Not surprisingly, all the speakers agreed that a shut-down of the Persian Gulf would be catastrophic and must be prevented at all costs. That is, all the speakers except one smiling Venezuelan named Alirio Parra, who was then oil minister.  The bottom line was: Don’t worry. Venezuela has more oil in the eastern Orinoco than all the Middle East. And, he strongly implied, your petroleum geologists should be more honest with you.

I remember the shouts of outrage from the assembled policy wonks, one of whom yelled that there was “a journalist here” in the same tone that a Victorian preacher might caution:  “ladies present.”

The friendly oil guys at my table tried to steer me right. Everyone knows that Venezuelan heavy oil is not actually oil.   Nor is Canadian tar sands juice really oil, either. After all, everyone knows that the Middle East had two thirds of all the world’s oil.

As I was leaving, a USGS scientist named Bernardo Grossling took me aside.  It’s all in how you define an oil reserve, he told me confidentially.  If you only count “proven” reserves, then the oil industry is right. Two thirds of proven reserves are in the Middle East.

On the other hand, if you want to just consider oil in the ground,  the Venezuelans were right. There’s far more in Canada and Venezuela than in the Middle East.

It all hinges on who decides what is actually listed as a proven reserve.  If the oil industry is allowed to decide what is a “fact,” then that is what we will base our policies on.

In retrospect, it’s an example of one of the more painful lessons of  history:  that money and politics and industry influence can seriously distort scientific information.

Ask any old timer. We all remember the gas lines, the “Oil Crisis,” and the Middle Eastern wars.  Those wars were necessary, we were told, because the Middle East had two-thirds of the world’s oil.  Not just two thirds of one special category of oil created by the oil industry. Oh, no. ALL the world’s oil. Every bit of it that was known.  Every media outlet in the world swallowed that one hook, line and sinker.  Which is why the US just HAD to go to war in the Middle East, to protect the lifeblood of the world’s commerce.

So how do we now account for the recent sudden abundance of oil?   The Post says  the “center of gravity” for  world oil resources has shifted, The Guardian says we were just  wrong on peak oil and that the “facts have changed.”

But who decides what is a “fact?”

If the facts have changed, what has not changed is the oil industry  itself.

Yes, the good old boys of Standard Oil that journalist Ida Tarbell exposed in 1904.  Our friends behind the Teapot Dome oil scandal of 1924. Those nice guys  who who fueled up Nazi submarines with their oil tankers on the high seas in 1940-41. You know, the fellows who gave  leaded gasoline technology to the Nazis and blocked synthetic rubber production in the US, hoping, apparently, to end up on the winning side of World War II.  Our grinning friends who tried to convince us that farm fuels were bad for your engine and bad for the economy in the 1970s, and that we should leave all that complicated policy stuff to them and not worry our pretty little heads about it.

Yeah — those guys. Now they’re telling us  that the market has only suddenly discovered Canadian and Venezuelan oil.

The  truth is that the choice was not between a ghastly war and severe oil shortages. The choice was between a ghastly war and slightly more expensive gasoline. It cost a dollar less to commute every day. Was the war worth it?  The depths of moral depravity encompassed in this question are difficult to fathom, but they go a long, long way down.

“I was misinformed,” Humphrey Bogart famously says in Casablanca, and everyone laughs.  We were misinformed by the world oil industry and the US Energy Information Administration and other governmental agencies.

It wasn’t very funny to the US Geological Survey.  Scientists there had another set of “facts” on the ground.

The two charts (above) are a good place to begin.   The first was created by BP in 2002, and the big green bar on the right hand side represents  Middle Eastern oil reserves. Obviously, it dwarfs the rest of the world.

The second chart has data from the USGS  World Petroleum Assessment and Analysis of Nov. 28, 2000 that contrasts fairly sharply with the oil industry’s perspective.

The problem was not simply that BP and the rest of the oil industry  slanted the data towards the Middle East.

The problem is that this was  the ONLY data available outside of a few very specialized circles.  The BP annual world oil assessment, and similar reports from Shell and Exxon and the federal Energy Information Administration, never referred to the USGS. They never let on that there was any question about world oil reserves.  They all said that the Middle East had two thirds of the world’s oil. There was no other point of view available.

Of course the USGS could have done something about it.  Back in 2005 I asked a high level USGS official why the agency did not inform the media, and he said:

          “The USGS is not a political agency.”

The USGS official didn’t get that question very often because, in our naivete, the journalists thought that the Middle East had two thirds of ALL of the world’s oil.  The Department of Energy and the oil industries all said so.  From Mother Jones to the New York Times to Fox News, from the 1970s to just last year,  everyone  writing news or dealing with public policy seemed to believe that the world’s supply of future oil  would necessarily gravitate around the Middle East — at least, until oil peaked. Then there would hardly be any left at all.

So our entire energy policy from the 2oth century through to about 2012 was based on one simple technological misrepresentation.  And I think it deserves a place of honor in the great and crowded museum of misdirections, mendacities and public relations.

The glass of beer analogy

A few years ago, Dr. Colin Campbell of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil used this analogy:”Understanding [oil] depletion is simple. Think of an Irish pub. The glass starts full and ends empty. There are only so many more drinks to closing time. It’s the same with oil. We have to find the bar before we can drink what’s in it.”

