Wisconsin state agency hit with official Florida-like climate-change taboo
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8113
For Wisconsin, Earth Day’s arrival this year on 22 April followed weeks of headlines about politicians forbidding state employees from discussing or engaging climate issues, calling to mind comparable recent news from Florida. From the Guardian in the UK to the New York Times to the Wisconsin State Journal —and including the Miami Herald —reports echoed this opening of the Chicago Tribune‘s article :
A Wisconsin board has banned its employees from working on global warming issues on state time in what’s become a bitter feud between a Republican board member and Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson’s daughter.
The three-member Board of Commissioners of Public Lands voted 2-1 on Tuesday to institute the ban on its nine employees, with the lone Democrat on the board casting the dissenting vote.
Republican State Treasurer Matt Adamcyzk proposed the ban, saying he’s upset that the board’s executive secretary, Tia Nelson, worked on global warming issues on board time years ago. He said the topic has nothing to do with the board’s mission of generating investment dollars for public school libraries and providing loans for municipal and school projects.
Scientific American noted that the restriction prevents 10 board staff members from communicating about potential climate-change effects on 77 000 acres of state timberland, that the staffers now must check with the three elected commissioners before answering climate-related queries, and that “a reference on the board’s website to the effects of climbing temperatures on invasive forest species was recently deleted.”
A disapproving Chicago Tribune editorial asserted that climate change inevitably affects public lands. It quoted a 2014 National Climate Assessment concluded last year: “The habitat ranges of many iconic tree species such as paper birch, quaking aspen, balsam fir, and black spruce are projected to decline substantially across the northern Midwest as they shift northward, while species that are common farther south, including several oaks and pines, expand their ranges northward into the region.”
The Tribune‘s news report described Nelson’s late father, a former Wisconsin governor and US senator, as having been “known for his staunch conservationism and his efforts to found Earth Day.” Much has been made of perceived Earth Day resonances in this official-taboo incident.
An op-ed in the Kenosha News, printed elsewhere in Wisconsin as well, carried the headline “State officials trample Earth Day.” It began, “Earth Day turns 45 years old on Wednesday. Don’t expect our state government to say much about it.” It concluded, “This anti-science and anti-environmental campaign is a black mark on a movement that started in Wisconsin with the first Earth Day. Tia Nelson’s father must be rolling over in his grave.”
A full-page ad , paid for by billionaire Tom Steyer’s NextGen Climate organization, appeared in the Wisconsin State Journal. It began: “In 1970, Earth Day was founded by Wisconsin’s own Gaylord Nelson. In 2015, Wisconsin’s GOP leadership declared war on science by banning work on climate change.”
That ad shouted, “STOP WISCONSIN’S WAR ON SCIENCE.” Meanwhile a posting at Inside Climate News, a website that won a Pulitzer Prize two years ago, predicts that far from being embarrassed by the officially imposed taboos in Florida and Wisconsin, politicians and public officials will be “emboldened” in a way that could lead to a “bevy” of similar restrictions in other states.
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.