The following is a transcript of
"WomenMatter, Facts and Trade-Offs The Environment: Whose Responsibility?" January 12, 2006
Intro: Why is there such a disconnect between learning science and doing something about preventing disasters? Dr. Bauer and Dr. Carol Parssinen national leader in science education at the Franklin Institute take a hard look at why the science we learn in school is so detached from the uses of science to sustain life on earth. Why do people who care about hurricanes and earthquakes refuse to plan for them?
ANNOUNCER: WomenMatter Facts and Trade-Offs is the place where we take one issue at a time, and find the connection between our personal lives and the facts of the bigger system we all live in, and recognize that every idea for making it better has Trade-Offs. This show is about the environment, which is just a vague and general name for all the elements of this planet which are necessary for our staying alive. That there should be arguments about air and water and food, and creating heat, is strange. The environment is not something that surrounds us, it is us – inside and out, all of us. And yet we are continually arguing about taking responsibility for it. So this show is about responsibility, spotlighting WomenMatter’s key questions: How much of this do I already handle on my own? How much of all this do I want to continue to handle by myself? How much of this would I rather handle as a community? And how much better would it be if we handled this together as our government, which is us?
Dr. Nancy Bauer, CEO and editor-in-chief of WomenMatter, studies history and learning. She is particularly interested in how we Americans understand ourselves, and how we use that information to make life more meaningful. Dr. Carol Parssinen is senior vice president of the Center for Innovation and Sciene Learning at the Franklin Institute, the leading science museum located in Philadelphia. She is responsible for connecting learning to science and technology for learners of all ages.
NANCY BAUER: WomenMatter’s nonpartisan message every week is that behind every action government takes is a policy that sets standards and spends our tax dollars. And behind every policy is a philosophy. Of all the subjects we deal with in our daily lives and government affects, the most obvious one ought to be the environment. We are all on life support. And scientists study how we get what we need to stay alive. And they don’t keep their know-how secret. So all of us have available to us what we need to know to live better and smarter. All we have to do is tell our government that we want to live better and smarter, and our representatives will set the standards we need, and spend the money that we give as tax dollars, and they’ll spend it where it will make our life better. But it doesn’t happen that way. Why is it that rules about life itself – air and water and food and energy for power – the details of life that women are in charge of every single day, are the hardest to agree on, of any rules that government makes? Dr. Parssinen, we all learn science in school. Where and why is the disconnect between science and our lives?
CAROL PARSSINEN: Nancy, the, the science that we learn in school is the basic matter of science, that is the facts of science, so-called, that derive from basic areas of biology, chemistry and physics. They are taught to us very often in a disaggregated way, so that even at, from the very beginning of our K12 experience through the end, we make little application of these facts to anything other than very closed-ended experiments in the schoolroom or the laboratory. Only in some high schools will you find courses that apply science to engineering, in a pre-engineering course, or courses that may be called “science and technology,” or “science, technology and society.”
BAUER: So what we’re saying for the kids is, you have to be 14 years old before you know that this makes a difference in your life. In the meantime you’ve just got to learn about how the plants grow, how the, you know, your respiratory system works, what your stomach looks like? I mean that it, it’s all done separately from thinking?
PARSSINEN: Well, not separately from thinking entirely, but I think separately from making a clear connection between that knowledge base and what it might mean on either a local or regional or national, or certainly international, scope. That is, very few curricula or classes that I know of make any attempt to make a connection between science as a disciplinary area and other disciplines, particularly social studies, where there would be the natural application of just what you were suggesting in your preface, about the relationship between scientific literacy and knowledge, and what it means in the world. I also just should say, because this is a particular province, I think, of the science museum community, that science museums find that, in fact, many, many teachers and kids think or know very little about the processes of science. That is, what is science inquiry, or science exploration, what does that mean? And if you become proficient and knowledgeable at that, can you, in fact, move beyond the facts that you have gathered up, and make and appropriate and useful application that will make you potentially, when you graduate, whether after high school or college or beyond, a good citizen and a productive voter.
BAUER: It seems to me that it’s interesting that what, you know, that that’s different than what makes people a scientist. That is, what draws people to be a scientist? What, you know, what do they think it’s for? Some, I mean, some kids get hooked. When do they get hooked, and why would they care?
PARSSINEN: Well there are, of course, so many different kinds of scientists, but I have to say along with a lot of other graduate studies that are focused on research, as you know yourself, graduate-level science study, or study in any other discipline, can be the process of learning more and more about less and less. Research is not necessarily about making an application to immediate problems. Although there are many fields now that do that with increasing emphasis and interest. All the material science areas, biotechnology, nanotechnology – these are really areas that are about taking what we know in science and making a direct application to some kind of social or personal issue or need.
BAUER: Well this is really interesting, because, you know, my field is history, and I want people to understand the, the fact we, you know, the facts about history in order to understand how we get into the messes we get into, how we get out of them, and when we have, when the human race has a better year, how it got to have one. And you’re talking about the fact that there is the, the facts of science, and that as you know more and more about how the globe works, or how the cosmos works, then we have better chance to do something about it to make life better while we’re here on earth. So that, the disconnect in both disciplines, and this is where WomenMatter comes in, is you have to care. We, people have to care about others. Unless it hits on television, you know, there are mining disasters, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, weather disasters – people listen to the weather all the time – and they’re so big on television, but they don’t plan for it. Is this a failure of imagination?
PARSSINEN: Well I think that maybe the counter to that is to say that it is the power of economic gain that is really a big factor here. That is, rather than, there is always the, the kind of double edge of doing research that has potentially powerful application to people’s lives, to say, is it in fact going to be economically remunerative. Just as an example, one of the things the Franklin Institute has are files going back to 1824 of all the most famous scientists to whom we have given awards for now almost 200 years. And as you look at the files for George Washington Carver, and all the experimentation that he did with agricultural products, you realize that one of the reasons that he was not better known, or not regarded, and not actually ever given an award by the Franklin Institute, was that he was not really focused on the economic, remunerative uses of what he had done as research. And if he had been more active in promoting that, he might have had a much longer and more defined kind of role in terms of his, both his, the knowledge we have about him and what it is that his work had led to.