But the analogy of a  tankard of beer is only appropriate if we are thinking about individual tanks of gas.  A better analogy to the world oil industry would involve a street full of  pubs and a network of warehouses and distilleries.  The price keeps going up because the proprietors of your pub claim to be running out of beer. You can see for yourself, they say, the shelf is almost empty. The Ministry for Pubs says its worried and gives each of the pubs a generous beverage  depletion allowance and other tax breaks. And the ministry loudly trumpets the  promise that it will eventually ease our dependence on beer while quietly cutting alternative beverage research.

Of course, the best kept secret in town is a huge stockpile of barley, yeast and hops in the warehouse across town.  If you even bothered to ask about it in the 1970s or 80s, they’d tell you that it wasn’t “proven” beer.  It was only “potential” beer or even “undiscovered” beer.  Meanwhile, of course, we had to have a strong army to fight to secure our “proven” sources of beer.

Resource wars and world oil reserves 

The logic of the fights over world oil, especially the 1992 and 2003 invasions of Kuwait and Iraq,  went something like this:

Premise 1: The world needs oil. It is the lifeblood of commerce.    Premise 2:  Two thirds of  ALL  the world’s oil is in the Middle East.  Oh, and by the way, there are terrorists there.   Conclusion: The US  has to wage war to ensure that this oil is accessible to the world. Even if it means war in the Middle East.

So, if you buy the premise, you buy the conclusion.  Few people ever questioned the alternative premise — that there were might be other sources of oil in the world or even alternatives to oil.

Of course, the invasions of Kuwait and Iraq   were not officially acknowledged as being related to oil reserves. They were officially all about Iraq’s invasion of peaceful Kuwait, or Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.  But of course it was well  understood by anyone paying attention that these were actually resource wars.

It’s not that the facts were suppressed in order to go to war. Nobody was forced to believe BP, ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, and the US Energy Information Administration and the International Energy Agency and OPEC. Nobody was forced to believe Daniel Yergin when he told us that the Middle East was “The” Prize. Hey, the guy won a Pulitzer, fer gosh sakes.

So a more reasoned view might be that in our haste to protect a resource that seemed threatened,  we did not develop alternative sources of information about alternative sources of energy.  We didn’t understand the world oil industry. In fact, we trusted them, and it was a big mistake.

One of humanity’s biggest mistakes, it may yet turn out, because the firestorm we unleashed is still burning.

So what’s a “proven” reserve? Does it matter?

The embarrassing scientific reality is that petroleum geologists never really thought that the Middle East had two – thirds of all the world’s oil.   It was only two thirds of a special category called “proven” oil reserves.

Any geologist will tell you that it’s wrong to focus on “proven” reserves when you consider long-term strategic goals. As Standard Oil  geologist  Wallace Pratt said in 1944, it is a “fallacy … [to] cite proved reserves as a measure of available future supplies.”

Yet this is exactly what happened.  And the fallacy animated US policy in the Middle East for decades.  Why?

To begin with, the issue is (prepare yourself) highly technical.  A “proven” oil reserve is not the opposite of an “unproven” reserve. That’s a false dichotomy, and although it seems natural enough, it’s quite misleading to see it that way because oil fields that are not proven are often well characterized by seismic tests and sample drilling.

Along with “proven,” the technical categories of oil reserves that geologists use include:  identified, probable, recoverable, potential, and unconventional.  In 2007, industry-affiliated geologists adopted two new categories — contingent resources and prospective resources – to account for anomalies in the old proven reserve system.  

Economists, analysts and stock brokers stick to proven reserves  because the economics of a proven reserve can be plotted down to the penny.  Proven reserves are a category that help guide investors who need to know just how easy the oil will be to find and what it will take to lift from the ground.  They need to know how light and pure the oil is, how much it will cost to refine, how close the oil is to the marketplace. Oil reserves that fall below a standard index of affordability are not called “proven” reserves under Securities and Exchange Commission rules,  and they are not developed because no one wants to lose the money it would take to develop them.

Conventional wisdom has it that investments are based on the world’s proven oil reserves. But it is probably more accurate to say that oil company investments and friendly country policies are what make reserves “proven.”

Proven reserves can be remarkably elastic over time.   Geologist M.A. Adelman noted in his book The Genie out of the Bottle that a special WWII mission to Persian Gulf estimated Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves at 16 billion proved and 5 billion probable. This was 1944.  Thirty years later, those same fields were estimated at 42 and 74 billion. In 1984, geologists estimated  another 199 billion barrels of probable reserves in the Gulf region. Today the proven reserve figure is about 265 billion according to OPEC and BP.

For the entire Middle East, the proven reserve figures are around 650 billion barrels, or about two-thirds of a world total of around one trillion.  But petroleum geologists have long known this is far too “conservative” an estimate, and too heavily slanted to the Middle East.

There is no doubt that the traditional hostility between Latin American nations and the oil industry, once at least nominally American,  had been a factor holding back oil reserve estimates in Venezuela and Mexico.  Nor is there any doubt that the under-counted Latin American reserves would have upset OPEC production quotas if they had suddenly been counted in the 1980s and 90s.

So by using the economic definition of an oil reserve, as opposed to the scientific definition, the oil industry in effect pulled a slight of hand and reset the premise of the world geo-strategic energy debate.   No doubt it was misleading, and intentionally so. Usually, even the word proven was dropped from most news articles and government agency reports about world oil reserves. So people naturally thought that the Middle East had two thirds of ALL the world’s oil, and nobody in government or the oil industry took it upon themselves to challenge that notion.

