Executive Director’s Note: The Song and the Science

By Carolyn Raffensperger

My oldest memories are of my mother playing the piano, the grand piano that I now have. She seemed to play most often at sunrise and dusk because the rhythm of the household gave her scant time to practice otherwise. I used to sit in the semi-dark as she played Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 8 in C Minor, Op. 13, "Pathétique." Whatever else had happened or would happen, her music set my mind and soul aright. Her music was worthy of the tree that became the piano.

This Networker weaves together stories of music and science. So much of our work at SEHN is to help the powers that be make wise environmental decisions.  Science is an essential ingredient: if we equip communities, policy makers and media with data they will wield that science and stop doing stupid things like provide more subsidies to the fossil fuel industry or give permits to new fracking wells or CO2 pipelines, or turn a blind eye to a carcinogenic pesticide that dominates the market.

If science was sufficient to make environmentally-sane decisions we would not be facing the climate catastrophe that is looming over us, nor would the cancer rates be on the rise in states like Iowa, and the fossil fuel industry would be put out of our misery. 

Part of the problem is that we are frequently making decisions characterized by uncertainty, which is the crux of the precautionary principle. The principle directs us to take precautionary action in the face of uncertainty to prevent harm. My SEHN colleague Dr. Ted Schettler pointed out that we are usually grappling with risk assessments vs facts. Risk assessments are typically done to decide what the risk is of some decision and then whether that risk is acceptable. This means that we are arguing about probabilities. What is the probability this CO2 pipeline will rupture and asphyxiate people? What is the probability that this pesticide will cause more cancer than is acceptable? What is the probability that this piece of legislation is actually going to make a difference?

We often get hard facts about actual harm because of a failure of some technology that is already on the market. It is nearly impossible to tear down existing infrastructure like a Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) facility or move a tar sands pipeline away from the Great Lakes. All that infrastructure has been built based on the risk assessments that portrayed the probability of unacceptable harm as low. Entire economies (think Texas, North Dakota or Saudi Arabia) are based on fossil fuels. 

What this means is that the decisions are going to get harder. Our SEHN colleague, Peter Montague points out that even if we ceased burning fossil fuels immediately, there are enough greenhouse gases in the environment to wreak even more havoc on the Earth. He argues that we will need direct air capture (DAC) of CO2 even though we know that it doesn’t work (yet), is wildly expensive and uses obscene amounts of energy. 

In the face of these impossible decisions, we recognize that, while science may be essential, it isn’t enough. Science is one tool in the toolbox. Others include direct action and, of course the arts. 

Over the past eight years, several of us at SEHN have stood with those on the frontlines that were taking direct action against the fossil fuel industry. In 2016 I spent a great deal of time at Standing Rock with the Indigenous communities in a massive protest to stop the Dakota Access pipeline. We put our bodies on the line to protect the Missouri River from that hideous pipeline. That pipeline was built, the oil is flowing but the permit the Army Corps of Engineers gave Dakota Access was deemed illegal. Even though the pipeline has been operating with an invalid permit, the court refuses to stop the oil from flowing across the Missouri River.

This summer, our senior scientist Sandra Steingraber was arrested numerous times trying to get Citibank to stop funding the fossil fuel industry because she recognized that science alone wasn’t cutting through the noise that money generates.

During one of those arrests, she was serving as a witness to a cello performance that was intended to move decision-makers to use their emotional intelligence to make the decision to stop funding the kamikaze fossil fuel industry. 

This work is difficult. We don’t often win. We have only a short time left to change course. It can be discouraging.

My friend Wendell Berry has a marvelous poem that describes one antidote to despair. 

“When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things….For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

The Earth makes her own music. Listen to the song of the wood drake mentioned in Berry’s poem. And the fact that a tree can become a piano or a cello? Pure grace.

Read on for several stories about how we at SEHN employ the tools in the social change tool box, particularly, science, music and direct action.  We aim to protect the grace of the world and leave the wonders of music and science, of a healthy Earth, to future generations.