As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, an online hub which explains science news and implications to laypeople is in the works. And not a moment too soon. For the schist is up to here, folks.

While more of the same continues in Washington, the general public is less and less informed of what’s going on, parrots the media soundbites of the day (“I hear the oil has vanished, Maitri. Herp derp.”) and is unconcerned about things like independent and unfettered scientific analyses performed for their own benefit.

* DOJ gags scientists studying BP disaster

… ecosystem biologist Linda Hooper-Bui describes how Obama administration and BP lawyers are making independent scientific analysis of the Gulf region an impossibility. Hooper-Bui has found that only scientists who are part of the Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA) process to determine BP“s civil liability get full access to contaminated sites and research data. Pete Tuttle, USFWS environmental contaminant specialist and Department of Interior NRDA coordinator, admitted to The Scientist that researchers wishing to formally participate in NRDA must sign a contract that includes a confidentiality agreement that prevents signees from releasing information from studies and findings until authorized by the Department of Justice at some later and unspecified date.

* University of Southern Florida says government tried to squelch their oil plume findings

“I got lambasted by the Coast Guard and NOAA when we said there was undersea oil,” USF marine sciences dean William Hogarth said. Some officials even told him to retract USF’s public announcement, he said, comparing it to being “beat up” by federal officials.

The USF scientists weren’t alone. Vernon Asper, an oceanographer at the University of Southern Mississippi, was part of a similar effort that met with a similar reaction.

***

In related energy news, I am happy to report that my house did not explode “into a fireball so massive observers saw it 20 miles away” thanks to my early detection of a leak in the fixtures surrounding the external gas meter and an extremely faint smell of gas in the basement. This morning’s conversation with the gas company’s emergency worker went like this:

Gas man: The meter doesn’t detect a leak. Not even a slight bump. You sure you’re not smelling one of the local gas wells?
Me: I smell it right now. Right *pointing at leak* here.
Gas man: Oh whoa, there it goes! You’re right!
Me: *blink*
Gas man: They say women have better noses.

The PepsiGate-induced exodus from Science Blogs and asinine California serpentinite-asbestos rumble, while waxing social, political and scientific on the BP oil spill for the last 110 odd days, have me convinced that the public outreach component of the science community, and geoscience in particular, needs a lot more work. In planning and design of cities, buildings, dams, levees, energy structures, highways, drilling for water and hydrocarbons, groundwater issues and so much more, geoscientists can play very important roles in shaping infrastructure. And these folks are the ones ignored first and furiously.

So what can we as geoscience bloggers do as a part of the solution? I’m not the only one with this concern. July“s Accretionary Wedge was a call for posts on the role of the geoblogosphere and, more recently, the Highly Allochthonous post on the evolving science blogging ecosystem elicited some very honest comments and ideas on the work we have cut out for us. As I said in the comments of the latter, the problem of the geoscience community is two-fold: Not Enough Geoscientists and Geoscientists Talking Amongst Ourselves, and suggested a policy blog that talks geoscience as a way for our offerings to gain traction in the public mind.

Ron Schott, (former fellow geology graduate student and housemate) and Father of the Geoblogs, organized the first Current Issues in the Geoblogosphere online discussion via Skype this past Saturday; several bloggers and I participated. We talked about the above issues in much detail (see Ron’s post for the great notes taken by Katharine). You can also listen to the audio here.

Many of you have read or quoted from Christopher Hitchens’s profound essay on his cancer. I point out this little bit, because it speaks in a few sentences what I distrust about religion or, more specifically, constant religiousness. Things don’t have to happen for a reason. Or they do, but it’s not the reason you are thinking of. To view it otherwise is creating a needless crutch. That’s no way to live. Especially as you fight death.

I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read if not indeed write the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger? But I understand this sort of non-thinking for what it is: sentimentality and self-pity. Of course my book hit the best-seller list on the day that I received the grimmest of news bulletins, and for that matter the last flight I took as a healthy-feeling person (to a fine, big audience at the Chicago Book Fair) was the one that made me a million-miler on United Airlines, with a lifetime of free upgrades to look forward to. But irony is my business and I just can’t see any ironies here: would it be less poignant to get cancer on the day that my memoirs were remaindered as a box-office turkey, or that I was bounced from a coach-class flight and left on the tarmac? To the dumb question Why me? the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?

Ed Darrell points out at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub an interesting 2008 exchange between Speaking of Faith’s Krista Tippett and Cal DeWitt, professor at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies of the University of Wisconsin at Madison on the history of environmentalism. According to DeWitt, it would seem that human beings stopped viewing themselves as part of their environment, in order first to conquer it and then to protect it. I’d love to learn more about this philosophical fork in the road given that it involves more than us seeing ourselves as separate from the creator; this is divorcing the human self from the rest of creation.

Cal DeWitt tells an interesting story about the origins of the word environment. It emerged, he says, from a term coined by Geoffrey Chaucer: environing. This became a linguistic way of distinguishing our human selves from the world around us. Previously, DeWitt avers, human beings had thought of themselves as part and parcel of the same creation. At best, this implied a certain responsibility and relationship that has been absent in the modern Western approach to the world.

Western Christianity itself has, ironically, been a potent historical driver of enmity between humanity and nature. But after careful study, Cal DeWitt found the Bible to be an “ecological handbook.” And he has long put it into practice in this way, beginning with the marsh beneath his feet.

… DeWitt also points out that the stereotype of environmental activism as liberal and secular has never been accurate. Devout evangelicals have long been in positions of environmental leadership. And on this program last year, the chief representative in Washington D.C. of the National Association of Evangelicals, Richard Cizik, stunned many of our listeners with his passionate declaration that he is a “convert” to the science of climate change. As it turns out, Cal DeWitt was one of the organizers of the global gathering that exposed Cizik and others to the science of climate change. DeWitt describes an intriguing theory of his this hour, that evangelical and charismatic Christianity may be better equipped than other Christian traditions to change and galvanize and lead on an issue like this.