BAUER: So it’s not just a failure of imagination, it’s a failure of connecting up to this thing that, in America, we measure so much by – whether we are going to spend our money at it, we measure so much by our economic success. We’ve had this great, lucky history, where things have been pretty good for us most of the time. And we measure the meaning of life against the cost of life. We get into all kinds of debates in this country, and, which cause us, I think, perhaps not to think back in time and think ahead at the same time. And so we, as we look at WomenMatter and we talk about women wanting to empower themselves to take our story of life, that we manage every day, and take it into, bring women together, and take it into the bigger body politic, and tell our government what we want to do, we keep running into this issue of, do I do as I please? Do I take personal responsibility? If I were to do this together with government, do we always get into the question of is it money or is it, and is it votes? And can the votes be promoted by something other than money? These are really serious issues as we face the enormous information we’re getting from science today about the future of the planet, and all of us with it. So the difficulty obviously, and using democracy to address an incremental problem, you know, like pollution from cars and factories, this is something that has to do with money, it has to do with jobs, and it has to do, however also, with the quality of life of the air we breathe.
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Interview with Deb Callahan, President of The League of Conservation Voters. Why Congress won't take the lead in conserving the quality of our air, water, and food. Why it has to be the responsibility of the informed voter to make the system work.
BAUER: We’re now going to hear from interviews with three women. Their job is to connect people’s personal lives to votes. To votes on environmental policy, and guess what? Votes about money. Votes about tax dollars. Because just my wallet isn’t going to pay for a lot of environmental advantages, but if we all put our tax dollars together, then we could make a difference. So as we listen to these three women, let’s listen for where in their approach is science. Do they ever talk about science? What are their philosophies about how we should use science in relationship to money and votes? What do these women believe? And in their important jobs, what do they do about it? We’re going to hear from Deb Callahan, who is the president of the League of Conservation Voters. And the key word is not just conservation, it is voters, in which she wants to mobilized the voters to put pressure on the Congress, who might not think about conservation if there isn’t pressure coming from them. So we’ll listen to her.
We’ll listen to Becky Norton Dunlap, who believes that things should be done at the state level wherever possible, who has very definite questions about the power of federal government, and whether we should have the same rules across the country. And in her view, it is a question of philosophy of individual responsibility, which she applies in very practical ways to get people to do what she thinks is the right thing about the environment, for not necessary philosophical reasons. But we’ll listen to where she puts her philosophical position.
And then, to Christine Todd Whitman, former governor of New Jersey, and head of the E, the Environmental Protection Agency for the Bush administration. And she will talk about the relationship of getting things done – how you do it, and why science is an iffy kind of question for people in government and for voters, how we can focus on the facts of science in relationship to the political system that we’re all a part of.
It’s my pleasure to introduce our WomenMatter radio audience to Deb Callahan, who is president of an amazing thing called the League of Conservation Voters, which represents, I think 27 different organizations, each of which wants to conserve, preserve, or make better a piece of this globe that we live on. Welcome Deb Callahan, how does your connection between government and voters work? WomenMatter cares desperately about informed women voters addressing the government, government paying attention to what informed women voters want. And you all stand in the middle of that. Tell me how you connect the government to the voters?
CALLAHAN: Thanks Nancy, and, um, it, it’s the right question. And democracy works when people work to make democracy work. We, sort of the shorthand for what we’re trying to do is to get voters to vote the environment, and environmentalists to vote. You can’t achieve the sorts of public policies that you, you want and need unless you have an engaged government. Especially in this environmental realm, and something that we’ve learned through doing work with environmental voters for now well over a decade, since I’ve been running the league, in terms of getting the environmental base just to simply get out and vote, we, you know, on the, on our education, nonpartisan side, we just want these people to get out and vote.
BAUER: You mean there are people who care about pollution in the streams and air and water and whatever, and they don’t vote?
CALLAHAN: This is, this is what’s extraordinary. About 10 years ago we did some deep research, looking at the 11 million members collectively, of environmental groups around this country, to find out, you know, these people in the environmental movement, are super-engaged in the democratic process through letter writing, through going to field hearings, to advocating for environmental policies. But what we discovered is most states around the country, back in the mid-nineties, environmentalists didn’t vote with any more frequency than the general public. So for 10 years, we’ve been reaching out, we’ve been, you know, getting our constituency to think of their active participation in the democratic process to extend to the voting booth. And it’s actually one of the simplest ways that you can be a good citizen. It’s one of the simplest ways you can exercise yourself for your policy purposes, yet it’s something that environmentalists, generally speaking, didn’t do. They thought about being an environmentalist as being an activist – I’ll write a letter, I’ll go to a hearing, not, I’ll be an environmental voter. We have made huge strides, to the point where in the, in the 2004 election, when we worked with a, a population of 200,000 environmental voters in Washington State, for instance, 94.5 percent of those 200,000 voters got out and voted, through my nonpartisan program. That, according to our list consultant, was the top of the heap of any constituency group working to get out their people. So we think over 10 years of ongoing education, and encouragement, and connecting the dots between the issues and the government, we’ve really broken through. But it’s, it takes a lot of work and it takes hammering away and connecting those dots.
BAUER: Well it’s really interesting that is, what is it about these people that, uh, what do they know that other people don’t know? The people who are part of what you call an environmental community, what makes them a community?
CALLAHAN: Well, in, in, I think we have kind of a unique issue in that, you know, the environment isn’t really an issue, it’s a topic heading, under which our, the issues of lead in drinking water, or clean air, or, or, you know, various public health issues, or drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or, you know, how you get to work, transportation, the food you eat, are there pesticides in it. The environment, you know, it comes through as a wide-ranging suite of issues, many of which are extremely important particularly to women, your constituency. Therefore it’s sort of hard in our issue, for people to sort of say, you know, that, that politician isn’t an environmentalist, because any politician is going to say, no, no, no, I am an environmentalist, and you need for people to be informed about who really is gonna sort of carry their water on this issue of great concern. You know, over 80 percent of the country consider themselves environmentalist, but we don’t see the Congress necessarily voting that way right now. So it’s an ongoing education process to get voters to be informed voters, so they’re really voting for people who reflect their values and their issues.
