Under Republican Governor Scott Walker, Wisconsin has engaged in extraordinary and often embarrassing efforts to gag science for what appear to be blatantly political reasons. The state’s experience mirrors trends in other states and on the national level.
The state’s experience mirrors trends in other states and on the national level.
Perhaps the strangest—and sadly illustrative—example is the attempt to silence Tia Nelson, formerly the head of Wisconsin’s Board of Commissioners of Public Lands, which manages a land trust that provides aid to schools, libraries, and local communities.
Nelson is the daughter of Gaylord Nelson, the former governor and U.S. Senator who in 1970 founded Earth Day. She served as the board’s executive secretary for more than a decade, under both Democratic and Republican governors, describing herself in an interview as “painfully nonpartisan.”
“I knew, because I was serving in a Republican administration, that there was deep suspicion of me—environmentalist Gaylord’s daughter,” Nelson says. “So I was an extraordinarily careful person. I never engaged visibly in any partisan politics.”
But that didn’t keep the Republicans from putting a target on her back. In late 2014, a conservative Republican businessman, Matt Adamczyk, was elected state treasurer, one of three officials who oversee the public lands board. Even before taking office, Adamczyk asked that Nelson’s name be removed from the board’s letterhead and that it stop subscribing to The New York Times.
Adamczyk was aggrieved that Nelson had served as co-chair of a state task force on global warming convened in 2007 by then-Governor Jim Doyle, a Democrat, and had testified about the group’s work at a congressional hearing in Washington, D.C.
In March 2015, Adamczyk tried to have Nelson fired, accusing her of “time theft” for her work on this issue. Nelson was stunned, and wonders to this day what state employee would refuse a governor’s request to serve on a task force—one that was “pointedly balanced” with Republican lawmakers and utility industry representatives.
Though his effort to fire Nelson failed, Adamczyk in April 2015 got Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel, a fellow board commissioner, to join him in passing a rule to prevent staff “from engaging in global warming or climate change work while on [board] time.” At this meeting, Adamczyk declared, “I don’t want anyone in this agency to work on that topic again.” The board’s action, interpreted as a ban on even discussing these issues, drew widespread media attention. It was later amended to apply only to “policy advocacy” on these issues.
Walker, through a spokesman, defended the original order: “Governor Walker does not think it is unreasonable to enact policies requiring board staff to focus on board-related activities.” But in fact, climate change has a direct impact on the mostly forest lands held in trust by the state. As the board noted in its 2005-2007 biennial report, “Global climate change is no longer debatable as a threat to ecosystems.” No such language appears in its most recent report.
Nelson, who left the board in July 2015, remains appalled that “a state employee would be ordered not to speak about an issue that is based on scientific fact, that has an impact on every Wisconsinite. Whether you are a farmer or a forester, a municipal official doing public infrastructure planning, an insurance executive, a trout fisherman—you will be affected by climate change. That merits discussion. And when government prevents that discussion from happening, we are all in great danger.”
According to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR), it began with a simple request. A rightwing journalist in northern Wisconsin asked Walker’s DNR secretary, Cathy Stepp, about references to the causes of climate change on the agency’s website. Stepp, a former Republican state lawmaker and Trump supporter (she’s claimed she had no idea he dismissed climate change as a Chinese hoax), promised to look into it.
Two days later, on December 21, 2016, the DNR purged its website of language stating that global warming is caused by human activities, a position held by 97 percent of working climate scientists. It now claimed that “the reasons for this change at this particular time in the Earth’s long history are being debated.”
The DNR also quietly removed a link to a lengthy 2011 report on climate impacts that it had helped produce in cooperation with the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, a University of Wisconsin education and research center named after Tia’s father, Gaylord.
Suppressing information is just one prong of Wisconsin’s war on science. In May 2015, the state legislature approved Walker’s call to slash half of the DNR’s senior science positions. And policy control has effectively been shifted from scientists to politicians on a range of issues: wetlands preservation, wolf population management, the spread of chronic wasting disease in deer, and the regulation of high-capacity wells that deplete groundwater and lower lake levels.
“They’re neutering the department in terms of what it should be, as a science-based agency,” says Scott Hassett, who served as Wisconsin’s DNR secretary from 2003 to 2007, in an interview with The Progressive. He blasts the agency for no longer staking out policy positions, instead leaving critical decisions up to “legislators who are hearing from bar-stool biologists.” Back when he was in charge, “I felt that was our role, to bring facts to bear.”
Hassett, who hears often from current and former DNR employees, notes that “morale is bad” and many people have left; those who remain are “afraid to talk about anything.” He faults Stepp for her professed focus on job creation, saying “that’s for the Department of Commerce.”
The DNR’s removal of accurate climate-change language from its website drew a huge public backlash, including “hundreds of phone calls and emails voicing shock, outrage, and ridicule,” reported the Wisconsin State Journal, based on a records request. The agency also heard from staffers wondering how to respond to questions from the public, prompting this Alice in Wonderland-esque reply from DNR spokesman Jim Dick: “The wording does not say the cause and effects of a changing climate are debatable. It says they are being debated.”
A script provided to workers says the new wording intends to convey debate among “the general public,” not the scientific community. Hassett is aghast, saying the DNR “should put out what it knows and link to reputable science on the subject,” not “back off because parts of the public are debating this.”
What’s happening at the DNR is part of a “whole national phenomenon,” Hassett says.
In Florida, a state employee was reprimanded in 2015 for mentioning climate change at a conference, in violation of an unofficial state rule against the use of this term. Within minutes of Trump’s January 20 Inauguration, all references to climate change were scrubbed from the White House’s website—except for his pledge to undo President Obama’s climate initiatives.
And while a call to strip climate change info from the Environmental Protection Agency’s website was rescinded, the agency has cracked down on communications. The EPA’s Climate Change Newsroom stopped posting new press releases as soon at Trump took office. In late April, the page was replaced with this message: “We are currently updating our website to reflect EPA’s priorities under the leadership of President Trump and Administrator Pruitt.”
“The constraints on speech about climate change have been put on steroids at the federal level,” says Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a national advocacy group in the Washington, D.C., area. Due to federal court rulings, he says, “government employees have fewer free-speech rights than inmates in penitentiaries.” Those who speak out against Trump’s environmental agenda, even on their own time, he’s warned, “may be targeted for discipline or removal.”
But some federal employees are embracing alternative means of communication. Dozens of agency-specific Twitter accounts with prefixes like “Alt” or “Rogue” have sprung up, most run by anonymous agency employees. For instance, the account altEPA provides a forum for opposing Trump’s anti-environmental agenda. As of the end of April, it had about 400,000 followers.
PEER advocacy director Kirsten Stade says most of these workers are afraid, believing “they could be fired in a heartbeat.”
They could also keep resisting, and insist that policy decisions be based on science. Tia Nelson, after quitting Wisconsin’s public lands board, became executive director of the Madison-based Outrider Foundation, which works to increase “public understanding about global existential risks that threaten the health and safety of humankind,” including climate change.
There is rich irony to be mined here. Despite being the daughter of a famous environmentalist and having worked for seventeen years with the Nature Conservancy in Washington, D.C., Nelson had for years largely steered clear of involvement in climate change, except for her service on the former governor’s task force. That she came under attack anyway, she says, is what spurred her “to return to the world of climate change advocacy.”
It is a world, unlike the political realm, in which facts matter. Nelson calls protection of the environment “one of government’s fundamental roles. To me, it’s as fundamental as a police force or defense force or public infrastructure for roads and sewers. It’s government’s job to protect the environment in a way in which we can prosper and be healthy. And government can’t do that job without sound and robust scientific information.”