Sadly, I believe that America is being governed by the “politics of hysteria.” You see it at every level: local, state and federal. Beginning at the local level is the issue of contamination at the site of Malibu Middle School. Judging from the letters and the web comments, you could suspect that there is some large conspiracy going on that systematically and intentionally harms our children. The co-conspirators apparently include members of the Board of Education, some schoolteachers and their union, some parents who served on school-related committees, certain city council candidates and a legion of public agencies that saw the problem and pretended it didn’t exist. Lastly, of course, The Malibu Times knew all about it and participated in the cover-up by not investigating and calling out the miscreants.
Part of the problem is that there are a number of questions of scientific evidence involved in this issue. Having spent many years as a litigator in a courtroom, proving up scientific facts, it is not what you see on television. Evidence is often a lot more muddy and equivocal than we’d like to believe. Even things that were accepted as gospel only a few years ago—fingerprint evidence, comparison of hair follicles and bite marks—are seriously under question. As I see it, the school problem boils down to a few basic questions:
– Is there contamination at the site?
– If there is, then is it at a level to present a danger to children? If so, then you get all of the kids out immediately.
– If there is no immediate danger, is there a long-term danger?
– If there is a problem, how do you remediate it?
– To what standard do you remediate?
– What do you do with the kids during the remediation process?
To answer many of these questions requires a significant amount of scientific expertise, so that means it’s helpful if the people involved can agree on some selected experts who are credible with all of the stakeholders. If they can’t agree, then every side has its own experts, many of which have their own agendas. In litigation, you frequently end up with two different interpretations of the facts, and the science and jury ultimately decide.
In this case, the school district is ultimately going to decide, with a number of other agencies looking over its shoulder. Currently, the EPA, the state Toxic Substances Agency and a slew of privately retained experts are pouring over the data. I can absolutely assure you that there will be honest differences among them. That doesn’t mean that one group is lying, merely that they’re attaching different weights to what they see. The one thing that you can be absolutely certain about is that no public agency is going to let children stay in a situation that would be immediately dangerous to their health.
Finally, no matter what they do, no matter what they all agree on, there will always be some people who will never believe the conclusions. Nothing less than a full-blooded conspiracy is going to satisfy them, and whatever you tell them the response is going to be “yes, but … ,” so don’t waste your energy. Some people just love conspiracies and cover-ups and will never let go of the idea. The bestseller lists are filled with apocalyptic books that those people rush out and buy.
Clearly, this attitude is not just local. Think of all the scientific questions tied up in conspiracies. For example, who is stealing our water? When you say drought, that’s simply not good enough. It’s governmental bureaucracy, it’s the EPA, it’s the environmentalists, it’s the Endangered Species Act, etc., etc.
How about global climate change? Is the polar ice cap melting? Are sea levels rising? Will beaches and beachfront homes soon be disappearing into the surf and Malibu along with it, or is it all just a myth? Is evolution a liberal trick? Could we really be descended from apes? Was Bishop Usher correct that the world is only 5,000 years old? Should we spend a lot of money to pull out non-native grasses and exotics in Malibu, or are we just chasing a pipe dream?
As you can all see, there are many things we don’t know, and a lot of what we do know is laden with misinformation or people pushing a personal or commercial agenda. So my advice is step back, take a deep breath; I can assure you that the world is not going to end next week, unless we humans are dumb enough to blow it all up.
Lastly, I don’t want to make light of parents who are justifiably concerned about their children. They have every right to ask. In fact, they have a duty to demand that the district and others get the best scientific experts available, and then have their own experts vet the information and present it to peer review and public scrutiny, and do it as quickly as the science will permit.