BAUER: Well it’s interesting ‘cause women lead, uh, live, lead their lives in what I call, and what we call, at the point of service. I mean women don’t seem to understand that they, a lot of us don’t seem to see ourselves as part of the body politic, because we are 52 percent of the country, so WomenMatter wants us to act like a knowledgeable majority, that we are. And our research says that women care desperately about safety, which is environment—
CALLAHAN: Absolutely.
BAUER: --you know, at the point of service. In the school, in the air, in the, at the corner – all of those things. That they need to know enough to know about this. How do you reach them? What kind of information can you get people to think about? Does it have to be something specific to them? Or can you get them to think about us as a little blue ball in the middle of the sky?
CALLAHAN: Well you know, I, I think, you know, people typically think of environmental issues that people will react to or engage in or vote on, are those issues which affect them directly. And so therefore, you know, you can’t tell me that lead in drinking water in Washington, D.C. wouldn’t be a potential election issue. I mean that’s something that is going to get people up in arms. You can’t tell me that voters in Las Vegas aren’t concerned about a potential high-level radioactive waste dump being put in their backyard. So there are those issues which are, are directly impactful, and those tend to be the ones that really motivate voters and that people, when they read about it on the front page, um, or in the body of the paper, or just hear about it in conversation with friends, sort of think, mmm, that’s important. I think what’s interesting is, layering on that though, we’re, we’re seeing some new issues for the day, particularly global climate change, beginning to sort of perk into, into the public’s awareness. And particularly these energies, these issues of energy. I think energy is coming to be a great concern to many people’s pocket books. I think after Katrina, Hurricane Katrina, we saw that energy supplies may not be quite as reliable as we all thought, we could take them for granted. And people are beginning to think about some of these very important issues, because they know they, they directly affect their lives. So then the question is, how do you know who, whose, who’s got what position on that? And, and that’s where it comes down to voters being informed voters. And I, I think one of the key things those of us who work in this electoral arena need to really make people feel powerful again. I think Americans increasingly feel like, you know, I care about this, and it sounds awful but what can I do about this? I think we have to put the power back in people’s hands.
BAUER: OK, well the interesting thing is, I mean if you use selfishness and fear, to sell to people, you know, this is, this is your issue in your neighborhood so I want you to care about, you care about, you know, this, and somebody else cares about hurricanes, and somebody else cares about earthquakes, and then, so if you’re afraid that it’s going to happen to you, then you’re supposed to care. That makes it hard, because then the people get to Congress, and Congress says I’m, you know, I’m horse trading.
CALLAHAN: Right.
BAUER: You know, so, in my district what they want is this, and the other one wants something else, and then this turns people off as well. I mean that it’s, I mean, so who do you educate first? The Congress, people, or the others? But if it’s all about being selfish or afraid, can we get people to think about themselves as part of something bigger?
CALLAHAN: Bigger than themselves. Yes, and I don’t, I – the voters and the elected officials should be two halves of a whole. I think increasingly today many elected officials are voting against what, what their constituents might want them to do on a host of things, and in part it’s because people aren’t made aware. You know, let’s look at, let’s take a cold hard look at American politics today. Who gets taken care of in society? Those folks who are viewed to be either a source of, of, you know, campaign contributions by an elected official, or those, those interests which are viewed to have political clout. If I help these folks they might help me. If, if I hurt this issue, they might hurt me. And I think that’s why important, it’s important to be organized. I think that’s why the environmental movement, for instance, is so important that we be visible, that we be organized. And in fact that we be actively engaged in elections, helping to elect or unelect public officials, because that way when people go up there and they cast a vote on the Arctic Wildlife Refuge or other things, even if it’s not in their own backyard or if it’s in their backyard, they know that we’re watching. And they might feel it politically when they have to go out there and get reelected, because I’m not gonna let people forget what votes they’ve cast on these critical issues. So there’s a linkage here, the elected needs to, their, their record needs to be known and then people will react.
BAUER: And so you’re teaching social studies when they know that if compromises have to be made what you don’t want is your congressman compromising against something you believe in. So you brought together the people who care about the trees with the ones who care about the, the plants, and the ones who care about the animals, and the ones who care about something else, and the fish, and you brought them all together. And you’re the League of Conservation Voters, so that you have, fascinating that to educate the voters to think bigger, to think from their personal interests, to the political system.
CALLAHAN: That’s right.
BAUER: And if they, and to understand, however, and one of the things that WomenMatter does three times a week is to show how the deals are made, and why they have to make them otherwise they don’t get things, because those same voters want stuff brought back, you know, in money, in standards, to their own neighborhoods.
CALLAHAN: Right.
BAUER: And if they don’t deliver, so there’s a three-quarter thing happening here, and Deb Callahan, it’s fascinating, I, you have helped us a lot, and we will continue to connect up with the League of Conservation Voters and this very interesting educational, as well as lobbying, as well as sending money where it counts. Because if 10 million women each send five dollars to the candidate, they will find out that there’s a lot that can be done if we come together and think together to begin with. And that’s where WomenMatter, very interested in what you’re doing as well. Thanks very much for this, that’s Deb Callahan of the League of Conservation Voters, nationwide.
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Interview with Becky Norton Dunlap, former Secretary of Natural Resources for the Commonwealth of Virginia. How to use competition between businesses and communities and individual responsibility to make the connection between science and a cleaner environment. Why it is better for each state to manage its own environment without federal regulations.
BAUER: I’d like to introduce to our WomenMatter audience Becky Norton Dunlap. She is the former Secretary of Natural Resources for the Commonwealth of Virginia, author of a book called “Clearing the Air,” which discusses current environmental and natural resources, and whether or not the states should do it or the federal government should do this. And in addition to that now she is vice president for external communications – that means everything they say to everybody else and not what they say to each other – of the Heritage Foundation in Washington. So, welcome Becky Norton Dunlap.
DUNLAP: Well thank you, I’m delighted to be with you today.
BAUER: So tell me, I mean, you’ve had some experience now, now with the whole idea behind what are we going to do with what we’re supposed to know about this globe we live on. Whose responsibility is this?