The usual explanation, repeated in this Wikipedia article, is that “the total amount of unconventional oil resources in the world considerably exceeds the amount of conventional oil reserves, but are much more difficult and expensive to develop.”

But the fact is that Canadian and Venezuelan tar sands and heavy oils require only a fraction of their total sale price to upgrade.  And the narrowness of the categories of conventional oil have blinded us to its overall abundance.

So now, in 2013, we have the information equivalent of the BP gulf of Mexico blowout of the Fukushima disaster.  We now know the vast extent of the Marcellus Shale gas reserves and the Canadian oil sands and the Arctic reserves.  We now know that there were trillions and trillions of barrels of oil in the geosynclinal trough from the Orinoco River to the Falkland Islands.

Imagine if we had known that in the 1980s and 90s.  The sad thing is, we did. Or at least, the scientists did.

Bottom line:  One of the most important  lessons of history is that interested industries can control the premises of  information and set the terms of the debate. They can submerge the science.  If anything, this underscores the need for better scientific information about major resource policies and geostrategic planning.

And one last point: Never again should we trust the oil industry with information about vital public policy issues.

Richard Nixon would be 100 years old today, and on the anniversary of his birth, it’s tempting to portray the 37th U.S. president as a major environmental advocate.

That would be a mistake, for it would let modern-day politics trump an important history lesson.

Nixon did say and did things about the environment that seem courageous from today’s perspective:  “Clean air is not free, and neither is clean water,” he said in his 1970 State of the Union address. “Through our years of past carelessness we incurred a debt to nature, and now that debt is being called.”

Such rhetoric has made Nixon’s environmental legacy a source of ongoing debate among environmentalists, scholars and reporters. Not long ago, Michael Lemonick of the news site Climate Central said Nixon was “a champion of protecting the environment, like no president before him since Teddy Roosevelt and like no president since.”

But Lemonick and others holding that view displace history with politics. One of history’s first lessons is the need to understand people and events in the context of their times…

What, today, is “the press” anyway? It’s a question without a simple answer, either in today’s chaotic and rapidly changing media landscape or in Supreme Court doctrine.

The First Amendment prohibits Congress (and, by later interpretive expansion, the states) from “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” Do the dual references to speech and press amount to one and the same, or does the amendment place “the press” in a special position, with rights not accorded to other speakers? The Supreme Court has never fully resolved this question.

Konrad Lorenz and his dog.

Austrian psychology professor Konrad Lorenz used to tell a story about his dog.  On their regular walks, his dog would always run along a neighborhood wall and bark at another dog that was on the inside of the wall.

The two dogs continued this  behavior for years, barking and snarling at each other every day,  until — one day — an accident took out part of the wall.   That day, the two dogs raced along the wall as usual but then came to the broken spot. And  the two dogs faced each other for the first time. After a moment of confusion, they quickly returned to their respective sides of the wall  and started barking across the wall again.

So the lesson, Lorenz said in his 1955 book Man Meets Dog, is that this ability to moderate aggression is a survival skill that animals seem to have.  Could we learn something from their example that applies to our communication problems today?  

Clearly, the walls are down.  For the first time, the world’s cultures are facing each other through satellite and web transmissions without any time or space in between.    That’s been a blessing in many ways but — it now seems — also quite a curse.    Points of friction are erupting into mob violence with stunning frequency.

The killing of the US Ambassador to Libya on Sept. 11, 2012 in apparent retaliation for a bizarre anti-Islamic movie entitled “The Innocence of Muslims” by someone apparently named Sam Becile is only the latest example.   A good run-down of the current crisis is found in a Nation article by Robert Dreyfuss.   Other incidents include the reaction to Salmon Rushdie’s novel in 1988, the Danish cartoons of 2005 and the threats of a crackpot Florida pastor to burn Korans in 2010.

Is the answer, as an editorial in the Denver Post says,  for Muslims to simply accept provocative speech from Americans like Sam Becile?

Provocative speech is not an abuse of free speech. It is precisely the speech the First Amendment exists to protect.

There are two classes of problems in play here. One has to do with the latitude of free speech protections in the US. The other has to do with a lack of American understanding about international law.

Is there a US balance?  

For all the recent political posturing about freedom of speech for ultra-right wing viewpoints in the US, you have to wonder if there is any comparable concern for fundamentalist Muslim viewpoints expressed by US citizens in the US.   For example, according to this article in Salon magazine,  a Virginia man named Jubair Ahmad is facing criminal charges of aiding a terrorist group for making a video that cheers attacks on American troops.

Its not quite the same as the “Innocence” video, but the Ahmad video is after all just speech, and not action. Both fall into the category of unethical hate speech.   Cheering attacks on US troops with a video may be vile and repulsive, but should it be illegal?  Supporting blasphemy by insulting a major world religion in the worst possible way may be vile and repulsive, but should IT be illegal?

The US standard for highly offensive “fighting words” speech is to ask whether they are likely to cause “imminent action.”  This standard has been effective since the Brandenburg v Ohio decision of 1969,  and RAV v St Paul in 1992, and it has been invoked (for example)  in a 2002 decision taking down a web site “hit list” of addresses and location of abortion clinics posted by an anti-abortion group in Oregon.

But that’s imminent action according to US cultural standards.  What happens if the “action” is imminent in another country, but not in the US? How do we handle the globalization of communication in a world of Balkanized communication laws? Is there any hope for an international law that would deal with hate speech?

