalf of my friends and colleagues on the faculty and staff, welcome. Welcome to our vibrant, intellectual community tucked into these picturesque hills that flank the Mohawk Valley. As you have begun to experience, the end of summer in Hamilton is a special time. The warm summer days yield to chilly nights when a heavy dew settles into the fields and drips from the trees. In the morning, the earliest rays of sunlight are greeted by rivers of fog filling the valleys.

Since this is not the first time I’ve spoken to this group, many of you have likely detected that I have an accent. When I meet new people, especially up here in Central New York, it doesn’t take long before someone asks me where I am from. I can’t say that this is a question I have always been thrilled to answer. Because the answer to that question is that I’m from the Pocahontas coalfields located in the heart of Central Appalachia. I was born and raised in a little coal mining town called Welch, the county seat of McDowell, the poorest and southernmost county in West Virginia. It’s the setting for two New York Times Bestsellers, October Sky and The Glass Castle, both memoirs about overcoming personal challenges. Both were turned in major motion pictures. Since I’ve only got 15 minutes, if you’ve never heard of them, Google them after convocation.

Given the prevailing negative stereotypes associated with people from West Virginia and greater Appalachia, I used to be reluctant to go into detail about my homeplace, often trying to hide this piece of my identity. However, the longer I have been away from that “place,” the more I have learned about its complicated history as well as its oversized contributions to the development of this country and its prosperity. I discovered just how precious it is, how incredible and special the people there are, and just how important it was in shaping the person I am today. There are two important insights wrapped up in my Appalachian roots that I want to share with you this evening. The first deals with a concept often referred to as “sense of place.” The second deals with the dangers of stereotypes.

Sense of place – This is not a simple concept to define, yet you can likely guess that it has something to do with our feelings of attachment to a place and how that place in turn shapes our identity, or at least part of it. Several of you may be sitting here with a pit in your stomach, an identifiable symptom of homesickness. You don’t get that pit in your stomach if you don’t have a strong attachment to home: your friends, your neighbors, the view from your front porch, smell of the morning air… While people and customs or “ways of life” certainly shape one’s sense of a place, affinities are also made to the natural and built environments. Here, I want to focus on the natural environment, specifically the one that you are just beginning to experience.

One’s “sense of place” is formed in part by your interactions with nature – in Hamilton and at Colgate, it is heavily influenced by the hills (one hill in particular that you are going to come to know quite well), and it is also influenced by the trees, the animals, the clean air, the snow, and even the darkness of the night sky. Colgate graduates clearly develop a strong sense of this place during their four short years here and take that with them when they leave. I believe it is one of the main reasons – consciously or unconsciously – that so many alums rarely miss an opportunity to visit, even decades after they graduate.

So, here’s a piece of advice, take advantage of the mountains, the rivers, the lakes, the trees, the silence, and the dark nights that this place so generously, and effortlessly provides. Scientific studies are now showing that being surrounded by nature reduces both physical and psychological stress. Before finals or mid-terms or paper deadlines or Friday, go for a walk on the Colgate trails either alone or on a nature hike organized by your Commons; go for a run around Woodman pond; go for a swim in Lake Moraine (note, do not go for a swim in Taylor Lake); go on a Commons snow tubing trip; or a Commons apple-picking trip; or the ‘Gate Night Bigfoot Scavenger Hunt. Whatever you do, do not waste this opportunity to connect with nature while it is at your doorstep, because it is very likely that when you leave, you will end up in a metropolitan area and you will go to work In Tall Buildings.

Lesson two: the dangers of stereotypes. I want to return to Appalachia, and, specifically, the “hillbilly” stereotype commonly associated with it. In the popular imagination, the term “hillbilly” is synonymous with a group of people who are backwards, uneducated, poor, lazy, and prone to violence. Such a stigmatizing and othering of Appalachians has had the effect, as negative stereotypes typically do, of dehumanizing and devaluing their lives. This false and misguided representation surely contributes to making the region and its population ripe for exploitation. As a child growing up in a place that is consistently depicted in such a negative light, I internalized aspects of the stereotype, growing to expect that I might never be as smart, talented, or capable as peers growing up outside of Appalachia or even just a few counties north of my own. Even today, despite having an understanding of “stereotype threat,” I continue to fight back and overcome those feelings. I suspect that some of you seated here may feel the same way, as some part of your identity is often negatively stereotyped. To you, I say, “Don’t buy into it.” Know that you are here because you belong. Know that we are thrilled to have you here with us. And know that you are, indeed, capable of great things.

This brings me to our present moment and what’s happening here at home and abroad. Over the last few years, we’ve seen our public discourse dominated, coopted by political figures wielding stereotypes as weapons, stoking fears and fanning the flames of hatred, while seeking to inflict the greatest harm to our increasingly diverse, pluralistic society. Stereotypes provide justification for policies that are anti-refugee, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, and in general, anti-people of color and they give license to those who will act on these sentiments. I implore all of you not to give in to fear and the hatred it sows. Not here. Not now. Not for as long as you draw your breath.

Anytime our differences are magnified in order to breed contempt among us, I often think of a quote from astrophysicist Carl Sagan, which appears in a piece titled The Pale Blue Dot. The Pale Blue Dot is a reference to an image of the Earth captured from billions of miles away by one of the Voyager spacecrafts. Sagan writes:

“The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all of those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturing, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.”

In this cosmic perspective, we are “scarcely distinguishable.” So, as you join this community that appreciates it diversity, help us make it more inclusive by dispensing with your preconceptions as you meet and get to know classmates with different backgrounds, identities, perspectives, faiths, and who come from different parts of the country and the world. Build multiple large and inclusive friend groups. I am so fortunate to have friends, colleagues, and students from all over the world who have given me an informal, yet rich and invaluable education about the world, about people, and about myself. So, expect to be surprised. But, be patient. Be patient with each other as you build these relationships. We live in a world filled with inherent biases of which we aren’t always aware and may not initially recognize as problematic. Building relationships across culturally constructed differences, of which the cosmos does not give one iota, are not necessarily easy. It takes a sustained and concerted effort, but the return on your investment will be invaluable to you, your community, and the wider world.

My final piece of advice is to always be a “Seeker.” I borrow this term from two people for whom I hold in high regard: the first being, Coleman Brown. Coleman was a Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion, coming to Colgate in 1970. As an ordained minister, he also served the Colgate community as University Chaplain. Professor of English Emeritus Jane Pinchin (as in Pinchin Hall) once memorably and accurately referred to Coleman as the “ethical center of Colgate’s Universe.” It is his and his wife Irene’s legacy, which includes a lifelong commitment to making the world a more just and equitable place that we honor with the Brown Commons living-learning community. Coleman would often say that in every crowd there are “Seekers, Believers, and Doubters” just as in each of us there is a “Seeker, a Believer, and a Doubter.” The second person I think of when I hear the term, “Seeker,” is Steve Earle, a folk singer-songwriter from Texas who wrote a song titled “The Seeker.” The song is about some special advice a young boy received from his grandfather, whom the boy lost when he was only eight-years old. The last phrase of the first verse relays the grandfather’s advice, “Whatever you do be a seeker.”

To my mind, a Seeker is one who courageously, passionately, and persistently searches for truth and meaning, justice and moral clarity, inspiration and hope. If you are or choose to become a Seeker, you are going to find Colgate to be an incredible frontier for your explorations. The folks seated behind me will provide you with world-class opportunities for self-discovery, cultural enrichment, and artistic expression through the critical exploration of nature and the human condition. Throughout these pursuits, a Seeker will undoubtedly encounter uncomfortable realities, such as the fact that we live in a culture suffused with racism, sexism, and homophobia or the fact that our current lifestyle threatens humanity’s existence on this Pale Blue Dot of a planet.

