Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (27 page)

Brandt describes the vital role in the strategy played by a biologist named Clarence Cook Little, who agreed to become the scientific director of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, the group created by the tobacco companies to give a scientific gloss to their sales project. A career eccentric who’d resigned the presidency of the University of Michigan in the face of what was nearly an all-out faculty uprising—he loudly decried the decadent campus life while himself carrying on with a coed—Little believed so strongly in the hereditarian view of biology that he’d become involved in the eugenics movements of the 1930s. In his view, all diseases, including cancer, were traceable to genetic origins. Thus, he was predisposed to reject any evidence of environmental causes, such
as smoking. However, his work in cancer research, particularly in the use of experimental mice, of which he’d developed several strains, won him such widespread acclaim that many of his colleagues were shocked when Little took the job with the SAB.

He gave the tobacco industry exactly what it wanted: a thickly credentialed spokesman who could help them sell cigarettes by muddling the scientific evidence. Little argued that cancer was hereditary, and that the research into a link between smoking and cancer was complicated and incomplete, even as study after study piled up outside. As the years went by, Little’s hard-won respectability dropped away from him. Nevertheless, the strategy devised in 1953 held, more or less intact, for nearly fifty years.

The echoes of Clarence Little are quite clear when Chris Mooney describes how, in 2002, a Republican consultant named Frank Luntz sent out a memo describing how Luntz believed the crisis of global warming should be handled within a political context. “The most important principle in any discussion of global warming is sound science,” wrote Luntz. “The scientific debate is closing [against the skeptics] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science.” In short, it doesn’t matter what the facts actually are, all that matters is how you can make people feel about them.

Luntz’s memo adhered closely to the strategy first used by the tobacco companies. Change the language, Luntz advised. Talk about “climate change” and not “global warming.” Call yourselves “conservationists” and not “environmentalists.” He also advised them to foster within their campaigns skepticism about the results of the research. His strategy depended completely on an American public easy to fool and on his ability to transfer the issue into those places where the Gut ruled, where the “debate” about global warming could be cast with familiar
grotesques from all the other modern morality plays—the Meddling Liberal, say, or the Elitist.

In a sense, Clarence Little had a hard job. The American public was deeply in love with scientific inquiry, and he had to bamboozle them about events that many of them had experienced firsthand, as Dad hacked his way to an early grave across the living room while Arthur Godfrey sang on the television set and sold him more Chesterfields. Luntz had a much easier sell. How many Americans had ever seen polar bears outside of a zoo, let alone cared whether they were drowning in the upper latitudes of Canada? How many of them had seen ice deeper than a hockey rink?
Sputnik
was a dead iron ball in space. The country was accustomed to being told what to think about things like this. They’d listen to anyone. Even the government.

TRUTH
be told, Shishmaref is more rusting than rustic. Along the bluffs behind the beach, old snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles lie in scattered pieces, like broken teeth, in the long grass by the side of the clotted dirt roads. There’s a tread here and a wheel there, and a pile of old engine parts that seems a part of the essential geology of the place. Rows of wooden racks, used for drying sealskins, face the sea. They’re pitted by the sand and grit that rides the rising wind; there’s no way to tell whether they’re still in use. Smiling children ride in carts pulled behind ATVs. In front of his clapboard house, its roof adorned with a cluster of caribou horns, a man guts a seal, its blood reddening the mud of the road.

Shishmaref is not a place anyone but the people who live there will particularly miss. There are two stores and one school. The town’s water system is touch and go, and most people catch fresh rainwater in buckets outside the house. In the
winter, people chop ice and melt it down, but there’s less of that now because of the changes in the ice, which forms later, freezes less thickly, and breaks up sooner than it used to do. Those changes, of course, also affect the winter’s hunting, which is still the basis for the subsistence economy on which the town depends. The loss of the permafrost means fewer people use the traditional Inupiaq method of preserving meat for the winter, which is to bury it in the ground. “Even in the summertime, we had our frost that kept our food,” recalls Luci Eningowuk. “We didn’t have to have freezers years ago; we just put the food underground.”

There is a transience about Shishmaref, a vestige of its nomadic origins now exacerbated by time and events into a permanent sense of abandonment. This seems in conflict with the deep attachment of its people to their land. But that attachment has become untenable. Sooner or later, Shishmaref will have to be abandoned. There’s not enough of it left to go around, even among the six-hundred-odd people who live there.

“It’s eating away at precious little land here,” Luci explains. “The main reason that we want to move—that we
have
to move—is for the sake of our children. We don’t have any more room to accommodate them. There’s no space to make their homes.”

