The first days of Donald Trump’s presidency have been chock full of news about gag orders on federal agencies, especially those that deal with the environment—where the science that defines the agencies’ missions and guides their activities contradicts GOP climate denial. That a National Park employee’s recent tweet about the facts of climate change is being cheered as a brave act of rebellion shows how far down the toilet we’ve gone in just a week.
Since an educated citizenry is a threat to GOP lies, Trump’s team clearly wants to keep the masses stupid by messing with education, to the point nominee Betsy DeVos would dismantle the entire public sphere if she could. Happily she can't, but she sure can make life miserable for public schools and their advocates. I also have little doubt Trump will try to dismantle other agencies in the broader educational sector—among them, research grants at NSF and EPA, museum and library funding from NEA and NEH, and support for public radio and what we used to call “educational TV.”
Granted, NPR and PBS don’t rely nearly as much on federal funding as they used to, which is why those pledge drives get longer and longer. Still, most PBS stations receive about 10-20 percent of their operating budget from the feds, which provides an important financial footing to build on—and, at least in theory, it keeps the stations public, not beholden to advertisers or ratings.
Given the shushing of agencies and scientists in just the last few days, will the American Experience program tonight about Rachel Carson even be allowed to air in the near future? A Pennsylvania native who developed her love of clean air and water while growing up near polluted Pittsburgh, Rachel Carson was one of the federal employees Trump would silence: a staffer at the US Bureau of Fisheries who researched and produced brochures, magazine articles, radio shows and other documents about the health of America’s waters and marine life. It was her job to get the news to the public.
Carson would go on to write beautiful books about life in the oceans, becoming a bestselling, well-known author. Then, of course, came 1962, when Silent Spring was published—one of those “books that changed the world.” This brave little woman, reeling from the cancer that would take her life in less than two years, was viciously attacked by the chemical and agricultural industries, along with their political ass-kissers, for revealing the truth about the nasty shit that companies put in the air, ground and water, with government approval.
Today, more than 50 years after her landmark book, there remains a cottage industry of libertarian swill-mongers who manage websites and print books aimed at discrediting Carson’s research (DDT was actually a good thing!), as well as her personally with ugly innuendo (she was a lesbian, a hysterical woman, a communist).
President Jimmy Carter posthumously awarded Carson the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980, and Presidents Clinton and Obama have also honored her. I don’t see many awards coming from the current White House occupant. In fact, the well-funded machine that was hellbent on ending Rachel Carson’s research and halting its dissemination to the public is oiled and ready—with tiny hands at the controls.