The Emperor Has No Clothes
Dear Friends,
If truth be told… the emperor has no clothes.
There have been many times over my environmental career when the work felt impossible because of the forces arrayed against the health of people and the Earth. When the odds seemed long and the losses mounted, I turned to the words of the writer, dissident, and former president of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel, who said,
Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good…
[Hope] is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.
What I learned this week is that Havel anchored his notion of hope in a sense of responsibility to tell the truth. The writer Daniel Henderson, talking about Havel’s Power of the Powerless, said that telling the truth is “moral hygiene.”
There are countless instances of controversies and unsettled questions, but sometimes, as in the wonderful fable “The Emperor's New Clothes,” the truth is clear and just needs telling and acting on. That is what we try to do at SEHN—ascertain the truth, acknowledge uncertainties, and bring that information to communities, organizations, elected officials, and individuals, helping to enable action. The goal? Public health, and the ecological integrity and stable climate on which it depends.
Science is, at its heart, a search for the truth, particularly the kind of science that drives public health and environmental concerns. This is where SEHN comes in.
At SEHN our task is to tell the scientific truths about public health as well as they are known. We do this through speaking at in-person forums and on online webinars; writing technical reports, research updates, op-eds, and lyrical essays; providing expertise in policy proceedings; hosting and aggregating information on websites, including carboncapture.facts.org.; and collaborating locally and internationally. Armed with facts about toxicities, emissions, exposures, and the laws we do have, we stand with communities experiencing harm or facing risks from chemical plants, pipelines and fracking, or the newest imprudent high-tech industrialization on their lakeshores or edges of town.
Our universities are enduring threats and funding cuts from the federal government, while this same administration is also slashing personnel and violating core missions of its own agencies that are charged with studying and implementing environmental and public health science. As these allies weather the storm, non-profits like SEHN need to redouble our efforts as a bastion of truth-seeking and action to protect our communities, land, water, and future generations.
We are living in a world where lies are repeated, amplified, and made into memes. The current president and his administration are blocking agencies from collecting greenhouse gas emissions data, withholding economic data that counters their worldview, and firing scientists who do the research on emerging infectious diseases. They are cancelling grants for essential research. Denial of greenhouse gas emissions? Claiming toxic chemicals don’t harm human health? That infectious disease isn’t preventable? An emperor’s flaunt of his nonexistent clothes.
A key task of government agencies and university scientists is finding the truth about public health threats and guiding actions that promote well-being. But those agencies and universities are beleaguered and muzzled by a federal administration that has a corporatized and politized agenda that is antithetical to public health.
At SEHN we rely on scientific data to understand the world around us. We sift through studies and aggregate the information into tools like the Compendium, which summarizes all the science on fracking and its vast infrastructure. This month we published a Compendium update with the most recent science on the risks and harms of fracking’s tailpipe: the gas stove that may be in your kitchen. This report has already made its way to building electrification specialists nationwide, policymakers, non-profits concerned with childhood asthma, and community organizations and individuals resisting new gas hookups (and the pipelines that feed them) while advocating for clean energy.
We pledge to you that we will do this work with all the tools at hand. We will help communities understand the science that tells the public health story that they have lived. We will aggregate data to understand the whole picture and help decision-makers create the wisest public health and environmental stories. We will harness the powerful tool of the precautionary principle—the duty to act even when knowledge gaps exist, if evidence leans toward the likelihood of harm and the availability of alternatives—in order to err on the side of protecting public and environmental health.
But we need your help. Will you give a gift to enable us to do this crucial work? Your donation will help us challenge the lies of the fossil fuel industry and those politicians who want to line their pockets with the grifted money of corporations.
We take our responsibility to seek and tell the truth seriously. Our lives and health depend on accurate assessments of everything from water quality to the presence of microplastics in placentas. We choose not only a moral hygiene, but also moral courage. This is what advocating for public health requires now.
And… while we will continue to tell the truth about the emperor, we won’t ever send you a picture of him to prove that he is, indeed naked.
Yours,
Carolyn Raffensperger