International law

The basis of international law in the area of freedom of speech involves two parts of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Article 7 — All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.

Article 19 — Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Most of the conflict between Article 7 and Article 19 has involved racial hatred rather than religious intolerance.

As Toby Mendel said in a 2010 paper on Hate Speech Rules under International Law:

There have been numerous academic attempts to distinguish hate speech from merely offensive speech. One line of reasoning, which is helpful at least conceptually, is to distinguish between expression targeting ideas, including offensive expression, which is protected, and abusive expression which targets human beings, which may not be protected. In … [one European case]  the European Court of Human Rights seemed to support this approach, holding that the impugned speech was not a gratuitous attack on religion but, rather, part of a clash of ideas  (‘débat d’idées’).

So if offensive expression is supposed to be protected under international law, but hate speech is not, where do we place the Becile video?

The value of criticizing other religions and beliefs is one that has long been held as a fundamental freedom in the West.  After all, Victor Hugo depicted the Catholic Church in the worst possible light in the Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1831.  So did Martin Luther in his 98 Theses in 1518.  We have a long tradition of religious criticism, and it’s understood that the West is not about to change that and go back 500 years to the age of horrifying religious war.

And yet most Muslims, while deploring the violence, have seen the Becile video as incitements to hatred against their religion.  Westerners might shrug such a thing off, but they must respect the apparent fact that it’s not so easy for Muslims to do that.  Sneering, vicious jabs at any religion are contemptible in the West, too, even if, in the Western tradition, they no cause for violence or censorship.

Clearly, this needs a lot more discussion between nations and people of good will.  Perhaps there are methods where “time, place and manner” restrictions on hate speech might be enabled. For example, on Sept. 13, Google  blocked YouTube users in Libya and Egypt from accessing the Becile video.   Did that violate Becile’s rights in the US? Of course not.

Perhaps we need to revisit the recommendations of   the UNESCO commission led by Sean MacBride in 1980, which attempted to address the deeper implications of the rapidly growing global network of communications.

Noting the rapid advance of communication as well as the disparities of economic power, the commission said:  “Whether the resources of communication will indeed be mobilized for human benefit depends on decisions now due to be taken… Each society will have to make its own choices and find ways of overcoming the material, social and political constraints that impede progress.”

So, to a large extent, the question of whether people in the Middle East should be exposed to anti-Islamic messages created in the West can, and should, rest on the choices their societies make.

Meanwhile, instead of insisting on an international right of American free speech that applies only to  Americans, we need to approach the problem of broken international communication barriers with more maturity.  Article 7 and Article 19 — not the US First Amendment — is what the rest of the world is talking about.

* Also see:  On the Web, a fine line (New York Times Sept. 16, 2012)

* America’s war on blasphemy (Philadelphia Inquirer, Oct 2 2012)

Radford University journalism students are challenged by Larry Gibson during a 2008 mountaintop mining tour.

Larry Gibson’s parents never worried about finding him, when, as a boy, he wandered out into the forest. All they had to do was spot the hawk that followed him from the air. That’s how close Gibson was to the West Virginia mountains.

He pined for those mountains after his family joined the exodus from Appalachia, moving to where the jobs were, into Ohio and Pennsylvania, in the 1950s. But finally, in the 1990s, he was able to move back to a small cabin on the land owned by his family for generations.

By that time, the nearby town of Kayford was nearly gone. And the hills where he once roamed trembled under gigantic bulldozers and leviathan drag lines that were pushing back the woods, reaching down into the earth, and tearing out the coal.

Mountaintop removal mining tore something out of him, too, but he found a way to fight back. And in the process, Larry Gibson became something unexpected, a unique species of Appalachian Lorax, a small man in bib overalls who could elevate your vision with a few dozen words.

Gibson died Sunday following a heart attack at his home on Kayford Mountain in West Virginia’s Raleigh County. He was 66-years-old.

In thousands of speeches at home and across the Appalachian region, he would ask people: What do you hold so precious in your own circle of life that you don’t have a price on it? What would it be?”

For Gibson, the answer was always Appalachia, the mountains, and his family’s vanishing way of life.

Gibson’s answer wasn’t everyone’s — but his question was. And when he asked it you could see people reaching deeply inside themselves as he talked with them, and challenged them, and charmed them into siding with him to fight the injustice that had already swept away most of his world.

Because he felt the injustice so deeply, Gibson stubbornly held onto a remnant of his world — a 53-acre island whose high point was a family cemetery — even while the surrounded 12,000 acres were blasted into a moonscape.

And because he did not sell out, journalists from just about every major network and publication in the world were able to see mountaintop removal first hand, while students could see the hell that earth would become if the power of giant corporations continued unchecked.

Standing in the family cemetery, visitors could see what Gibson meant when he said this form of mining was “like raising the dead while burying the living.

Kayford Mountain became the world’s image of mountaintop removal mining, said Mary Anne Hitt of the Sierra Club: “Because it was one of the few places you could reliably see mountaintop removal from the ground, everybody went to Kayford. And Larry was always there to greet them and give them a tour.”  He would bring people up to the cemetery, then walk them over to the edge of a gaping wound in the earth. It was a view, Hitt wrote in a eulogy on Daily Kos, “that would shake you to your core and never let you go.”