DUNLAP: Well, I would start off by saying to your listeners that every individual on the planet has a responsibility. We all are supposed to be good stewards of the earth, and we have to learn, first of all, how to go about being good stewards, and then we need to start where we have the most influences, which is our homes, our neighborhoods, and our communities.
BAUER: So the, but everybody has access to the science, so how come everybody’s in such disagreement all the time? I mean, after all, the science is there.
DUNLAP: Well, I think that on issues that face us most directly and are around us and our homes and our neighborhoods and with our local streams and so forth, there’s not a lot of disagreement. And, you know, if we all worked harder at being better stewards of the resources over which we have direct interaction and direct authority, I think that we would see all of our natural resources improve in quality and condition.
BAUER: So if enough people are scared or enough people are greedy, that we can, it’ll all add up to being responsible, you think?
DUNLAP: Well I don’t think it’s necessarily greed, uh, I think it’s a matter of just looking at, a matter of teaching our children to be good stewards of the resources that we’ve been blessed with. So, in order for economies to grow and for people to have improved qualities of life, we have to use, and we want to use natural resources. But it is important that we learn through our science classes at a very early age and young age about, you know, trees and grasses and water, and things like this. And that as we grow we learn to be good stewards. So we, we, we had lessons through the years where we’re taught to, you know, throw our trash in the wastebasket and not out the car window. Those are simple lessons, but in many respects these lessons have been, have been forgotten by many people, not only in our communities but around the world. We need to relearn those basic lessons to be good stewards.
BAUER: Well it’s really interesting that it’s in the science class we take them out to the parks and they clean up, you know, they clean up the schoolyard, and they go down and help clean up along the river banks. On the other hand, maybe the science class and the social studies class should get together and they take them to the factory, where, just spewing out the pollutants because it can’t afford to, you know, to clean it up.
DUNLAP: Well I think that, uh, I can tell you that when we were, when I was in office in Virginia, one of the lessons that we tried to teach students is about waste treatment plants, sewage treatment plants, if you will.
BAUER: Uh-huh.
DUNLAP: And we, the first lesson they have to learn is how do you determine what the water quality is in the creek and the stream or the river that’s running through your community. And so we encourage all kinds of teachers, and service clubs and organizations, to learn how to test water quality themselves, uh, you know, sometimes to the chagrin of state government employees, who didn’t think they did it quite as well, citizens don’t do it quite as well as state government employees. But our point was, if we teach them how to make this determination about water quality, and they find that they have water quality that’s not as good as it should be in that stream, they can begin working their way back upstream, and identify where there are problems.
BAUER: But there’s, the problem comes from somebody else’s constituency in some other state. I mean, you had very interesting stories about how you, I don’t know, whether you browbeat the businesses to care, [laughter], in order to come to—
DUNLAP: No, I didn’t have to browbeat them. They, they were interested. What we found in Virginia is that the people who live in Virginia cared deeply about the quality and condition of the environment in the commonwealth, where they live and raise their families.
BAUER: So they want new jobs?
DUNLAP: Sometimes they weren’t aware of some of the problems, though, they weren’t aware of the science behind the problems.
BAUER: Well what about the, what about jobs? Because we hear an awful lot about the fact that, you know, if we spend too much time just trying to prevent, you know, help problems with, you know, the science and, and the natural environment, we’ve really got to talk about businesses with jobs. What are you able to do to get businesses to pay attention to, you know, the economics of the environment?
DUNLAP: Well we found in Virginia, where we were trying to improve our air quality, that we met with the local elected officials, and then local business people, and we talked first of all about the challenges that we face with the air quality problem – the science behind it, the federal government regulations behind it, the, the limitations, or the extra cost that would be, become a burden to our citizens, if we didn’t improve our air quality.
BAUER: OK, so—
DUNLAP: And then we talked about options that were available, that were cost effective, and that the community could buy into.
BAUER: I see, so the idea is, one is, regulators are going to come and get you if you don’t do it, but there is, you could make money if you do something?
DUNLAP: Well, we didn’t quite put it that way, I mean, we wanted them to understand that the air, we wanted to improve the air quality, and that everybody could be part of the solution.
BAUER: But you—
DUNLAP: And people make choices about, uh, what they want to do in their community. And some communities in Virginia, we told them if we don’t improve the air quality in this area, we’re going to have to begin testing tailpipes of cars.
BAUER: Uh-huh.
DUNLAP: And if you, if we do that then, you know, that means, there are a lot of costs involved in that. So there are other things that we can do, and let’s talk about what some of those options are, and then the state went away, and said, we’re going to come back and see you in three or four months, you guys talk among yourselves and figure out the kinds of things you want to do in your community, that your citizens will buy into and your corporate community will buy into, and then we’ll come back and we’ll help you figure out how to implement those things.
BAUER: And you put state dollars to incentivize those people, if they, from a solution that meets new technology or whatever?
DUNLAP: Yeah, although we found that in most instances they didn’t need the new dollars and—
BAUER: I see.
DUNLAP: They just needed the, they needed to learn about what options there were out there, and then go about making adjustments and so forth.
BAUER: Well if we need to care then about our own local places, do I have to care about New Orleans? Do I have to care about California, where people live over the earthquake fault? Do I have to care about the eastern shore of the ocean?
DUNLAP: Well of course there are going to be many people who care about all of those places, and there are going to be some people who have to focus on their own community and their own families. And the, the, one of the great benefits of living in a free society, which is, which is the envy, frankly, of the rest of the world, is that people who are concerned about their own community and are doing something to make their own community better, we know that that has a ripple effect on making communities, you know, downwind, or downstream, better, and then those people who have the interest, the wherewithal, the economic reasons and resources to care about other places, can be involved in those, in those communities too.
BAUER: What about the people who want to continue to live over the earthquake fault, or live along the beach? Or who want to rebuild New Orleans, you know, from under, you know, which is underwater?
DUNLAP: Well I think that this is one thing that the United States, the citizens of the United States, does need to come to grips with. And that is, that if people are going to live in areas where there is risk of natural disasters, they need to be prepared to, for instance, buy earthquake insurance, or flood insurance. And the federal government should not be in the business of subsidizing that insurance.
