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This is a personal story because I know the people involved. But it is also a bigger story – a national story – because it is happening all over America.

A couple I know is moving to Britain soon. These are wonderful people who’ve added a tremendous amount to our community here. He’s a PhD Assistant Professor at a major local university and he’s also a brilliant up-and-coming young scientist who is rapidly becoming a ‘name’ in the field he’s decided to work in. He’s been in the pre-tenure publish or perish portion of his academic career now for sometime working hard and waiting to advance.

Well, a university in Britain offered him one and a half times his current salary and an immediate advance into a fully tenured position as an associate professor. His new university has decided, with the blessing of the British government, to become a major force in global environmental science and has lavished 8 million pounds on his new department. The physical research facilities he will have at his control are several times larger than what he was allocated here.

I know these folks hate to leave what they’ve built here in the fifteen years they’ve lived in our community but how could they resist an offer like that?

The National Science Foundation’s budget is being lowered year by year and all over America, scientists of all flavors are rethinking their options. Other countries haven’t been infected with our country’s current disrespect for science. They are still well aware that science IS the power card to the future while we are slipping deeper and deeper into fundamentalist conservative right-wing dreams and delusions that science is an impediment to the advance of capitalistic profit and fundamentalist religious fervor.

Do I sound bitter about all of this? I am. This country was one of the finest experiments ever manifested in human history and we are in big danger now of pissing it all away.

Years ago I read a book, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey, by a Nobel prize winner in literature, V.S. Naipaul, in which the author traveled the full arc of the Muslim world from Morocco to Indonesia. Many things stuck with me from the book but one that really amazed me was his description of how the authors of scientific papers in Pakistan would put titles on their papers like “The Electron Potentials of Scandium Ferrous alloys as revealed by the Grace of Allah“. I thought to myself at the time that these people have fatally mixed up religion and science.

Well, if things keep on as they are in this country, I fully expect to see papers like “Advances in GSM Cell Phone Technology as approved by the Southern Baptist Convention of 2010” soon. And it is deeply scary that there is a significant portion of our population that thinks changes like this are appropriate in this day and age.

Soon, those who think that science is just an inconvenience in their path as they try to make America a fundamentalist Christian nation and those who think that our societies only exist as sandboxes in which corporations are free to corner all of the nation and world’s wealth for the few – soon these folks will have marginalized this great country and another great event in human history will have had its day in the sun and be moved into the historical also-ran category.

Our scientists are leaving for Singapore, Britain, France and a host of other places and we are the poorer everyday for this brain-drain.

I will miss my friends soon. And all of us, in not too many years, will miss what this great country once was if we continue to embrace mediocrity.

/rant off

A secret draft of regulations (pdf) that would fundamentally rewrite the Endangered Species Act was leaked to two environmental organizations, which provided them to the press Tuesday. An article in Salon quotes Earthjustice attorney Jan Hasselman saying, “The proposed changes fundamentally gut the intent of the Endangered Species Act.”

The changes are fiercely technical and complicated, but make future listings extremely difficult, redefine key concepts to the detriment of protected species, virtually hand over administration of the act to hostile states, and severely restrict habitat protections.

Many of the changes — lifted from unsuccessful legislative proposals from then-Senator (now Interior Secretary) Dirk Kempthorne and the recently defeated congressman Richard Pombo — are reactions to policies and practices established as a result of litigation filed by environmental organizations including Earthjustice.

“After the failure of these legislative proposals in the last Congress, the Bush administration has opted to gut the Endangered Species Act through the only avenue left open: administrative regulations,” said Hasselman. “This end-run around the will of Congress and the American people will not succeed.”

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– This story comes from The Washington Post.

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It is the policy of The Washington Post not to publish anonymous pieces. In this case, an exception has been made because the author — who would have preferred to be named — is legally prohibited from disclosing his or her identity in connection with receipt of a national security letter. The Post confirmed the legitimacy of this submission by verifying it with the author’s attorney and by reviewing publicly available court documents.