Gibson’s path was not an easy one.  Two of his dogs were killed. Coal-crazies constantly harassed him; and his cabin would regularly take bullets. Fellow activists were afraid that he would take one too, with all the threats he got. They raised $10,000 for a security system in 2010, but even years before that, they were pleading with coal-friendly West Virginia officials to tone down the “war on coal” rhetoric.

“Larry was one of the ones that stood elbow to elbow with me when no one else was there,” Goldman prize winner Maria Gunnoe said. “He came to my home to check on me after a flood put out the phone lines. Everyone loved him — everyone but the coal companies. Some of their men were simply cruel to Larry Gibson, and they should hang their heads in shame for the way they treated him.”

Despite the abuse, he had a stolid and unshakeable demeanor whether speaking to large crowds, small groups, or the cameras of TV crews from around the world.

Gibson served on the board of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition and helped form other groups like Coal River Mountain Watch. He understood the day-to-day practicalities of organizing and coalition building and gentle persuasion. But he could be fierce as well.

“Few people in our country were so fearless in the face of political pressure, bankers, Big Coal backlash and even death threats,” author Jeff Biggers wrote yesterday in a remembrance on The Huffington Post. And fewer people had the inspiring impact of this determined mountaineer.

Although he was an international figure, traveling to Latin America and arguing for native Appalachian rights at the United Nations, Gibson remained unfazed by fame and well grounded in the mountain life and lore that was his heritage.

Partly because of this combination of fearlessness and inspiration, Gibson was named a CNN Hero in 2007. More honors would doubtless have come if he had lived longer.

“I always imagined that, when we celebrated the end of mountaintop removal, Larry Gibson would be there,” Hitt wrote.

Gibson is survived by a wife and three children. The family has asked that those who wish to express their condolences donate to his Keeper of the Mountains Foundation at mountainkeeper.blogspot.com.

“I think it’s just so ironic,” Gunnoe said, “that Larry left Kayford Mountain through a gate that the coal company used to try to keep him out, the gate to a cemetery where his Grandma and Grandpa were buried.

“You win, Larry,” Gunnoe said wistfully.  “You got the last laugh.”

Appreciation for the history of women, minorities, labor and social movements is long overdue, since these stories are just as close to the heart of the democratic experience, or perhaps closer, than many found in traditional American history textbooks.

Especially interesting is the leading role women played in the nation’s early environmental movement. This movement began at least a century and a half ago, peaked in the Progressive era of the 1890s, and then declined during the war years in the early- to mid-20th century.

The environmental movement was revived in 1962 with the publication of Silent Spring, a book about the dangers of pesticides, by Rachel Carson. Although Carson is well known, the women at the other end of this historical continuum who started the environmental movement are hardly known at all.

Ellen Swallow Richards (1842-1911) was a pioneer of the women’s environment movement. In 1873, Richards began the nation’s first systematic survey of river and stream pollution for Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A Vassar graduate, Richards had asked simply to study at MIT, but she impressed the college president and was formally admitted as MIT’s first female graduate student. During the 1870s Richards created new methods for measuring pollution from sewage and industry. She also helped establish the first state experimental station for water pollution research in Lawrence, MA.

Richards was known as a proponent of “euthenics” — an idea concerned with the improvement of the environment, both in and out of the household. (The term was meant to be the opposite of “eugenics”). In her books and studies over the next 40 years, Richards fought for clean kitchens, clean water and clean cites. She advocated “ecology” in a broad sense as a woman’s responsibility and began what she first called the “home ecology” movement. The idea was soon broadened into “home economics,” a field that was taught in most American universities in the early to mid-20th centuries, fell out of favor in the 1970s, and is recently undergoing something of a revival in the form of “human ecology” studies at some universities.

Among her many accomplishments, Richards’ research demonstrated the need for Massachusetts factory and food inspection laws — the first in the nation. She was also involved in the development of sanitary sewer treatment systems and many other environmental projects.

Richards was never allowed to finish her graduate degree, but she did not fight the prevailing prejudice directly. She even cleaned house for some of her professors. “Perhaps the fact that I am not a radical,” she wrote her parents, “and that I do not scorn womanly duties, but claim it as a privilege to clean up and sort of supervise the room and sew things, is winning me stronger allies than anything else.”

Someone at MIT must have agreed, and she became an instructor in sanitary chemistry at the Women’s Laboratory at MIT in the mid-1880s. Richards is remembered today as a pioneer for women in science, partly because she had “figured out a way to connect (science) with household cleaning,” the New York Times said in a belated 2005 acknowledgement of her role. But Richards did more than that – she connected the ills of the household with the ills of the community, and urged women to get out and do something about bad food, impure water and unsanitary sewage treatment.

Women’s clubs and “municipal housekeeping”

“Municipal housekeeping” was the label placed on Richards’ vision of the new role for women as environmental and social advocates at the community level. Within a generation, the vision had been widely taken up by thousands of newly formed women’s clubs. New York journalist Jane Croly had formed a small New York city club after being barred in 1868 from a lecture by Charles Dickens, and 20 years later, she led related organizations that formed the General Federation of Women’s Clubs.

From the 1890s to around 1917, over a million women used these clubs as a base to organize for conservation and urban renewal, and against child labor and sweatshop practices. This movement was the heart of what is now known as the Progressive era. The GFWC had national committees on forestry, waterways and rivers, child labor and other issues. “The rationale for women’s involvement lay in the effect of waterways on every American home: Pure water meant health; impure meant disease and death,” said historian Carolyn Merchant.