The Seeker responds with a sense of urgency and the conviction that what we do in this lifetime matters, that the quality of the world we leave behind matters. Being a Seeker sometimes requires you to stand up to powerful and monied industries, institutions, and individuals that look to continue to enrich themselves by exploiting the environment, the most vulnerable among us, and in the case of anthropogenic climate change, future generations. In opposing these forces, a Seeker chooses moral clarity over hypocrisy, reality over alternative facts, and a vibrant and sustainable future over fleeting glory or short-term gain.  As Steve Earle says in the third verse of “The Seeker”:

“You can’t always believe your eyes

It’s your heart that sees through all the lies

The first answer follows the first question asked

The mystery unmasked by the Seeker” — Steve Earle

 As a Seeker, you will often find yourself “outside of your comfort zone.” You may be experiencing that feeling at this very moment or earlier when members of the faculty processed through your midst in their academic regalia. I have to admit that when I was seventeen that would have at least “gotten my attention” and then some.

A Seeker learns to embrace this uneasy feeling of being slightly insecure, unsure of oneself and what is to come, because a Seeker knows that this is where the “magic happens.” It is moments when we feel most vulnerable or are in the most unfamiliar of settings, when we have to face down our fears and overcome our insecurities, that we have the most meaningful, and often transcendent experiences. Be bold and undaunted in your seeking and learn to embrace awkward and uncomfortable moments because of the reward that comes once the uneasiness passes.

In his brilliant commencement address to the Colgate Class of 2015, Eddie Glaude author and Distinguished University Professor of African American Studies at Princeton, asked the following question “How will you orient yourself to the “fierce urgency of now?” Since his speech, the fierceness of the urgent “now” has only grown. Tonight, I conclude my remarks by challenging you to spend the next four years seeking a full-throated and clear-eyed response to this question. Know that you will be doing so in a community that will both challenge and sustain you, in a place that will keep you connected to something bigger than yourself, and with friends and classmates and mentors from all walks of life with whom you will grow and share so much. These “interesting times,” when the world has never seemed closer or its challenges more pressing, will play out as both text and subtext for your time at Colgate. How you respond to the “fierce urgency of now” will be determined by how you embrace this thrilling new chapter in your life’s journey. That journey starts here, it starts now. And what an amazing journey it will be if you choose to always be a “Seeker.”

Thank you!

 

Under West Virginia Skies

A little over a year ago, I gave the following presentation at the Appalachian Studies Association as part of a panel regarding dark sky preservation and a dark sky park in Grantsville, WV, Calhoun County. My goal was to establish that dark skies are and should remain a part of the Appalachian sense of place. My actual talk also included a few slides regarding light pollution. I only include one of those below.

Under West Virginia Skies

I grew up in a small town located in the heart of the Appalachian coalfields. Or as the late author John O’Brien described McDowell County in his book At Home in the Heart of Appalachia, “the heart of the heart of Appalachia.” Welch, West Virginia sits nestled into the steeply rising banks and hillsides adjacent to the Tug Fork River and Elkhorn Creek. Our house was the seventh one on the right as you left town heading south on Route 16. The front porch sat fifteen feet back from the narrow, shoulder-less road, which sees its fair share of hulking 18-wheelers weighted down with heaping loads of black coal. The neighbors across the road lived in houses perched 60-80 feet above street level. The uncommon nature of the topography of my home environment seemed to me as nothing extraordinary, until one summer, I had a few college friends from Emory & Henry home for a visit. One afternoon, as we were heading out of the house, my neighbor across the street, fired up his lawn mower. Now, I had grown up watching Carl cut his grass by lowering the mower down the hill with a rope cleverly tied to its handle. So I paid him no mind. On the other hand, my friends from Chattanooga, Gate City, and even Clintwood, evidently did not have neighbors who cut their grass using the “rope technique.”

While my friends and I still laugh about this revelation, it illustrates something special about this region and why it is so quintessentially, Appalachian. In Welch, and McDowell County more generally, the mountains feel particularly close. Standing on my “postage stamp” of a yard – the only nearly level spot in my neighborhood – mountains steeply rise in every direction. The Sun is visible for short periods of the day as it crosses a narrow river of blue sky. In the late afternoon, it ducks behind the mountain to our west, hours before it actually sets. Darrell Scott describes the phenomenon perfectly in his song “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive” as he sings, “The Sun comes up about ten in the morning and the Sun goes down about three every day.”

As a young boy, I remember looking up at night seeing a river of darkness replace the blue of the day. I remember watching Taurus and Orion and the occasional planet wander across the sky. My narrow window on the Universe became as much a part of my sense of this place as the feeling of comfort provided by the closeness of the mountains during thunderstorms or the chill from the damp air that occasionally settles into the valleys late on a summer night. A “sense of place” can be a difficult concept to articulate, often being no more than a sense of longing for a place one lives or has lived in the past. For me, Tal Stanley’s The Poco Field: An American History of Place helped to make this concept more concrete by giving me a critical lens through which to see and understand my own sense of place. He defines a person’s “sense of place” as the “result of a prolonged interaction and interrelationship between three complex realities,” which includes the natural environment, the built environment, and human culture and history. The natural environment means the topography, geology, and resources of a place. The built environment includes a “human response and appropriation of the land” and resources for “subsistence, profit, and power.” Human culture and history describes the “way of life” of a place and is the result of the interaction between people and the natural and built environments. If you have not read Tal’s book, it is simultaneously a recognition and a critique of two competing desires that many of us struggle to reconcile regardless of where we are from. The first being a desire for the monetary and economic success defined by a corporate dominated, capitalist economic system. The second being the connection and commitment we develop for the places in which we live. Chasing the corporate-defined notion of success requires a willingness to uproot at any moment. In preparation for imminent dislocation, we refrain from developing attachments to places, people, and communities.

For the far-reaching Appalachian diaspora, there is a strong connection to this place that appears to only grow stronger with the passage of time. The “Hills of Home” are never far from my mind. And for me, and other native McDowell Countians like author Homer Hickam, that sense of place includes a dark, albeit narrow sky, populated with stars, planets, and the hazy glow of the Milky Way, as part of the natural environment.

I no longer live in Welch. Currently, I am a professor of physics and astronomy at Colgate University, a small liberal arts college located in the geographic center of the state of New York. The nearest city is Syracuse, which is over an hour away. It is not difficult to find a dark location on campus or just outside of the Village of Hamilton where the Milky Way is easily visible on a clear night. Having lived in Nashville and Charlottesville for a total of twelve years, I do not take this fact for granted. A large number of Colgate students come from New York City and the surrounding, sprawling metropolitan area. It took me a few years to appreciate just how little time the overwhelming majority of my students had spent looking at the night sky. Perhaps, this is because there isn’t really much for them to see back home because of the severity of the light pollution. As a result, most of our students have no personal connection to the sky. It was not part of their “sense of place” connected to where they grew up.

As part of my introductory astronomy course, I require the students to do some naked-eye observing as well as peering through small telescopes at planets, nebulae, and the moon. Without fail, upon first arriving to an observing session, I have several students ask about the cloud in the sky that doesn’t seem be moving. For many these evenings mark the first time they have “knowingly” cast their eyes on the plane of the Milky Way galaxy. The same goes for seeing Saturn and the Moon through a small telescope. These experiences have illustrated for me just how much we in the developed world are losing our connection with sky. For my students and most of the world’s population, the night sky is not a recognizable part of the natural environment and the place they are from.

(Slides: The light pollution found in a big city is enough to obscure all but the brightest of objects like planets, a handful of stars, and the Moon. The recognizable patterns of constellations are washed away in the background glow from light scattering off of particles afloat in the air.