The Justice Department’s inspector general revealed on March 9 that the FBI has been systematically abusing one of the most controversial provisions of the USA Patriot Act: the expanded power to issue “national security letters.” It no doubt surprised most Americans to learn that between 2003 and 2005 the FBI issued more than 140,000 specific demands under this provision — demands issued without a showing of probable cause or prior judicial approval — to obtain potentially sensitive information about U.S. citizens and residents. It did not, however, come as any surprise to me.

Three years ago, I received a national security letter (NSL) in my capacity as the president of a small Internet access and consulting business. The letter ordered me to provide sensitive information about one of my clients. There was no indication that a judge had reviewed or approved the letter, and it turned out that none had. The letter came with a gag provision that prohibited me from telling anyone, including my client, that the FBI was seeking this information. Based on the context of the demand — a context that the FBI still won’t let me discuss publicly — I suspected that the FBI was abusing its power and that the letter sought information to which the FBI was not entitled.

Rather than turn over the information, I contacted lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union, and in April 2004 I filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the NSL power. I never released the information the FBI sought, and last November the FBI decided that it no longer needs the information anyway. But the FBI still hasn’t abandoned the gag order that prevents me from disclosing my experience and concerns with the law or the national security letter that was served on my company. In fact, the government will return to court in the next few weeks to defend the gag orders that are imposed on recipients of these letters.

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– Read the second paragraph in the article, below, and think about it for a bit. I high-lighted the part that I think is key. And it is just this kind of talk-talk-talk while Rome burns that is so unbelievable. Some time, in not too many years, everyone will be up in arms to know why nothing was done and we’ll look back on stuff like this as absolute crimes – that we gave away this Eden through dithering.
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The Amazon is not, and never has been, a pristine wilderness that could be fenced and preserved as an intact ecosystem. Increasingly, it is proving to be a resource-rich region of a continent that desperately needs to grow. Brazil, which contains most of the Amazon basin, is under particular pressure as it tries to reconcile its great disparities between rich and poor. And there’s a voracious market for the goods, whether it’s the Chinese buying steel or the Europeans buying soybeans. At the same time, the vast basin of freshwater and forest is a global feature of such magnitude that its destruction will only help tip a fragile global climate further over the edge. The hard question facing the various governments and organizations with a stake in the outcome is whether some development can prevent a lot of deforestation.

Every year a chunk of forest equivalent to an average-size U.S. state disappears from the Amazon. In the year ending August 2004, 16,236 square miles, about twice the size of Massachusetts, were deforested. According to Conservation International, that represents between 1.1 billion and 1.4 billion trees of 4 inches or more in diameter. This deforestation took place during a time of heightened environmentalism in Brazil, during a robust return to democracy when a comprehensive body of laws protecting the Amazon had been enacted and supported by broad enforcement powers-though often, not the enforcement itself. The reaction of the Brazilian government and nongovernmental organizations to these annual figures can be summarized by the Yogi Berra quote, “It’s like déjà vu all over again.” The so-called experts annually express “shock and surprise” at the figures. The shock subsides, then reappears the following spring. Fingers point at the culprit du jour-the cattle ranchers in some years, or the soy farmers, or the migration of small families clearing homesteads. Loggers, miners, and ranchers get denounced regularly. And in response, the government usually sets aside another national park equivalent in size to a small American state. A federal department’s budget gets increased by more than $100 million, at least publicly. A government official sometimes resigns. Nongovernmental organizations use the statistics in their annual pleas for contributions. The New York Times writes an editorial reminding Brazil that “the rain forest is not a commodity to be exploited for private gain.” The Economist chides Brazil for its institutions, which are “weak, poorly coordinated, and prone to corruption and influence-peddling.” But from one year to another, the process repeats itself and the Amazon shrinks. When we first traveled here in 1980, about 3 percent had been deforested. Today, more than 20 percent is gone.

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