BAUER: Uh-huh.
DUNLAP: If we subsidize insurance for people who want to live in those areas where natural disasters are most likely to happen, that means that all the taxpayers of the coun--, of the country are encouraging to make choices to live in those risky areas. If somebody wants to live in that area just because they like it, then they need to be prepared to pay themselves for that insurance that will help them if the, if the natural disaster does strike.
BAUER: Well thank you very much, Becky Norton Dunlap, whose, with the idea that with our individual responsibility focusing on the areas where we live as individuals, and knowing the science, we can then decide what to do with our neighbors, and that people, and then understanding the relationship between incentive, taxpayer dollars, and this thing called risk. Thanks very much, and the women of WomenMatter, who live at that point where the res--, individual responsibilities are taken, I hope will lead the way.
DUNLAP: Thanks so much, appreciate being with you.
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Interview with Christine Todd Whitman, former Governor of New Jersey and Administrator of the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Why Americans have a hard time taking action about the environment. Why science is seldom the major factor in the political decisions about what to do.
BAUER: It is WomenMatter’s privilege to introduce the women of WomenMatter to Christine Todd Whitman, a name that everybody knows, who has had a long record of working in government and in the private sector, as governor of New Jersey from 1994 to 2001, and then as the administrator of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, a Cabinet-level post under President George W. Bush, from 2001 to 2003. And she now heads the Whitman Strategy Group, which is going to solve all the problems that she learned about in those other two jobs—
CHRISTINE TODD WHITMAN: [laughter].
BAUER: --so welcome, Governor Whitman.
WHITMAN: Oh, well thank you very much. I wish we could solve all the problems.
BAUER: Somebody’s gotta do it, and that’s why we’re here today. So, I mean, as we talk about the environment, I mean every kid goes to school and learns that we, you know, that, and they see on television, there’s a little blue ball and we all live on it, and it’s floating around. And we all know that the ice is melting, and the hurricanes hurt oil wells, and they’re bad for refineries. We all have that basic information. Why are there people who know the science and still choose not to act?
WHITMAN: Well, for many it’s a, it’s a question of money. It gets down to being as simple as that. They can, as long as they can make the profit over, by not doing what’s right for the environment, they’ll take the chance that eventually they’ll get caught and have to pay something extra, but it’s worth it to them in today’s dollars. Unfortunately that does motivate a lot of people. I think for the average person, though, the reason that we don’t see, hear more pressure, I mean, Europe, the citizens in Europe are much more focused and concerned about the environment than we are here, in the sense that they let their politicians know it and we don’t. I don’t think we’re not concerned about it as individuals, we just don’t feel that we can influence policy in the same way they do in other countries. And I think part of that is because people are confused, there’s a lot of contradictory science out there, there’s all sorts of pushback about, is there really global climate change occurring? And if so do humans have any role to play? A little role to play? A big role to play? And most people say, Look, I gotta worry about getting the kids to school, making sure I can pay the rent, taking care of a whole lot of other things, this one I have to leave for somebody else as long as I have clean air and clean water. And the real problem is, we’re getting into a position where we’re not always going to have clean air and clean water, and that we really do need to worry about.
BAUER: Well so the, the, then what are the uses of government? If people in Europe are used to being part of the government, is there something about Americans that, is it because we’re such a lucky country, that we haven’t had to think about it?
WHITMAN: Well that’s part of it. I mean if you remember back in the sixties, when we had rivers that spontaneously combusted, and we had literally hundreds of, tens of thousands of people being sickened every year by inversions in the air and air quality, bad air quality, and that’s when the Environmental Protection Agency – well that’s when we had Rachel Carsons, who wrote the Silent Spring and really woke up everyone to the environment and our role in it. And people started to put pressure on, on government, and government acted. And we had the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, a whole series of regulations and laws passed, that have done a great deal to clean up our environment. I mean, we really are much better off today than we were 40 years ago, 35 years ago.
BAUER: And so, it wasn’t just under one political party then, that it happened.
WHITMAN: Oh no, I mean the interesting thing was, all those major laws were signed by Republican presidents, and they were working mostly with Democrat Congresses.
BAUER: Uh-huh.
WHITMAN: This was very much a bipartisan effort.
BAUER: Maybe what we need is more split government. [laughter].
WHITMAN: Well I, I think you’re right there, I think we need more bipartisanship, that’s for sure.
BAUER: Yeah, but the idea that, there’s sort of a prevailing feeling that one party has one philosophy and the other one, you know, has another philosophy. And the fact is that every, in our history, even in our recent history of a generation ago, people knew that somehow or other, you still have to make money and you still have to have businesses, but you still have to be able to, you know, drink the water and breathe the air.
WHITMAN: Well if you, if you think about it, the last 35 years have been among the most productive from an economic point of view in this country’s history. I mean it’s about 115 percent growth in, economic growth, that we’ve seen in this country. And at the same time, we were enacting these laws that were protecting the environment. So the people that said these laws are just going to stop economic growth, and you can’t have a clean and green environment and a healthy economy are just plain flat-out wrong. And more people need to understand that that’s not the choice they have to make. It’s not that either-or choice, you can have both things. You need to be smart about how you do it, and you need, but you need to be involved to get it to happen.
BAUER: Well this is an interesting thing, because women that we know, from our research at WomenMatter, that women live as we would call at the point of service. It’s where, you know, the, the water comes out of the tap, it’s where the school does or does not have asbestos or lead, you know, and what happens with the paint, and all of those, you know, safety factors are sort of women’s responsibility at the local or community level. You’ve been in every level of government. What’s the right level of government for all of this? Because, you know, it gets involved with the states rights thing and the federal thing, and the, and the fact is that if women are not active locally, are they going to think about, you know, calling their Congressman, or person, which they can certainly do right from WomenMatter. But what level of government is the right one and how do they work together, or not?