You may have seen one of these images of the Earth taken from a satellite like this composite image that shows nearly the entire globe at night. Apparent are the most densely populated and industrialized parts of the world. The eastern half of the United States is well lit as is much of Europe… and the coastal areas.)

“New World Atlas of Artificial Sky Brightness” F. Falchi (2016)

Closing

I have a colleague in the department of physics and astronomy at Colgate, Anthony Aveni, Russell Colgate Distinguished Professor of Astronomy and Anthropology and Native American Studies. He is one of the world’s foremost experts on ancient Mesoamerican cultures and the integral role the night sky played in the lives of these indigenous people. The studies of what ancient peoples knew about and how they interacted with the patterns and motions made by objects in the sky fall under a discipline commonly referred to as archeoastronomy – a discipline Professor Aveni is credited with helping to found.   In his book, “People and the Sky,” Tony laments the modern world’s lost intimacy with the sky. Where people once saw a reflection of life played out in the heavens, our modern scientific mode of creating knowledge and understanding reduces the once relatable universe to a lifeless, inanimate backdrop lacking any immediacy or connectivity. For ancient peoples from regions spanning the globe, Tony infers “Their astronomy was lived as much as practiced, and much of what our predecessors included in its domain served what we might regard as social and religious rather than scientific purposes.” They lived with a sky filled with representations that were both tangible and familiar.

There is no doubt that our modern world has lost this type of connection to the sky. I’m not here to provide reasons for this disconnection, nor to take measure of what has been and continues to be lost, but to make real and personal the threat posed to future generations and their interest in the sky. Dark sky preservation such as that which we propose in Calhoun County West Virginia is about preserving spaces on this planet where people can maintain a deep connection to the sky, one that becomes an important part of the natural environment and takes root as a sense of a particular place. I argue that dark skies have always been and should continue to be a fundamental aspect of Appalachia, one as important to the local population as the hills, trees, rivers, coal seams, coal miners, and mountain musics.

March 2017

The Devil is Here in These Hills

On our way home from spending Thanksgiving in WV, we stopped in Shepherdstown, WV for a night. Shepherdstown is a great little town near the WV/VA border and sits right on the banks of the Potomac. It’s home to Shepherd University and a quaint little downtown with tons of independent restaurants, coffee shops, and specialty stores. We’ve started breaking the 12 hour trip to Welch into two nights and Shepherdstown has become one of the spots we like to stop when heading home. If you have never visited, you should. If you do, plan to stop off at Antietam National Park for a history lesson about the bloodiest battle of the U. S. Civil War.

The point of this post is not a travel log, but to encourage folks to read a book I picked up at Four Seasons Bookstore, a little independent bookstore in Shepherdstown. They have a nice selection of titles related to WV history including The Devil is Here in These Hills, a book that I have passed up several times at the Appalachian Studies Association meeting. The cover has always piqued by interest as it shows a mix of black and white miners posing for a group photo with the black miners outnumbering the white miners. With its cover, this book is already challenging the common stereotype that Appalachians are white. After years of picking up this title and putting it down, I decided it was time to read James Green’s book about the “devil” in these hills.

The author is a labor historian and professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. The Devil is Here in These Hills is a detailed, chronological account of the wars that were fought to unionize miners in the coalfields of Central Appalachia. For a kid who grew up in Welch, the county seat of McDowell, I wonder why I didn’t learn more about this rich history in my eighth grade West Virginia history class. How did I not know that McDowell County was the most difficult place in WV for the union organizers to make inroads? Or, having grown up walking up the steps of the famous courthouse where “Two Gun” Sid Hatfield and Ed Chambers were gunned down by Baldwin-Felts detectives not knowing the circumstances of the killings. Heck, I  grew up thinking that the detectives were actual lawmen and not hired assassins. Or that this same company, the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency located in Bluefield also provided the local coal operators with the armed guards or “gun thugs” that patrolled the coal camps, intimidated miners and their families, and deprived them of their most basic constitutional rights and freedoms.

I grew up like everyone else in my part of Appalachia, with a strong distrust of outsiders that write about our little, forgotten corner of the world. Many journalists focus solely on the poverty without taking the time to understand the reasons for it. They completely miss the complexity of the region and its people and how the extreme poverty in the region can be directly traced to the devil in these hills, “… and the devil is greed.” How else can one explain such poverty centered in a region so rich in natural resources?

The author of The Devil is Here in These Hills is not a journalist, but a historian. And his book is not a splashy column for a newspaper, but a monograph that gives a detailed account of the circumstances and events that led to the mine wars.

Historical details aside, James Green gets it. He knows that not many who have told this story have represented the region and the characters in this history correctly. The author recognizes the value of the lives of the people in this region, the valiant ways in which they fought for justice and fair treatment, and the respect that their bravery and actions should afford them. It is a constant theme throughout the book, that the economic despair that many of the miners found themselves in was not of their own making. Instead, it was a result of greed and the unscrupulous ways in which the wealthy and heavily resourced coal operators, often supported by elected state and federal government officials, forced compliance and extracted labor from the miners by constantly threatening their lives and livelihoods.

I don’t know many folks from back home that do not have an immediate family member that has not worked in the mines. For all of us, the incredible history surrounding the mine wars and the unionization of the miners should be a source of pride and a constant reminder of the necessary protections that labor unions like the United Mine Workers of America provide workers. Miners in the Tug River Valley fought like hell for the bargaining power that a labor union can provide and it would do us all good to remember this history today. As our current lawmakers get a little too cozy with the coal, gas, and timber companies, it is just as important today that people have the ability to fight back whether through labor unions or strong grassroots organizations.

If you happen to be one of the few people who might read this, chances are you are from “my neck of the woods.” In that case, you will do your hillbilly soul some good by reading The Devil is Here in These Hills.

(Final Note: The author mentions in his acknowledgments having spent some time with a number of historians from the region. Folks like Lou Martin at Chatham University and Ken Fones-Wolf at WVU, scholars I’ve had the pleasure to meet and get to know thanks to another PhD historian, native of Welch, and friend, Mark Myers. I am certain that their input strengthened the author’s efforts to accurately portray the region and its people.)

 

 

 

 

Reagan’s Economic Legacy: Working Class Pain and Discontent

A few years back, I recall watching a discussion on CNN between a news anchor and two Republican economic strategists.  They were making that often repeated argument that “a rising tide raises all ships.”  The first I recall hearing this logic was back in the 1980s as a justification for “trickle down economics” or as was often called Reaganomics.  The fundamental principle behind this economic stimulus model was that placing more capital in the hands of the wealthy would have a stimulating effect on the economy.  The wealthy would spend money in such a way that would drive economic growth.  This idea has not lost favor in the last 30 years as the two CNN guests continue to argue its merits.  What made this moment stick out in my head was that CNN was showing a graphic during the strategists’ commentary that seemed to completely deny the veracity of their claims.