While the women’s clubs of California worked to save the sequoia forests and the Hetch Hetchy valley, their counterparts in New York opposed hydroelectric plants at Niagra Falls. In New Jersey, the women’s clubs were focused on saving the Palisades of the Hudson River from a stone quarry, while the Progressive women of Colorado were saving cliff dwellings and pueblo ruins from vandalism.

The women’s clubs also worked on the national level to end the importation of tropical bird feathers for hats, to support wise use of forest resources, to pass pure food and drug laws, and to support the creation of national parks.

The women’s environmental movement should be seen in the context of a general national movement for women, with goals that included the right to vote, equal treatment for women, and higher education for women.

The movement’s intent was not simply to improve the condition of women, but more importantly, to empower women to serve and improve their communities in ways that expanded traditional roles.

Contributions from Hull House

An important leader of the Progressive reform movement was Jane Addams (1860-1945), the first American woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1889, Adams founded Hull House, a center for social reform in of one Chicago’s most squalid slums. Hull House was a community center based on the concept of “settlement houses” that provided a base for middle class women who were dedicated to public service but who had often been barred from professions or a university education.

Adams had been inspired by Ellen Swallow Richards and the women’s club movement, but was particularly inspired by a 1887 visit to Toynbee House in London’s East End. She brought the settlement house concept back to Chicago two years later, and Hull House became a famous national example of what women could accomplish.

Addams and colleagues worked on things many people today take for granted, included garbage cleanup, sewer installation, street lighting, clean drinking water, child labor laws, food inspections, health and medical services, fighting epidemic disease and many other urban environmental issues. Addams was so successful that by 1920 there were nearly 500 settlement houses in most major US cities.

Among the many residents who worked with Addams at Hull House were Alice Hamilton (1869-1970), a young MD whose experiences inspired her reform efforts on behalf of workers in dangerous trades, and Florence Kelly (1859-1932), an “impatient crusader” against child labor and abusive conditions in women’s workplaces.

Florence Kelly

Kelly was a tireless advocate for child labor laws, civil rights, and better working conditions. In 1892, while she worked at Hull House, Kelly was asked by the state Bureau of Labor Statistics to investigate child labor. One of her reports noted:

“Some of the children are boys who cut up the animals as soon as the hide is removed… These children stand, ankle deep, in water used for flooding the floor for the purpose of carrying off blood and refuse into the drains; they breathe air so sickening that a man not accustomed to it can stay in the plant but a few minutes; and the work is the most brutalizing that can be devised…” (Sass, 1999).

In 1899 Kelly moved to New York and founded the Henry Street settlement house, and, a year later, the National Consumers League, both of which are thriving today. The League worked with women’s clubs nationwide to limit child labor and establish an eight hour work day, and because of her work, state limits on women’s work were upheld by the Supreme Court in 1908. She also helped found a federal agency called the US Children’s Bureau 1912 that fought for pure milk, pure food and better conditions for children.

Alice Hamilton

Alice Hamilton also went to work at Hull House in the early 1890s, after earning a medical degree in 1893. She was a professor of medicine at the Women’s College of Northwestern University in Chicago and, like Addams and Kelly, became increasingly alarmed at the environmental conditions in the slums. Without support from industry or government, Hamilton conducted studies on lead and mercury poisoning in the Chicago area. She was also concerned with public health, and during a typhoid fever epidemic in 1902, Hamilton helped convince Chicago authorities that improper sewage treatment was spreading the disease. When the state’s Occupational Disease Commission was created in 1910, she became its first director and helped pass some of the first workers compensation laws.

Hamilton’s tours of Illinois industries uncovered hundreds of cases of outright lead poisoning, some of which were quite severe. As Hamilton put it, conditions were “equal to those described by French authorities of the early 19th century.” Shocked that Illinois was a century behind Europe, the legislature quickly passed a law requiring ventilation and other safety standards for workers.

The Illinois study brought Hamilton to the attention of the U.S. Department of Labor, where she worked from 1910 to 1919 as a special investigator of industrial poisons. She was then invited to join the faculty at Harvard University. From then until her retirement she served at Harvard and became an internationally recognized expert in hazardous trades and environmental issues. She worked on such controversies as the leaded gasoline issue of 1924-26 and the “radium girls” case of 1929. Although she reached the pinnacle of a scientific career as the first woman on the Harvard faculty, Hamilton still had to enter the faculty club by the back door and still had to promise not to attend football games.

Caroline Crane

Another environmental reformer inspired by Addams was Rev. Caroline Bartlett Crane, a former journalist and pastor of a Unitarian church in Kalamazoo, MI, who organized “new and untried kinds of social service,” including discussion groups on civic problems. When she could not find a speaker to discuss meat inspection in 1902, she began researching the subject herself. Along with members of the women’s club, she visited nearby slaughterhouses and was shocked by the grossly unsanitary conditions and the discovery that no distinctions were made between healthy and diseased animals.

Crane disclosed these conditions to the city council, but learned that it had no jurisdiction over businesses located outside city limits, as these were. The state board of health took no action either. Crane made a study of meat inspection laws in other states and drafted a proposed law that gave cities the right to regulate meat sold within their limits. Her bill became law in the spring of 1903, and a year later she founded the Women’s Civic Improvement League of Kalamazoo.

Her successes led to requests for help in other cities, and Crane became a traveling consultant for sanitary planning to dozens of cities. A visit to Uniontown, Pennsylvania, for example, resulted in the condemnation of the public water supply; a tour of Kentucky cities resulted in the establishment of a state bacteriological laboratory.