WHITMAN: It’s all of them, and it’s that last part that’s so important, it’s the working together. There is no, there’s, there’s no one part or level of government that has sole responsibility. The public has a responsibility, the private sector has a responsibility, local, state, federal government all have responsibilities. I mean the thing you have to remember about the environment is many issues, it is one of those where you think globally and act locally. The biggest problem, for instance, that we have in the future in clean water is what we call non-point source pollution. It’s pollution that comes from the things that we do everyday when people over-fertilize their lawn or change the oil of their car in the driveway, let’s say, and don’t dispose of it properly. All of that, when there’s a rain event, flushes down into the, into a river or a stream. Even if you don’t live on one, it eventually gets in the storm drains, which go into the rivers and streams, and end up along, in the ocean and in our lakes. And right now every eight months, there’s as much oil deposited along the entire coastline of the United States, every eight months, from activities like that, from non-point source pollution, as was released during the Exxon-Valdez spill, which was our largest single natural disaster.
BAUER: Well I mean, is it—
WHITMAN: So we each have a probl--, we each have a responsibility, government has to do regulate the businesses and what they discharge. But we need to look at what, how we act every day, and our activities as well.
BAUER: Well that takes the imagination, that is when the oil from my driveway goes down someplace else and I never go to the beach—
WHITMAN: Right.
BAUER: I mean, that’s asking me to imagine myself on the beach?
WHITMAN: And that’s what makes it so tough. That’s what makes it so tough, for instance, when you’re, when you’re starting to enforce regulations that are telling farmers that they have to change the way they graze their cattle, not let them get down to the stream, when their water is perfectly fine, because it’s polluting water further down the stream, and it’s going to cost them money to do it and it’s not going to impact them at all, it’s pretty tough to tell them, you gotta spend a bunch of money to change the way you’ve been doing things. For someone else’s benefit, but that’s what we have to do, because we all live downstream from somebody else.
BAUER: Ah, so the fact that, that, so getting the sense of that it, I may not care about the people but if I don’t care about them they won’t care about me either. That’s a—
WHITMAN: Exactly, they won’t care about me either.
BAUER: This is sort of enlightened self interest, and a little bit on the selfish side. I mean, is this the way we have to sell it in this country? That is, I mean we tell little children, you know, that we are all God’s children living on this big, you know, planet all together, and everybody’s supposed to care. But what’s, from a—
WHITMAN: I’ll do it any and every way that it works. I really don’t, at this point, I don’t care what the motivation is, as long as people do the right thing. And for some it will be because it is the right thing to do. For others, it will be an economic motive, or it will be a self preservation motive. I mean for instance, if you can call something that’s not contagious a disease, then we have an epidemic, and we have an epidemic of asthma. It’s not contagious, we don’t know what causes it, but we do know what can trigger attacks and what can exacerbate an attack. And that’s dirty air. It’s, asthma’s the number one cause of children missing school these days in the United States. Over 10 million missed school days a year, and those are, that’s an old number from a couple of years ago, it’s probably gone up since then. That has a huge impact on our future. If you’re a mom with a kid that has to stay home from school because they’re having an asthma attack, can’t participate in sports because they have asthma, if—
BAUER: And you can’t go to work because the kid’s home.
WHITMAN: You can’t go to work because you have to be home with the child, you have to spend money to get that child the kind of healthcare that they need, there are all kinds of implications from that, that should matter to each and every one of us. In a personal way, and sometimes just from the broader, this is the make the world a better place.
BAUER: So does it have to be federal legislation? Because after all that’s what crosses the borders. I mean there’s a big discussion now about what’s interstate commerce.
WHITMAN: Mmm-hmm.
BAUER: But if the air is coming across, you know—
WHITMAN: Exactly, uh, that definitely takes some time, but you know states have gotten together before and worked these things out. Very often the states are ahead of the federal government, they are the laboratories of democracy, they take action and that pushes the federal government to take action.
BAUER: Why does it have to start at the state level? Why can’t we think like Americans?
WHITMAN: Oh, because we have a tradition of not, and we have very strong states’ rights. I used to have enormous battles when I was governor with a governor who lived in the state that shall remain nameless, but it was west of here and had some plants—
BAUER: That’s where I live.
WHITMAN: --big plants that were putting stuff into the air, and I kept saying to him, you know, it’s called air transport. What you’re producing is coming into my state. And he said, no, no, no, there’s no such thing as that, [laughter]. A, why is it that you can cross the United States faster coming west to east than going east to west? It’s called trade winds. They blow, and they blow in a certain direction, and so a lot of the pollution that, that many of the East Coast states get comes from other states, and that’s where you do need federal legislation, that’s where you got the Clean Air Act.
BAUER: So does it—
WHITMAN: But there are other things, if you’re, if you have the kind of logjam that we have right now in Congress, where everything has gotten so partisan, and we’re not getting good legislation, we haven’t had a major piece, a really major piece of federal legislation passed in over a decade now. If we’re not having it done at the federal level then we need to have it happen at the state level, and start to put pressure on the federal government.
BAUER: And of course this is, I mean, that’s too bad to say wherever the weakness is, that we have to go to the other one, rather than having some kind of, of educating ourselves as Americans to realize that, you know, that we have a country, and there’s something, you know, in addition to a, the fact that we’re going to catch something from somebody, or it’s going to cost us a bundle, that the idea that what are the, you know, the values behind all of us. I mean in a democracy, are we talking about values or are we just talking about finding out how we can get somebody to do what they, you know, to vote the way we want them to vote at a particular moment in time because of their pocket books or their own particular situation.
WHITMAN: Well again there, there are a variety of things that motivate people, and it depends on what part of the country you’re in too. You know, different people, different parts of the country see different issues as being major, of major concern. If you go to the Southwest, they understand the concerns about water, and having enough water, and having clean water. If you spend some time in the Northeast, you get more people will focus more on things like air quality, because see rivers and lakes dying around them, or on the Gulf, where you have big dead zones out in the Gulf of Mexico. You know, there are different things that motivate people, we are such a diverse country. In the state of New Jersey we speak over 150 different languages, so to think that you can come up with kind of one set of motivators to get everybody on the same page is, is really a reach. And so that’s why we have to approach these issues on a bunch of different levels. We start with kids, we need to reach their parents, we need to reach corporations and tell them this is good for business if you do the right thing, and there are a lot that are. There are many that are, but unfortunately not enough yet.