The plot that the guests on CNN were looking at was similar to the plot above, which shows the change in annual wages for the top 1% compared to the bottom 90%.  It’s interesting to note that during the early part of the Reagan years, wages declined for the bottom 90% while they still increased for the top earners.  Moving from 1980 to 1990, wages remained stagnant for the bottom 90%, while the top 1% saw gains greater than 50%, which translates to a little over a 4% raise each year for ten years.  The Clinton years (1992-2000) were obviously better for everyone, but note how steep the slope of the line is for the gains seen by the top 1% during that period.  The G. W. Bush years came next and the growth in wages for the bottom 90% stagnated.  The top 1% took a hit in the early G. W. Bush years with 9/11 and the commencement of two wars.  However, there is money to be made off of fighting wars and the top 1% turns around their wage losses and sees huge gains of nearly 50% before the Great Recession hits in 2008.  That represents earning increases of nearly 10% per year between 2003 and 2008.  All the while, the wage gains for the bottom 90% stagnated or declined ever so slightly.  This is a clear reflection of the redistribution of wealth from the working class to the top 1% of earners.  The plot above fails to capture some of the details of what actually happening in the bottom 90%.  So, here’s another plot with greater detail:

The above plots breaks earners up into quintiles or fifths.  The bottom quintile is the lowest 20% of earners.  The 4th quintile lies between 20 and 40% of earners.  The middle or 3rd quintile corresponds to 40 to 60% of earners.  The black dashed line corresponds to the top 5% of earners and note that they are also included in the top 20% or the top quintile of earners.  Note that this plot goes farther back in time to 1967.  The first aspect of the plot that is worth noting is the timing of the inflections in the income for the top 5% and top 20% of earners.  The initial surge comes during the Reagan years following a recession that ended towards the latter part of 1982.  At this same time, little or no gains in income were seen for the lower 40 to 60% of earners.  Well, one may say that there should be a time lag for the wealth being generated at the top to “trickle down” to the lower wage earners.  That is clearly not the case as illustrated by this graph.  If you have not been in the top 40% of wage earners over the last 50 years, you have not seen your wages increase at all.

So, back to my strategists discussing plots like this on CNN.  How about that rising tide?  The data above do not bear out that opinion.  In all honesty, the data completely contradicts it!  And it doesn’t take someone with a degree in math to read it.  Yet, they go on to state that a “rising tide raises all ships.”  Well, this may be true for boats in the water, but that metaphor clearly doesn’t apply to economics or the US economy over the last 30-50 years.  We’ve clearly run the experiment and found this to be untrue.  I would imagine that many workers would say that this is painfully untrue.  In fact, the decline in the standard of living/middle class lifestyle for workers is directly related to the frustration we see in the electorate.  As for the political strategists, the CNN anchor didn’t challenge them.  They didn’t say, this data clearly contradicts what you are saying.  “So what is your motivation for continuing to promote a failed economic policy?  Why do you continue to hold to an economic premise that has been soundly debunked?”

Here’s another plot that should make clear the abysmal failure our current economic policy is for an overwhelming majority of workers in this country.  Below is a plot that shows the distribution of household income broken up into upper, middle, and lower income.  Between 1970 and 1980, the distribution held pretty constant.  In 1980, the drastic shift began so that by 2010, the upper income bracket earns more than the middle income bracket.  What this plot fails to capture is just how many more people fall within the middle and lower income brackets than do the upper income bracket.  While the number of folks falling into the lower income bracket have likely increased substantially over the last 30 years, their fraction of the total or aggregate income has actually decreased.

The erosion of the American middle class and its standard of living is clearly troubling.  However, what compounds my frustration over this point is how the gains in productivity made by the typical worker over the last 40 years have not translated into higher wages.  Above I pointed out that wages for the average worker have stagnated.  So, workers are producing vastly more, but are making the same or less!

Above is a plot of a typical worker’s productivity along with that worker’s hourly wage over the period of 1943-2014.  Beginning just after World War II, note the way pay used to rise with increase in productivity.  Between the years, 1943 and 1973, there seems to be a clear correlation.  It makes sense.  A worker gets paid to make something or provide a service.  When the worker produces more or provides more services, this generates more income for the business.  More income for the business can be passed on to the worker who is being more productive, making the worker’s compensation a clear reflection of that worker’s productivity.  In 1973, that connection between pay and productivity ceased.  And, what is really troubling, is that during the Reagan years there was an incredibly steep growth in productivity while wages actually decreased.  Yeah, the Reagan presidency, often held up as the gold standard of what a conservative presidency should look like.  He is championed by so many white working-class folk.  I think this plot alone challenges those supporters’ warm regards for the old Gipper and dashes any notion that “trickle down economics” is viable economic policy.  That is, if you want an economic policy that works for everyone.

I want to be clear about what this plot means.  Workers are making more product for a business that then makes more money as a result.  However, that revenue/profit is not passed on to the majority of its workers.  It’s either going to investors or the highly paid executives of the company.  If it is being reinvested into the expansion of the company, which in turn hires more workers, wages still do not rise for the company’s employees.

Now, being from West Virginia and growing up in the heart of the coalfields, I feel like labor unions and the right to unionize are, or at least should be, an inalienable right of the working class.  After all, our miners were ready to go to war over that right in 1920-21.  In a country that believes as we do in the checks and balances on the power of different branches of government, I think it is only natural to believe that corporate interests be balanced by the interests of labor.  Unions can effectively represent those interests and balance the power between corporations and workers.  As is true of all endeavors that involve people, unions have their challenges, but workers are certainly going to fare better with them than without them.  For example, here’s a plot that shows an anti-correlation between union membership and wages for the top 10% of earners.

I find this plot really interesting, especially given the recent push for so-called “right to work” legislation that is being passed by many state legislatures.  As the unions grow weaker and weaker, the gap between earners at the top and the bottom 90% grows larger.  I’m going to guess that the politicians that are pushing this legislation are certainly aware of this trend.  Since this is clearly not a good thing for 9 of 10 workers, I am astonished that this agenda item alone does not get many governors and state legislators voted out of office!!!

We are currently having a national debate over raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour.  For those who have been around for a few decades, this debate should sound familiar.  On one side, you have the “sky is going to fall” argument against raising the minimum wage.  Businesses will close.  Everyone will lose their jobs.  On the other side, folks making minimum wage describe how difficult it is to make ends meet on a wage that is not “livable.”  Why is it not livable?  Well, there is a plot for that too.  On the plot below, we can see that the minimum wage was actually higher in 1968, giving earner’s more purchasing power than they have today.  Oh, if you factor in productivity gains, as mentioned earlier, to calculate how the minimum would have risen if productivity had remained correlated with wages, the minimum wage would be over $18 today!

What does all of this mean?  Why am I interested in putting all of this data in one place?  Well, in my mind, it explains a lot about the current current political climate.  People are upset and all of this data says “Rightly so!!”  My fear is, that without the right data, people are going to misdirect that anger and instead of supporting an economic policy that will be fairer than “trickle down” or “supply side” or “job creator” economics, they will vote for the candidates that will continue to support the current system that continues to redistribute wealth from the middle class and working poor to the top 1%.  Yeah, wealth redistribution.  That’s what has been happening since the Reagan years.  Wealth has been redirected from the middle class into the hands of the highest of wage earners.  Nobody calls it that because wealth distribution suggests taking money from rich people and giving it to poor working class folk.  It’s the equivalent of a four-letter word when spoken by Republican strategists and politicians.  Yet, they have been engineering a massive wealth redistribution project for over 30 years that has been incredibly successful.

What can we do?  Support a progressive tax structure that requires the highest earners to pay a reasonable tax rate and stop privileging earning from capital gains over earnings produced by actual labor by taxing capital gains at a significantly lower rate.  Recognize the importance of estate taxes that prevent generational wealth and the formation of an aristocracy similar to that seen during the Gilded Age.  Support a raise in the minimum wage and work to restore the dignity of all work.  Finally, stop taking our political leaders at their word.  Just because you think what they say may sound good, in many cases, there is data that you can use check their claims against.  Oh, and one more last point, Reagan was a horrible president for working-class folk in this country.  We are still reaping the benefits of his presidency, one that claimed to “Make America Great Again.”