IN
1995, Norman Myers of the Climate Institute estimated that there already were between twenty-five million and thirty million “environmental refugees,” and that the number could rise to two hundred million before the middle of this century. Environmental refugees are people fleeing an environmental crisis, either natural or human made. As they move, a ripple effect overwhelms the countries in which they live. They flood the cities,
overtaxing the social services which, in many nations, are rudimentary to begin with. A UN study explained that, at least in part because of environmental refugees, Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, has doubled its population every six years since 1972 and that the city’s main aquifer may run dry by 2010.

That same study—financed and run by the UN University’s Institute for Environment and Human Security—warned that there would be fifty million environmental refugees by 2010, and it argued that they should be recognized in the same way as are refugees from war or political oppression. This would make them eligible for humanitarian aid from a number of governmental and nongovernmental agencies.

Most of the refugees come from sub-Saharan Africa, but there have been similar migrations in the south Pacific, where New Zealand agreed to accept all eleven thousand inhabitants of the Tuvalu atoll, which had been rendered uninhabitable by rising sea levels. According to the journalist Terry Allen, upon arriving in Auckland the Tuvaluans found themselves “lonely and lost, without the support of community and culture, or the skills to survive an urban life based on money.” For better or worse, sometime in the next decade or so, the inhabitants of Shishmaref are going to be among the first environmental refugees in North America.

A number of them have come together this afternoon for a meeting in the town’s community center. It’s a low brown building suffused with what crepuscular light can fight its way through bleary windows. Those present are talking with state highway officials about the early preparations for the evacuation of Shishmaref. The town’s elders have determined that the village will be moved twenty miles across the lagoon to the mainland, to a place not far from the town of Tin Creek. It is a peaceful little spot, small and quiet enough for Shishmaref
to reconstitute itself according to its traditional culture. “The elders wanted to keep one area as serene as possible because it’s a subsistence setting for our lifestyle here,” Luci Eningowuk explains.

The process of moving the residents of Shishmaref is complicated and expensive. (The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers estimated that the cost of moving a nearby village half the size of Shishmaref to be approximately $1 million per resident.) In fact, today’s meeting is not about moving the village. It’s not even about building a road to move the village. It’s not even about gathering stone to build a road to move the village. It’s about building a road to the place where someone can gather the stone to build the road to move the village.

They’re having trouble finding a place with enough gravel to make building a road worthwhile. A spot near Ear Mountain seems promising, but it is logistically difficult to reach, and there are complications in building the road over which the gravel will be carried because the area is located inside protected park land. Patti Miller, an official from the Alaska Department of Transportation, fields questions in the front of the room. Every answer yields another question. Somebody mentions $3 million in government funds already earmarked for assistance in the project.

“Three million dollars,” Miller says, “doesn’t go very far toward building that road.”

Heads nod around the room. Several men get up and pore over the topographical maps that Miller has spread out on the broad tables that, later tonight, will be used for the town’s bingo games.

“The reason we’re talking about it this way is that we don’t really have the funds to move the village,” explains Tony Weyiounna, a village official who’s been deeply involved in the relocation
project for more than five years. “But we do have funding to do some parts of the relocation process. Building the road is one of them.

“In 2002, we developed a strategic relocation plan, along with a flooding and erosion plan, to help guide our community, and we’ve been trying to follow that along to try and do things symmetrically. Constructing the new seawalls was one of the first things, so that was highlighted, and that’s how come we’re building so much of the protection piece.

“But the other aspects, like the relocation project, it’s slow to gather assistance. You know, in our country, for most people to get assistance, you need a big mass of people that the money will benefit. In our case, we’re only six hundred people and the cost of the relocation work is so big, and the benefits to our country are so small, that it doesn’t justify getting a lot of assistance.”

“Just to move them is going to take twenty years and probably two hundred million dollars,” says Patti Miller, after the meeting has broken up. “And the people in the Lower Forty-eight don’t understand that. To them, that’s like an outrageous amount of money, and it is an outrageous amount of money, but these people haven’t got any choices.” There was a good turnout for the meeting. After all, the temperature was fifty-eight degrees outside, a nice day for the first week of November.

ON
February 18, 2004, sixty-two scientists, including forty-nine Nobel laureates, released a report in which they criticized the administration of George W. Bush for its treatment of the scientific process. The report charged the administration with barbering documents, stacking review panels, distorting scientific information, and forcing science itself into a mutable servility to political ends. In short, the scientists charged that the tobacco
industry’s approach to science—which is “Science is whatever we can sell”—had become indistinguishable from the government’s.