BAUER: Well I think the fact that we are continent wide, maybe this is where we differ from Europe, where the countries are smaller—
WHITMAN: Right, sure.
BAUER: So that their cultures are more homogeneous and, and somebody once said there are nine different nations within the United States, and so that therefore this is where the federal government, you know, is the great unifier. But sometimes after the fact, and it is, you know, and that’s sort of a shame, that where does the leadership come from, and what do we need to know. This has been enormously—
WHITMAN: Well I’ll tell you one of the reasons why we don’t get more aggressive leadership in Washington on the issues of the environment, is because we as the, the interested public, the people that they serve and represent, aren’t telling them we care.
BAUER: Ah ha.
WHITMAN: Any time there’s a poll, and you ask people to list their 10 most important issues, they never will list the environment. If you give them a list to choose from, and environment is on it, it may make 10, but it’s usually around 12. So we’re not, it’s not that we don’t care about the environment, it’s just that there are other things that bother us more, that we worry about more on a daily basis. And so the message that many of these people are getting, many of the representatives, is this isn’t the number one issue. There are other issues, fight those battles and, so, you know, you pick your battles. And they say, OK, I can afford not to worry about these other things and not show a great deal of leadership because I’m just going to get people mad at me, and I won’t get a lot of credit from those who care, because it’s just not number one on their radar.
BAUER: Well that is the lesson from WomenMatter and that’s why we’re both nonpartisan and an information and education service, because we want women to understand this, to understand what government can do, and that democracy means you’ve got to collect the votes, otherwise you don’t get enough votes and that’s the, the deal we make with our representatives. Thank you very much Governor Christine Todd Whitman—
WHITMAN: You’re welcome.
BAUER: Who has brought a career of, of insights and experiences to show us how we’re going to have to approach this whole issue from more than one angle. Thanks a lot.
WHITMAN: Well thank you very much, thank you for what you do.
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Dr. Bauer and Dr. Parssinen spotlight the hurricane Katrina disaster and its connections to science, politics, world trade, tax dollars and war. The need for women to use science and history to require smarter standards and smarter use of our tax dollars.
BAUER: WomenMatter informs women so that we can be smarter voters. You at the Franklin Institute, Dr. Parssinen, teach voters what they need to know about science and the uses of science. Now let’s look at the political environmental policy makers, who are supposed to connect up the science with the voter with the policy with the taxes, with the laws, and set the standards. What is their view of science and the voters? And their philosophy of what to do and how to do it? How did it sound to you?
PARSSINEN: The theme that came through very strongly, I thought, in all three interviews, was the strength of self interest in making any kind of efforts move beyond, beyond where they start. That is, I had this strong sense that each of them was suggesting a kind of focus on the individual, certainly whether we’re talking about stewardship or we’re talking about votes that are conservation oriented, it was really at the level of the individual that I thought the interviews were making their case.
BAUER: It’s an interesting thing, that is, in this country, that when Madison helped to design the Constitution, you remember they were concerned that they had three sets of geography then. They had the, you know, the North, the South and the Middle, and they were never going to get anybody to agree about anything, so that they were worried about factions in the country. So what they said was, you’re gonna have to make deals. And the Constitution is all about how you broker a deal with enlightened self interest, because you have to go get somebody else’s faction to vote for yours, or you never get enough votes and get anything done in the Congress. This is very different from the Declaration of Independence, which is all about what brings us together philosophically as a place of liberty and freedom and trying to do things together to make life better for everybody. So that their focus is very much on that system. And maybe we should take a look at a case history of what happens, then, when the individual view crosses over into something that is clearly bigger than the rest of us. Shall we use Katrina as an example? What happened when they, this enormous hurricane hit one part of the country, why should anybody care?
PARSSINEN: That I think is a terrific example, and was in many ways, along with the tsunami that preceded it, and the earthquake in Pakistan that came afterward, a kind of lesson writ large for the public view and imagination about the power of nature and the potential of the connection between these horrific events and global climate change, or global warming, if you prefer that terminology. In fact, for many people the aftermath of Katrina, with the rupture in the levees, and then the problems that there were with the refineries and the immediate, and enormous spike in gas prices, was a way of making this not just a series of pictures on television, or perhaps a few of the Katrina evacuees in your own community, but rather something that was very dramatic in terms of your own pocketbook, both as you powered up your car but also thought about what it was going to cost to heat your home over the winter. And what we saw was people not buying SUVs, and instead buying cars with alternative power sources. There was a very dramatic case of this in the third and fourth quarters of this year, and certainly negative impacts as we saw on GM and some of the other big producers in Detroit. But this was an example, I think, of where people’s individual decision-making had global implications. Were those decisions really powered by a philosophy that said we must now care about the world, about the planet on which we live, about people who live in places that seem very remote to us, like Bande Aceh? I don’t know, I don’t know what the extent of the philosophical implications was. But I certainly think that we can see a dramatic impact here from these natural disasters on the consciousness of people about the relationship between their personal decision-making and the kinds of global implications that it has.
BAUER: And now we’re into an interesting phase in this. Let’s assume that, it’s funny when people talk about “Mother Nature” rather than about science. People seem much more comfortable about saying Mother Nature is going to come back and claim the New Orleans delta. That is, you know, there’s going to be another storm, and if you’re going to build the city under water then people who want to do that, according to Becky Dunlap, she says if you want to live there, you buy insurance. But it’s not fair to live over an earthquake fault or live on a beach and expect the taxpayers’ dollars to pay for, you know, the fact that you’re willing to take a risk that the rest of don’t have to take. So there’s this generosity of Americans of wanting to send aid to help people who are in trouble everywhere, or anywhere, but the difference between that and paying for this problem forever. So we’re now up to, who gets to come back to New Orleans, and who gets to decide where they can live? And this is a political issue. And it’s political issue at the local level, but it’s also going to be an issue for everybody, because it has a lot to do with taxpayers dollars across the country, and the money we have to borrow in order to pay for that kind of an expense that we didn’t expect to do. So it’s really interesting, that as you point out, that our taxpayers and our individuals, we’ve caused the car companies a big problem. First we wanted big cars, so we bought them. And then we decided suddenly we don’t want big cars, and they’re stuck having, you know--
PARSSINEN: Having made, yes, [laughter], having made many, many big cars that nobody now wants to buy.