 

 

 

 

Let’s be clear, WV Coal Association and Friends of Coal don’t really care about coal miners

Above is a plot from the following website.  It shows the job losses among coal miners in the thousands since 1948 in West Virgina.  In 1948, it appears that there were ~130,000 miners employed in the state.  This number dropped precipitately in throughout the 1950s, leveling off at a little over 40,000 in the 1960s.  The number increased in the 70s, seeing its most significant, but volatile growth in the mid- to late-part of the decade.  The 1980s came and the gains in employment in the mines were quickly lost.  However, the number of coal miners in WV continued to drop through the 80s and 90s.  The numbers would level off somewhere below the 20,000 mark around 2000.  There was a general increase in jobs from 2002-2012.  This likely reflects a 10% increase from 20,000 to 22,000.

I grew up in WV throughout the 70s, 80s, and the first half of the 90s.  During this period of time, we lost 50% of our coal miners.  50%!!!  I’ve searched (and searched) the web for instances of the West Virginia Coal Association fighting to keep coal miners from losing their jobs during this time period, but found absolutely zero examples.  When the southern coalfields were hemorrhaging coal mining jobs, the WV Coal Association appears to have been quiet on the matter.  They did not declare the existence of a “war on coal” or that those responsible for the devastating job losses should in some way be held accountable.  They didn’t blame government regulations or elected officials.  They quietly let it happen with no resistance. Why?  Because the WV Coal Association and now the Friends of Coal are industry groups that represent the coal companies, not the miners. During the time frame mentioned above, coal production was on the rise.  Mechanization, which the United Mine Workers Association had tried to prevent or at least manage its implementation, was replacing miners in droves, while increasing the productivity of individual miners several times over.

Today, the coal industry senses a threat to their bottom line.  All of the easy to reach coal (read as “cheap to extract”) is gone in the southern coalfields.  Combine that with competition from the boom in natural gas, and the coal industry and mine owners in southern WV find themselves in a difficult position.  A difficult position mainly driven my market conditions and not necessarily over regulation and environmental protection.  However, we must realize that any regulation affects the bottom line of the coal business.  Of course, it would be cheaper to produce coal from a mine that had no safety regulations or had to abide by some environmental protections.  The industry sees an opportunity to push back against these regulations as a step towards making it cheaper to extract coal and thus making coal more competitive with the natural gas.  It is a clever way of trying to extend the life of the industry and make it feasible to go after the harder to reach and often thinner coal seams. In other words, they are fighting against environmental and safety regulations, not to save mining jobs, but to serve their own interests by making coal extraction in WV as profitable as possible until all of the reasonably attainable coal has been mined.

So, this current situation is vastly different than the one the industry faced in the previous decades when cutting thousands of miners jobs positively impacted their bottom line. This is not about miners and their jobs, its about the industry extracting every dollar of profit from southern WV.  Profit that is unfairly taken through the exploitation of the miners, the infrastructure, and the environment in places like McDowell, Wyoming, and Boone counties.

I am hoping to make obvious to everyone that the industry’s public relations machine is disguising their desire for continued profit off the backs of the hardworking miners and those that live in the coalfields as “concern for miners, their livelihoods, and their families.”  However, history tells us that they don’t really care about keeping miners employed, saying so now only serves their own purposes and self interest.

Let’s not lose sight that if they are successful, this will come at a huge cost.  Much of that cost will be borne by the people they are pretending to care about.  A decrease in safety regulations will lead to more deaths on the job and higher incidences of black lung.  Continued pollution of the local environment will not only affect the health of families of miners, but the rest of the population in the coalfields.  Buying in to the rhetoric of the WV Coal Association and the CEOs of companies like Murray Energy will only further undermine the future for everyone in southern WV.

As far as the Supreme Court ruling on mercury emission from coal-fired power plants goes, let’s keep in mind that we are talking about mercury!  None of the news coverage that I have heard has even mentioned how toxic mercury is and that we are already in a situation where pregnant women are advised not to eat fish because of a serious risk of birth defects.  How can we celebrate the fact that the Supreme Court ruled in favor of allowing us to continue to poison our air and streams at an astonishing rate?  I cannot wrap my head around that.

Doing What Astrophysicists Do…

Apache Point Observatory (APO) is located on a 9200 ft. peak near the town of Alamagordo, New Mexico.  The famous White Sands are also nearby.  I arrived on the mountain Sunday evening with four undergraduate students in tow.  We traveled all day to get here from Hamilton, NY, leaving the village at 3:30am for a 6am flight out of Syracuse.  After stopping for some authentic Mexican food in Albuquerque, we made the roughly four hour drive to a Wal-Mart in Alamagordo where we stocked up on food for the next three days.  After a mostly successful grocery stop in which we loaded up on orange juice, milk, bread, salsa, chorizo (including the soy variety), corn tortillas, Tostitos “Hint of Lime” corn chips, and fruit, we turned on to Rt. 82, which took us UP into the Lincoln National Forest toward the little town of Cloudcroft.  We arrived at APO just before sunset.

After unloading and hydrating, we moseyed on over to the control room for the 3.5 meter telescope where my students and I would be observing on Monday night (Tuesday morning really).  We arrived just in time to be treated to a plate swap on the 2.5-meter Sloan telescope by Howard, the most prolific observer in Sloan’s history.  The Sloan Digital Sky Survey III program APOGEE was collecting data.  APOGEE is a program I’ve always felt tenuous connection to through my former lab at the University of Virginia with Mike Skrutskie, John Wilson, Matt Nelson, Ricardo Schiavon, et al.  With that said, it was a treat to get a first hand look at how the APOGEE instrument and survey has been conducted.  APOGEE, like much of the Sloan work has been extremely successful at mapping the motions of stars in the Milky Way and obtaining chemical abundances in order to understand the dynamical and chemical history of the Galaxy.

After a short night’s sleep, we had a few breakfast burritos and walked to the National Solar Observatory that sits atop Sacramento Peak on a ridge adjacent to Apache Point.  After being tourists for a few hours, we made our way back to APO to plan our observations, get another bite to eat, and take a short nap before we went on the telescope at 1:10am.  My students, two from Colgate, one from Wesleyan, and one from Vassar, had done an excellent job preparing for the observations having put together detailed finder charts that made finding our sources, which were in crowded fields quite easy.  While the skies were clear, the atmospheric conditions we not great.  Astronomical seeing was two to two and a half arcseconds.  Meaning that the refraction of the starlight by turbulent pockets in the atmosphere would cause the apparent size of the star to be twice the size it would appear on an average night.  Regardless, we still obtained good data on a number of the targets we were looking forward to observing.

During the afternoon of our second day, we took a short ride into the small nearby town of Cloudcroft.  We made our way into a small independent bookstore called Imaginary Books & Collectibles.  The store is “Open most days 11am-5pm.”  I started a conversation with the owner, Ed, and told him what we were doing in Cloudcroft.  He pointed out some of the original buildings in town and how integral the railroad was to its existence.  The railroad was shutdown at some point and the rails were removed and sold for scrap metal.  So, nowadays, if you want to visit Cloudcroft, you have to drive up the mountain.  Our discussion of the timber industry turned to a discussion of West Virginia and the clear-cutting of the state that had occurred at the turn of the 20-th century.  Ed, a former elementary and middle school science teacher, said that all he knew of WV was Coalwood.  I said, well, you know a lot about where I am from then, as I described that Coalwood was one of the many coal camps that encircled my hometown of Welch.  Then ensued a discussion of Homer Hickam’s books about Coalwood and the movie October Sky, which Ed used to show his students.  He had a hardback copy of The Rocket Boys for sale.  You don’t see those much anymore.