Crane insisted that women take a share of the responsibility for the cleanliness of their cities, advising: “We certainly should keep our city — that is to say, our common house — clean. The floor should be clean. The air should be clean…” She saw “municipal housekeeping” as a non-partisan responsibility that should involve not only women, but rather, the whole community working in a partnership with local government.

Conclusion

In spite of their contributions, women were systematically excluded from mainstream political and social systems around the turn of the century, and their environmental and political contributions at this time were often made in parallel to, rather than within, the mainstream. The movement faded when many of their objectives were met, including the right of women to vote, and when many other objectives became part of the New Deal in the 1930s.

The Progressive movement also faded during the “red scare” of the 1920s, in which politically motivated charges were brought against men and women who were organizing labor unions and fighting for better working or environmental conditions. Alice Hamilton noted in 1925 that she had often been charged with “sentimentality if not socialism,” while Florence Kelly spent the last years of her life defending herself against accusers. The awarding of a Nobel Peace Prize to Jane Addams in 1931, like many subsequent awards, involved not only recognition but also the hope of protection for her work.

And yet, the tenacity of these and many other women in the environmental and public health areas is remarkable. Women became so identified as the caretakers of environmental causes that, as late as 1948, a New York Times editorial would “urge housewives and others to take this opportunity” to attend an anti-smoke political rally.

And many of the institutions founded by the women’s environmental movement still exist today – for example Hull House, Henry Street settlement, and Toynbee Hall, along with the National Consumers League and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs.

Change comes from within, as the old saying goes. It comes from within the people of a democracy, and Richards, Croly, Addams, Kelly, Hamilton and Carson are among those whose personal determination created the first wave of an expanding world environmental movement.

Following their examples today we find a long list of Americans and Europeans, as well as Wangari Maathai of Kenya’s Greenbelt Movement, Chandi Prasad Bhatt of India’s Chipko movement and Maria Cherkasova of Russia’s Socio-Ecological Union.

The legacy is enduring, the debt is profound, and at the very least, historical appreciation of the women’s movement to protect their homes and their environments is long overdue.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

• Hull House, Chicago
• Toynbee Hall, London
• Henry Street Settlement House, New York
• National Consumers League
• General Federation of Womens ClubsREFERENCES__ “An Anti-Smoke Rally,” New York Times, Nov. 18, 1948: 26:3.
  __ “The Revenge of Ellen Swallow (Richards),” New York Times, Feb. 20, 2005.
  Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House, New York: Macmillan, 1948 (first printed in 1910).
  Caroline L. Hunt, The Life of Ellen H. Richards, Boston, Whitcomb & Hunt, 1912.
  Suellen M. Hoy, “Municipal Housekeeping: The Role of Women in Improving Urban Sanitation Practices,” in Martin V. Melosi, ed., Pollution and Reform in American Cities 1870 – 1930, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1980.
  Mary S. Gibson, ed., A Record of Twenty Five Years of the California Federation of Women’s Clubs, 1900 – 1925, Pasadena, CFWC, 1927.
  Carolyn Merchant, “The Women of the Progressive Conservation Crusade: 1900 – 1915,” in Kendall E. Bailes, ed., Environmental History: Critical Issues in Comparative Perspective, (NY, University Press, 1985): 156.
  Sass R. The unwritten story of women’s role in the birth of occupational health and safety legislation. Int J Health Serv. 1999;29(1):109-45.
  Barbara Sicherman, Alice Hamilton: A Life in Letters (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1984),
  Marcia Yudkin, “Earth, Air, Water, Hearth: The Woman Who Founded Ecology,” Vassar Quarterly, Spring 1982: 32-34.

• Appalachian Feudalism New York Times, April 14, 2010  — Why are [mine disasters] happening? Three factors stand out: Appalachian people are have been historically oppressed, with ugly stereotypes used to justify their mistreatment. The history of coal mining in Appalachia shows over a century of constant violence against those who have stood up for human rights, for labor unions and for other reforms… And the external costs of coal, in terms of human health or the natural environment, have never been reflected in what consumers pay to keep the lights on.
• Second battle of Blair Mountain continues, Earth Island Journal, June 2, 2011 — The marchers who will take to the roads of West Virginia next week to try to stop the demolition of yet another mountain for the coal underneath will be following the same route that more than 10,000 well-armed miners took 90 years ago…
  
• Stone’s Throw:  Earth Island Journal, Autumn, 2007 –  High in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia, on a small island of green above a desert of rock and mud, a man in blue jean overalls wanders through an overgrown cemetery and struggles to contain his emotions. What happened to the graves down here?” the man asks. “There were three graves over here and one over here.”

Larry Gibson has the desperate sound of a man who has just realized a terrible loss. He points to an area where the forest ends abruptly, having beenscoured by enormous bulldozers. He wonders if the driver even saw the headstones.

Gibson, an environmental activist in his mid-50s, is on an inspection of his family cemetery that has been isolated by mountaintop removal (MTR) mining. He has been asking for permission to inspect the cemetery for a year and a half. Finally, on August 4, 2007, he is allowed to visit, and his worst fears are confirmed. Most of the graves are still in place, covered with vinesand short plants, but there have been losses.

“The people who are buried over there – or who were buried over there – are my great-great-great-grandparents,” Gibson says, his voice choking. “It’s my history they’re wiping out – 200years of my past.”