BAUER: Right, and so that therefore they turn to the government and say, heavens, help us, give us subsidies, give us some money to help us retool for environmentally-friendly cars, because it’s not our fault that the voters changed their minds. And the voters, of course, are the same people that are consumers, that buy the cars. So that one of the big questions is, do we ever think bigger than being a consumer? And being a consumer of science, a consumer of, of oil, you know, is there such a thing as thinking of ourselves as something bigger? The idea that as you deal with the science of pollution, how would you want to expand the thinking of our, you know, WomenMatter audience, how do we think about Katrina? How do we think about ourselves in a, in a more scientific way?
PARSSINEN: I think that a lot of what seems important, both productive citizenship and voter activity, is really the hands-on experience that you get, and it may not be necessarily as part of your school education apropos what I said earlier. But in fact, it may be something that is at the community level, or at your science center. We have, for example, a program for high school students in Philadelphia that’s now 13 years old that has focused very heavily on environmental exploration, research in a lake in Fairmount Park in Philadelphia. These kinds of programs exist all over the country, and they are very important indicators for young people as they grow about their ability not only to learn and to be in contact with the environment – even those who are in urban areas – but to do something about it. Because the other half of this program that I was describing is not just finding out about the environment, it’s public engagement. And I think we need to seed that very early with kids, so that they feel not just that they are stewards of the environment, but that they are also public spokespersons for its care and conservation. This habit of mine, this way of being actively involved in environmental issues, I think, is like everything else that gets seeded early, is likely to be retained in ways that express themselves throughout one’s life. Are there other community ways in which people not just at the K-12 level but throughout their lives as adults can be involved in environmental issues? Some of these are, are fairly obvious, recycling and power use and so forth. But on a, a larger, philosophical plane, I don’t know whether we get beyond the immediate benefits to our locale, and again I’m, I’m feeling the pressure of what I think are all these three spokespersons really looking at the ways in which environmental issues touch the individual and not really move beyond that to larger scope. So in that regard, Nancy, I have to say, a program like WomenMatter and the, both the impetus and the challenge to keep thinking in these larger terms, is hugely important.
BAUER: And it’s really interesting, you know, we have the environment is one of the nine issues we track every week. But we also track security. And of course it is oil that ties us, it’s the oil and the car and the price of the gas and what happened at the oil refineries off the coast of, you know, of, of New Orleans, that is, ties us to the Middle East, where there is trouble. And unless we stop buying their oil, we are not going to be able to manage the security of this country to a level that we would like to manage it. So that we are tied to that, and it’s a, so, and is that enlightened self interest? I guess Mr. Madison will be please wherever he is to hear this, but how to keep thinking individually and personally, and then thinking bigger. And now we have the other thing. There’s the challenge of other countries that want our standard of living. We live better than any other nation on the, on the planet. And now we have China, the largest nation on the planet, and they are rapidly, in the last, you know, 30 years, have managed to jump almost 150 years of industrialization, and they want cars. And we want to say to them, please don’t pollute the way we pollute, because if you do that, it’s going to cause terrible trouble for all of us. Please don’t use oil and gas the way we do, or you’re going to drive up the price. And the Chinese are going around the world making friendly deals with countries that we might not like particularly well who happen to have oil. So that these, we’re going to push ourselves, maybe, for selfish, or self-interest reasons, to other sources of energy – sun and wind and water and biofuels, things that are, you know, made out of plants and whatever. And as we do this I hope that we, WomenMatter hopes that we can realize that we have got to have the imagination to think about people we’ve never met and places we may never visit, but the fact that we’re tied to them, both personally and in our communities, and then what are the right uses of government. Because that’s where we do the negotiating. It is extremely interesting to see that science can be the most specific thing, but it can also be the most philosophical, that environmental science, WomenMatter hopes, will make us realize that we are tied to each other, because we breathe the air and use the water and eat the food and pollute the world altogether on this little, funny globe that is floating around, that we can see from, you know, outer space. Dr. Parssinen, thanks a lot for bringing this to us, and the idea that we can get to science both as a study, we can do science as a philosophy of understanding, and we can use science to make sure that our representatives in Congress in this democracy we live in, this representative government we live in, that they use real science as we learn to know it, to make some of the decisions on our behalf. Because we’re going to send them the money and we’re going to tell them how we want them to vote.
PARSSINEN: Thank you Nancy, it’s been a pleasure.
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BAUER: The responsibility to tell our representatives to think bigger and long term is the responsibility of every one of us. And WomenMatter makes it easy for us to do it, we can do it at night or in the morning or any other time, and we can do it right from the website. There is the need for women to come together. We’ve got to debate each other, use the blog on WomenMatter about the philosophy of the future. Are we just consumers? Are we just users of cars, and therefore we’re happy to have our Congresspeople treat us as if it were consumer marketing, they’re telling us vote for me and I’ll make you more money, vote for me and I’ll get you a job. Or shall we all vote together and think about being the proper user of science and history? And can we get our schools to put science and history together instead of just teaching them separately and saying, learn all the facts now and later on we’ll let you think critically about solving the problems? Are we able to think ahead? Are we able to demand that government thinks ahead too? So as we look at the four questions that we always look at in Facts and Trade-Offs, WomenMatter’s talk radio show, how much can each woman handle on her own? Or locally in the community? The environment is about health and education, not just about oil and about pollution. These are not just separate issues and not just personal issues, because when people are sick, the sickness goes in the air. If people don’t know enough and read enough, and read well enough and are educated enough, they cannot understand the science and the history in order to inform the government. So we women of WomenMatter, we need to get healthier and smarter together to make a greater difference. And we need to make that difference in time. Time is shorter than we wish. How much easier is life if we can share the risk of disaster by using science and history to avoid trouble, and not just clean up after it occurs.
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ANNOUNCER: Follow on the WomenMatter website the way our representatives set standards and spend our tax dollars. Follow the science as well as the politics. Make sure that your representatives know how smart we are. Then we can afford to come together and plan wisely for our global future. For WomenMatter, Facts and Trade-Offs, this is Victoria Jones.