I also caught a glimpse of The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls.  He hadn’t recognized that her story also took place, partly at least, in Welch, but he was familiar with most of her books, noting the southwest connection with her mother.  After buying a few books from Ed, we were on our way back to APO to get in a little nap before our second night of observations started at 1:22am.  While some high cirrus clouds rolled in around midnight, we were still able to collect our data with no issues.  We made it to bed around 6:30am having completed two successful nights on the telescope.  Our plan was to get a few more hours of sleep and head down the mountain around 10am so that we could stop by the Very Large Array and catch an Albuquerque Isotopes baseball game that evening.

We made the long drive to Soccoro, stopping for the best green chile burgers on Earth at the Owl Bar and Restaurant for lunch.  We made the 50 mile drive out to the VLA and arrived at the welcome center with Bohemian Rhapsody blaring on the radio and everyone singing along (Galileo, figaro…).  The telescope was currently in one of its more extended configurations with the 27 antennae extending nearly 17 miles out in each direction.  We entered the welcome center and sat down for the introductory video.  A 23 minutes production narrated by not-surprisingly, Jodie Foster.  What was a big surprise was that the astrophysicist that was featured in the movie was Amy Reines.  Amy and her husband David Nidever (also an astrophysicist), were graduate students at UVA while I was there as a postdoc  It was a little surreal to sit down in a theater that seemed to be in another world and see such a familiar face pop up on the screen.  I’m constantly reminded that it’s a small world, but the astronomical community is truly a “small world.”

After much “oohhing and awwing” over the VLA, we hopped back into the car and made the final 2-hour drive from the VLA back to Albuquerque to see the Isotopes.  The entire trip had gone so well up to this point and we were on time to see most of the game.  We checked in to our hotel and caught a hotel shuttle to the Isotopes field.  My only knowledge of the Albuquerque AAA baseball team, besides knowing that they are in the Pacific Coast League with my former hometown team, The Nashville Sounds, came from my former acquaintance, Richie Hebner.  For some, you might recognize the name.  Coach Hebner was a major leaguer for a number of years spending most of his time in the “Bigs” as a third baseman for the Pittsburgh Pirates.  He won a World Series on a team with Roberto Clemente, Willie Stargell, and Bill Mazeroski.  We met on an airplane ride from Dallas -Fort Worth two weeks after he had taken over mid-season as the manager of the Nashville Sounds.  The team was on its way back from Albuquerque when they (and I) were delayed for three hours.  Evidently Coach had spent most of the three hours at a bar in the airport before they allowed us to board the plane.  I was already in my window seat when Richie made his way on to the plane and took the middle seat next to me.  He was wearing a white polo shirt with the Pirates logo on it.  I immediately asked if he was a coach for the Sounds.  He said, “Yes!”  I said, “Which one?”  He, “The manager.”  My response, was measured.  I knew that they had yet to win a game since he had taken the helm two weeks prior.  “So, where are y’all coming from?”  “Albuquerque, the asshole of the earth!”  He responded.  “How did you do?”  “11-1!  It was like the other team’s players were on a merry-go round”  Referring to the other players constantly advancing around the bases.  Still winless.  What followed was a three-hour conversation about coaching, playing in the majors, The Great One, hitting, hitting behind Willie Stargell, visiting colleges and universities, prima donnas with 0.088 batting averages,…  Richie Hebner was part comedian and part crusty old curmudgeon.  Coack would leave me tickets at the Will Call, whenever I wanted to come to Sounds game the rest of that summer.  Of course, he didn’t return the following season as the Sounds would finish with the worst record in their history that summer.

Back to the Isotopes:  A Dodgers affiliate, the Isotopes were hosting a Texas affiliate from Round Rock.  The game was quite exciting with 39 hits, 5 errors, and 23 runs scored.  There was even a grand slam in the top of the ninth.  The Isotopes were on the losing end of this slugfest.  But I see what coach meant about the merry-go round analogy!!!

The next morning we visited the University of New Mexico campus, discovered a closed meteorite museum, and then headed back to the airport for a 1pm flight back east.  Now we are back home and ready to analyze some data!!!

Budget priorities…

‘Tis the season that parents and prospective students descend on college campuses across the country.  During April Visit Days at Colgate, we see a steady flow of wide-eyed high school seniors with proud, pensive, and inquisitive parents in tow.  I always enjoy speaking to prospectives and their parents even when the parents are a little over zealous.  Normally, I get to speak to the prospectives who are not only interested in physics, but are also interested in pursuing astronomy.  Parents always ask the question what kind of a job can my kid gets if they get a degree in astronomy.  My answer is pretty standard.  For professional astronomers, there are two main career paths: academia or research scientist.  For those just wanting an undergraduate degree, I let them know that their child will be a problem solver with sophisticated math and computational skills.  Since our economy is based on workers with these types of skills, I imagine they will do just fine in the workplace.  As much a I try not to, I also find myself at some point in the conversation mentioning the status of funding for basic science research.  After discussing the status of NSF funding with a prospective student’s parents the other day, I decided to do a little poking around to see how the US is currently spending its money and compare how research funding compares with other areas of spending.  Here’s what I was able to find quickly (mostly from government websites), with my hopefully pragmatic take on the numbers.

$65.9 billion is the amount allocated for basic civilian science research in President Obama’s 2015 budget.  Nearly half of that, $30.2 billion is designated for the National Institute of Health (NIH).  Nearly half of the other 50% goes to NASA with $5 billion for science research and the other $12.46 billion going for space exploration (loosely defined).  The National Science Foundation (NSF) is requesting $7.255 billion for 2015.  I’m not sure how this differs from what is in Pres. Obama’s budget.  The total science research budget request of $65.9B is 1.69% of the total $3.901 trillion dollar budget.  In other words, that’s less than 1/50th of the budget.

If we estimate the current population of the US at 317 million people, the total budget breaks down to $12,305 per person with $207 going toward basic scientific research.  For $200 per person, we get all of our advances in the sciences with nearly $100 of that going into health-related research via the NIH.  If you compare that with what a visit to the doctor costs, it should sound like a small price to pay to cure cancer, fight Alzheimer’s disease, fix spinal chord injuries, and any of the other numerous illnesses and diseases our researchers are trying to understand and treat.

Let’s now compare the basic research spending to the Department of Defense (DoD) budget request of $495.6 billion dollars.  If it weren’t for the sequester, this number would likely be well over $500B.  That’s 12.7% (roughly 1/8th) of the budget or $1563 per person to maintain the most technologically advanced army in the world.  However, I’ve seen other estimates that include defense-related spending that increases the fraction closer to 20% of the overall budget ($780.2B or nearly $2500 per person)  For comparison, France, Germany, and UK combined are expected to spend $149B on defense in 2015.  That’s less than a third of the US DoD budget and less than 1/5th of the overall US spending on defense.  How does that work out per person for these three less populated countries?  $720 per person.

For a second, let’s look at the money budgeted for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).  The NEH’s budget request for 2015 is $0.146B.  That’s right, there is a zero before the decimal point.  And for some folks, that’s still too much.  In fact, if you are Paul Ryan, the conservative appointed guru of the US budget, you want to eliminate the NEH completely.  As you can see, it would be a huge cost savings!!!  As a self-proclaimed pragmatist, I actually fail to see the logic in cutting a program such as the NEH.  The budget for the NEH represents, get this, 0.003% of the US budget.  Instead of completely cutting a 100% of a program that does a lot of good with very little.  Why not cut 1% from a program that probably can save that much by spending their money a little more wisely, like the DoD.  A 1% cut in the DoD budget would fund the entire NEH for almost 34 years.  Yeah!  Big numbers can be surprising.  Given the return to human development and the importance of creativity in all forms to advances in science and technology and, by extension, emerging economic markets, the negligible budget of the NEH should never be threatened.  But, who takes the time to really dive into these numbers on their own to see just how ridiculous the budget saving measure proposed by our elected officials actually are?  In fact, Paul Ryan and other partisan hacks are just taking aim at programs they don’t understand nor lack the insight/good sense to see the value of.