The land that spawned Larry Gibson and generations before him is very different today than it was only a few years ago. Not far away from the cemetery, the earth suddenly drops off hundreds of feet in jagged man-made cliffs of gray-brown rock.

Across the gaping mine site, running creeks fall from the living edge of the forest. The waterfalls appear tiny in the distance, and make no sound against the monstrous diesel cacophony of gigantic earth movers that eat awayat the mine pit below.

Down in the pit, the earth is laid open like a cadaver on a dissecting table, and near the bottom, coal seams stretch horizontally like thick black wounds.

This is all that is left of the mountain that Gibson grew up with – a few dozen headstones rising above the rest of the land like a cemetery in the sky. . .

“For many years intolerant regimes like Russia and China and military dictatorships tolerated environmental activists. That (environmental advocacy) was the one thing you could do safely, until (you) crossed into the political area,” Kovarik said. “Now, environmentalism has become a dangerous form of activism, and that is relatively new.” Both Kovarik and Global Witness believe even more killings have gone unreported, especially in relatively closed societies in countries such as Myanmar, Laos and China. Global Witness said there is an “alarming lack of systematic information on killing in many countries and no specialized monitoring at the international level.” See Global Witness report. Washington Post story.

Klaatu barada nikto

These pages are for my students, who need a place to find links to their courses, and for anyone else who might be interested in my historical work or  links to experimental publishing projects.

By way of introduction, I’m posting this photo taken by Linda Burton at the Seattle museum of science fiction.  Gort was the robot from a movie called The Day the Earth Stood Still. Despite the uncanny resemblance, I’m the handsome one on your right. The museum is  extremely cool, and if you don’t see it next time you’re in Seattle, Gort will know where to find you.

Why do historians  like science fiction?  It has something to do with what history is and what it ought to be.

Most people suffered through their history classes, struggling to stay awake as   Professor Dryasdust t0ld them what dates to memorize.  But if history is a guide to the future, as Thucydides once said, it ought to be the most interesting thing in the world.   So part of what concerns me is how to present history in a way that catches some of that interest.

I think part of the problem is what we actually study.  Conflict has been a huge part of our past, and is usually the main area for historical studies, and yet,  amazingly, there’s very little attention paid to our attempts to avoid conflict.  The sources of conflict include fights over resources, but what have people done in the past to find alternatives and optimize resource use?  Why isn’t that part of conflict history?  How do we organize communication systems and what interests do they serve?

These are some of the questions that don’t get enough attention, and they are serious questions that affect our future, at least, far more than the insufferable droning about civil war battles and all the great heroes.

Yes, now I’ve said it. History is more than Great Men and Great Battles !!  Holy cow !  Ill bet the historical society is going to sic Gort on me. Too late, though. Me and Gort go way back.

• Where are the Steve Wozniaks of the Energy Revolution? True Slant, May 30, 2010  — Why it is that the social construction of energy technology is so much more difficult than the social construction of, say, computing and the digital media revolution? Was IBM that much less of a challenge than Standard Oil? Where are the Steve Wozniaks of the energy revolution?”
• Running on ‘E’ — Norfolk Virginian Pilot, Dec. 3, 2011 — “Ethanol isn’t new. Benjamin Franklin used it for his warming pan in the 18th century, said Bill Kovarik, a professor of communication at Radford University who has studied the topic. Henry Ford built the Model T with an “adjustable carburetor” to run on gas or ethanol, Kovarik said.
• United Nations: Leaded gasoline to be eliminated – Associated Press, worldwide, Oct. 27, 2011 — Leaded gasoline became universal despite warnings from public health advocates and a scandal over the deaths in 1924 of six refinery workers in Newark, New Jersey, who were poisoned while manufacturing it and “were led away in straitjackets,” said Bill Kovarik, a journalist and communication professor at Radford University who researched the history of leaded gasoline.“Historically, there are only a handful of major environmental victories like this,” Kovarik said. “It took 90 years to eradicate what was always a well-known poison from a product that everyone uses. It’s a great achievement, but it really says something about how public health works globally, that it took so long … Benjamin Franklin complained about lead poisoning in print shops.”
• What comes after ethanol? — Roanoke Times, Sept. 4, 2011 — Some people say that government shouldn’t be in the business of choosing technologies. They say they want an unregulated marketplace. But if that were true, we wouldn’t have military protection for the Persian Gulf, we wouldn’t have an insurance ceiling for the nuclear power industry, and we would still be talking about taking the lead out of gasoline. We need to remember our history and use a little common sense in our energy policy before taking thoughtless actions we may later come to regret.
• Ethanol gets a boost — National Public Radio, Dec. 21, 2010 — Ethanol may seem modern, but people throughout Appalachia have been making it for hundreds of years. “We are known for our moonshine industry,” says science writer Bill Kovarik with a laugh, “very well known for our moonshine industry. It is still flourishing.” Kovarik, who’s also a professor at Radford University, says that ethanol is, first and foremost, a way to make corn more valuable. More than a century ago, Henry Ford built cars to run on it, with just that in mind. “So, you could replace the transportation income that farmers used to have by [their] growing the fuel for the cars, instead of growing horses and feed.” Prohibition killed that idea, but the farm crisis, oil shocks and environmental concerns have revived it. Lawmakers gave companies a tax credit — currently 45 cents a gallon, more than $5 billion a year — for blending ethanol with gasoline.