Silencing science: How the government’s war on climate research makes us all less safe

“WE HAVE THE BODY BAGS READY.”

Though it was more than 25 years ago, I still feel the chill that ran through my body in a conference room in the wetlands of Northern California. I was a graduate student on a multi-university, interdisciplinary wetland restoration project team. We, a group of scientists from the south and west, had convened near one of our research sites, and a prominent plant biologist from Louisiana who spent her career researching the wetlands of New Orleans was presenting her work. It was four years prior to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, when we were naïve to the harsh reality that the government, at all levels, could and would devastatingly fail the most vulnerable Americans during an unprecedented natural disaster, leaving human tragedy in its wake.