Returning to the big dollar items, what if we spent money on defense like our European counterparts?  The DoD’s budget would be $228.2B, which would translate into a savings of roughly $260B dollars in 2015.  Would we have better roads?  Or better yet, would we have a better public transportation system?  Would we have better schools?  After all, the 2015 budget for education is $69 billion, or only a little over a fourth of what we would save.  Would we have found a cure for many cancers?  Would we have solved our energy problems with research and development into sustainable energy production?  Would we have rebuilt our agricultural industry to produce food in a more sustainable manner, while appreciating the need for biodiversity among the edible plants we grow?  Would we have been back to the moon or even have sent people to Mars?  Would we have cleaned up the environmental disasters like the Exxon Valdez and the BP oil spill in the gulf?  Would we have made our underground mines safer for our coal miners?  Would we have done a better job of protecting our water sheds?  Would we enforce regulations protecting our oceans and fisheries?  Would we have refurbished our aging infrastructure?  Are these not our priorities?  If not, what are our priorities?

At the same time, I wonder who is getting rich off of the $500B we spend on defense?  What role are they playing in convincing us to accept the status quo of spending 20% of our budget per year to defend ourselves from the boogey man.  Perhaps, I don’t get it because I don’t fear for my safety as much as the next person.  I’m also not one of these people who feel that I should have the right to carry a weapon everywhere I go because I need to defend myself “everywhere I go.”  Perhaps, we wouldn’t feel the need to defend ourselves from mentally disturbed people if we committed resources to caring for them.  In the long run,  I would rather see society work better for everyone than feel like we could repel a simultaneous attack from the Russians, the Chinese, and ET.

In the end, our spending should reflect our priorities.  Instead, our spending now reflects the priorities of a country I don’t recognize.

 

Climate Change Deniers

Last Saturday night I was invited to give a talk to the local amateur astronomy club.  I really enjoy speaking to amateur groups because they are completely engaged and so happy to have the opportunity to speak with professional astronomers.  The banquet was held at the Club Monarch in Yorkville.  The outside of the building was not much to look at, but the inside was well-preserved and felt like stepping back into time 30 or 40 years ago during a slightly more prosperous era when semi-formal working/middle-class social gatherings must have occurred with more frequency.

At the beginning of dinner, one of the gentleman sitting at my table claimed that he doesn’t “believe” in global warming or climate change.  He initially said that there are too many natural explanations for warming such a sunspots or variations in the radiation coming from the Sun.  Both plausible suggestions that have been studied and deemed highly unlikely to explain the recent warming trend.  He then mentioned that the globe has been cooling over the last sixteen years and global warming has effectively stopped, which is why people call it climate change instead of global warming.  The truth is that the warming of the globe has slowed considerably over the last sixteen years.  And yes, it was a bit of a surprise to most climate scientists.  However, there is a known effect called the pacific decadal oscillation, which appears to explain the recent pause (not cooling) in the warming trend.  The scary thing about this and the lack of recognition from the denial community is that it is an oscillation.  This means that if the waters in the Pacific absorb more energy than expected during one half of the period then it may absorb less or release more energy during the other half of its cycle.  So, when the pattern shifts back to heating, it may be at a greater rate than previously predicted.  Of course, this will be observable over the coming years.

The gentleman also claimed that the government was behind the science of global warming.  This is a highly problematic viewpoint that I am sure is shared by many climate change deniers.  However, it represents a fundamental lack of understanding of how we conduct basic science research in the US and across the world.  This viewpoint is the result of the constant barrage of misinformation and propaganda that constantly flows across the airwaves and in print media thanks to political pundits, elected officials, and news outlets that must receive generous support from those with a vested interest in seeing climate scientists discredited.  The willingness to blame the government obviously shows a conservative ideology that seeks to blame government for all our problems.  This statement by the gentleman along with a belief that equal numbers of scientists (he didn’t specify whether they were climate scientists or scientists like myself) don’t “believe” in global warming were the most troubling and problematic for me.  It reflects how successful the campaign being waged by the fossil fuel industry and the Republican party has been in reaching people in the general public.  It also demonstrates the lack of clarity with which the science is presented in the popular media.  For instance, I recall seeing a “scientist” on CNN being interviewed by Piers Morgan who didn’t “believe” in global warming along side a science journalist as if both of their views carried equal weight, the journalist representing the consensus of the scientific community and the scientist representing the fringe opinion that the globe is not warming as if there is a legitimate debate to be had between the two communities.  The interview ended with the science journalist telling Piers that this was irresponsible to place the fringe opinion on “equal footing” with the consensus view.  However, this happens all of the time when issues of science are debated in the public sphere and it contributes to the general public’s assertion that there really is a debate going on in the scientific community.  So, I understand why the gentleman may have this idea that there are equal numbers of scientists that do not believe in global warming.  However, this is far from the truth.  We wouldn’t be calling this consensus science if that were the case.

This leads me to the use of the word “believe,” when people talk about scientific knowledge.  I find this term problematic when someone uses it in regards to scientific knowledge such as the theory of evolution, the big bang theory, or gravity.  In science, the data and the uncertainties attached to it tell you exactly how strongly you should “believe” it.  It is not a gut reaction or choice.  The scientific community universally accepts evolution based on the theory’s ability to explain so much of what we find in nature.  The data that this theory is built on leaves no room for you choose to “believe it or not.”  As we say, “It is what it is.”  With regards to global warming, the data demonstrating the rise in global temperatures and its correlation with increases in CO2 is solid.  The globe is obviously warming!!!  There is no room for interpretation.  It is an OBSERVATIONAL fact.  And, the nature of the warming, how severely it has spiked over such a short time period has no precedent (as best we can tell) in the last few hundred thousand years.  Climatologists have spent a great deal of effort searching for explanations to the warming and find the strongest anthropogenic (human-made) cause for the warming to be radiative forcing by the introduction of CO2 into the atmosphere.  Check out the most recent IPCC Summary for Policymakers here and here.

You do not get to believe in things such as gravity or the conservation of energy or the theory of evolution.  If there are no observations that disprove the theory (in its entirety) then you are left having to accept it as a scientific theory.  I’m afraid a lot of people still think that they have a choice.  I imagine that if a climate change denier were on trial for murder and there was clear forensic evidence exonerating them of the crime, they wouldn’t want the jury to question the scientific evidence on the basis that they simply don’t “believe” it.

This brings me to my final point, because this post is getting a little too long.  What does it mean that something is statistically likely.  In the case of climate change, scientists are using statistical significances to highlight the certainty of their findings and predictions for the future.  I seem to recall that the statistical likelihood that the burning of CO2 is causing the warming is over 90%.  As is common in cases like this, the industry folks like to focus on the uncertainty as a way of calling into question the scientific results, as if scientists have to be 100% certain (which by the tentative nature of scientific knowledge, they are not).  Let’s think of it in these terms.  As far as global warming is concerned, it threatens the livelihoods and lives of future generations.  By exacerbating the uncertainty and refusing to do things to mitigate the threat and effects of global warming, climate change deniers and industry types are in essence playing Russian roulette with the planet and the future of civilization.  Let’s assume that scientists are only 95% certain that we are to blame for global warming.  Assuming that the climate change deniers have a revolver that holds 100 bullets, this game of roulette would require them to put bullets in 95 of the 100 chambers.  Are these folks certain this is the game they want to play?  Perhaps, it’s an easy decision for them to make since the dire consequences of their current actions will not be felt until several generations to come.  So, it’s not their own head that they are putting a loaded gun to.  It’s heads of their grandchildren that they are putting the gun to.  Now, I would never suggest that grandparents do not care for their grandchildren.  In fact, I think most grandparents love their grandchildren more than anything in the world, which is why I think this analogy is so powerful.  Are they really so certain that the scientists are wrong that they do not want to err on the side of caution and choose not to play roulette in the first place?

As for my friend at the amateur astronomy group, he eventually admitted that he was a proud skeptic.  So I left him with this thought.  “As a scientist, I can only say that I appreciate skepticism.  However, a true skeptic has to be skeptical of their own position.”  Deniers are not “real” skeptics.

The First Amendment Puts Rich People First in Our “So-Called Democracy”

It is surprisingly refreshing to recognize that actions taken by Congress and the Supreme Court catch me off guard.  Perhaps, I am not as much a cynic as I sometimes think I am.  For instance, the recent decision by the Supreme Court to make money an even bigger part of the electoral process truly caught be by surprise.  After the asinine ruling on the Citizens United case a few years ago and the emergence of the super-PAC, I thought it was clear that the electoral process was becoming more and more broken as unlimited dollars from wealthy individuals and corporations flowed into the super-PACs, which flooded the airwaves with half-truths and outright fabrications all meant to deceive voters.  It makes it a full-time job to be an informed voter these days, wading through the endless attacks on candidates, most of which do not stand up to serious scrutiny.  Of course, that is not to say that some don’t.  Case in point, Virginia’s former governor and the “perks” of the job, most would consider bribes.

While we cannot say that the amount of money a candidate spends on a race ALWAYS correlates with success, it almost always does.  Have a look at the data compiled on https://www.opensecrets.org/bigpicture/elec_stats.php?cycle=2012 from the Center for Responsive Politics.

If money were not important to who gets elected, candidates and their fundraisers would not work as hard as they do to raise the ridiculous amount of money required to get elected.  The effect money has had on our electoral process is that our elected officials spend the overwhelming majority of their time fundraising and only a fraction of their time legislating or doing what they were actually elected to do.  If the supreme court ruling means that their will be added pressure for legislators to raise funds, then I can only imagine the time they commit to legislating and doing the people’s business, as they say, will shrink even more.  The current congress is already labeled the “do nothing” congress.  Can we really afford for their work habits to get any more abysmal?

Let’s ignore the productivity of legislators for a moment and think about the effect of money on our political system.  It is probably a fair statement to say that the majority of our legislation is not written by the elected officials, but is written predominantly by lobbyists who “buy access.”  Legislation is often written to benefit corporations and profit margins and not to benefit workers or the environment.  I recognize this as a generalization, and there is always a danger in generalizing, but I think there is a lot of truth in this statement.  This leaves me wondering where is the representation of the average voter in this system?

I’m afraid it is already hard to find.  We can see the lack of representation in the willingness of this congress to stymie every effort to move ahead with actions that would help the average worker and attempt to raise the standard of living in this country.  A standard of living, which for the middle class and working poor has taken an absolute beating over the last thirty years in spite of huge gains in productivity.  I’m confounded by the arguments against raising the minimum wage, spending money on a jobs program (at a time when the infrastructure is reaching an age when it badly needs replaced, refurbished, or expanded), and the need for universal health care.  If the average voter is already lacking any evident representation in our political system, how could the supreme court make a ruling that will clearly favor the wealthiest Americans?  Unfortunately, the data clearly demonstrates that money correlates with election victories.  While the justices who voted in favor of this ruling argue that they are strictly interpreting the first amendment, the reality is that they have chosen unequal representation that favors the wealthy.  Even if this is an unintended consequence, I do not think that is how they or we the people want to view our democracy.

Here we go: Ruling Spurs Rush for Cash in Both Parties

 

Why We All Should Be Environmentalists…

This meeting has raised lots of interesting questions for me and other issues that need more consideration.  However, here is one I feel like I have a pretty good handle on for the sake of a blog post.

Back home, in southern West Virginia, we all shy away from the terms environmentalist and environmentalism.  In a region where “tree hugger” is hurled as a derogatory slur, the local population associats the notion of caring for the environment as something that only privileged outsiders have the time or means to do.  Outsiders of the region and the motivation for their interest in our region is always viewed with skepticism and environmentalists or “tree huggers” are viewed in a negative light.  This issue was discussed in a session regarding a book Our Roots Run as Deep as Ironweed about female activists in Appalachia.  The work was built on a number of interviews with Appalachian women who have found their way to the front lines of the battle to protect their communities from the numerous threats posed to them my mountaintop removal mines and associated environmental degradation.

Despite the fact that these women are fighting to protect the quality of the air and water that their children breathe and drink, many, if not all, would not classify themselves as environmentalists.  I understand why they feel this way, at least in my gut, because I know how I felt about the so-called tree huggers when I was growing up in McDowell County.  So even while these women are fighting the same fight as their tree-hugging, outsider counterparts, probably working hand-in-hand with those that would readily identify themselves as environmentalists, they hesitate to call themselves environmentalists or even to see themselves as such.

Should there be such a stigma in central Appalachia associated with protecting the environment?  Are there ways to get beyond this stigma so that locals can take pride in protecting their environment, including themselves?  This stigma did not simply materialize out of thin air.  The corporate interests in this part of the state (coal, natural gas, and timber industries) have always sought to weaken environmental regulation or even the prospect of regulation in the region.  One of the corporation’s most effective campaigns has been to portray the environmental groups that would come to the region as “hippie” outsiders who were actually more concerned with themselves and the trees than the people living in Appalachia.  In other words, environmentalism was more of the same cultural exploitation that descended on the region during the war on poverty, when outside journalists exported picture after picture of impoverished, backwards, inbred, toothless hillbillies.  It was an effective tactic on the part of the corporations.  Environmentalism or having a general concern for the environment was largely associated with protecting animals and trees at the expense of the people.  Thus, a tree hugger cared more for about the trees and squirrels than they did for people.  Since they were all hippie outsiders who were likely to be communists that probably smoked a lot of weed and hated “america,” the term “tree hugger” became a term to be avoided.  Since I believe that many consider an environmentalist to be synonymous with tree hugger, anyone from back home would reasonably be hesitant to call themselves an environmentalist.

I think this is unfortunate that the powerful external corporations have been allowed to determine whether we think of ourselves as protectors of our environment.  We distance ourselves from environmental struggles at our peril and to our own misfortune.  We should not make the distinction between caring for the trees, fish, deer, birds, and salamanders and caring for people.  A basic understanding of ecology informs us that we, human beings, all require a healthy environment with clean air, clean water, and unadulterated food supplies to thrive.  An environmentalist or one who seeks to preserve and protect the environment is working to protect people equally as much as they are working to protect the trees and animals due to this interconnectedness.

As a culture that once entirely subsisted on the land, Appalachians should understand better than most the dependence of the health of people on the health of the land as it should be ingrained in our DNA.  Just as we do not want to let outsiders to tell us how to fight for our environment, we should be equally resistant to allowing external corporate interests remove us from our environment, causing us to see ourselves and our well-being as distinct from health of our streams, our fish, and our forests.  I suggest we take back the terms environmentalism, environmentalist, even tree hugger.  Because we are all environmentalists.

Last May, during a visit to Charleston, I saw a bumper sticker on a pickup truck that read Coal Hugger.  I guess a Coal Hugger is supposed to be the opposite of a Tree Hugger.  Since I am arguing that being a “tree hugger” is just as much about protecting people as it is protecting trees, I suggest Hillbilly Hugger as the counter sentiment to the misguided Coal Hugger sticker.  Why use the term Hillbilly?  Because that’s obviously another term we need to take back!