The Texas Observer

Texas scientists have finally stopped agonizing over creationism and gotten busy organizing.

Today, a group of university professors announced in a press conference the 21st Century Science Coalition, a vehicle to promote science education in Texas and push back against the retrograde agenda at the State Board of Education. It’s about time. The obscure but powerful board is a known hotbed of pseudo-scientific activity. At least six of its 15 members, including Chairman Don McLeroy, are creationists who have done little to hide their contempt for evolutionary biology. With an overhaul of the state’s science curriculum underway, this religious right faction has an opportunity to leave its fingerprints all over biology textbooks.

That’s where the scientists, mostly biologists, come in. Dr. David Hillis, a professor of integrative biology at UT-Austin, came out firing at the press conference:

[McLeroy] is on record stating that there are two kinds of science: one that uses natural explanations, and one that relies on supernatural explanations. He is dead wrong about this: supernatural explanations have no place in science classrooms. Science is about testable explanations, and supernatural explanations are by their very nature untestable. It is clear that Chairman McLeroy wants to promote a particular religious, rather than a scientific, agenda in our science classrooms, and that has stimulated our group of over 800 Texas scientists to object.

The speakers made the usual — but necessary — statements that evolution is undisputed among the vast majority of scientists. To illustrate the point to a media that sometimes sacrifices accuracy for balance (”on one hand… but on the other”), the organizers piled up 10 years’ worth of the journal Evolution. Altogether, there are some 100,000 peer-reviewed articles supporting evolution published in this journal and others, said Dr. Dan Bolnick, an assistant professor at UT-Austin. “Not a single one shows that evolution has not occurred,” Bolnick said.

Dr. Richard Duhrkopf, who teaches — God bless him — biology at Baylor, had the best zinger of the day: “It’s time to keep religion and faith in the Sunday schools and not in the public schools.”

The coalition’s first goal is to strip language from the state’s standards that calls for the teaching of “strengths and weaknesses” in scientific theories. A committee of teachers has already recommended removing the language, but the board will make the final decision. McLeroytold the Austin American-Statesman that he wanted to maintain the status quo.

“Evolution shouldn’t have anything to worry about — if there’s no weaknesses, there’s no weaknesses. But if there’s scientifically testable explanations out there to refute it, shouldn’t those be included too?”

That argument is the new hobbyhorse of the creationist crowd. Having failed to get Intelligent Design into the classroom, the intellects of the creationist movement are pushing the “strengths and weaknesses” line. It’s a wedge to introduce creationist thinking into the classroom, says Dr. Sahotra Sarkar, a UT professor and founding member of the coalition. “What they’re trying to do is put in some completely phony doubts about what constitutes evolution,” said Sarkar.

This semester Sarkar is teaching a class to freshmen that touches on creationism. Of his 18 students, three of them claim to never have been taught a thing in high school about evolution, Sarkar says, even though it’s required by the state.

In November 2007, I wrote a story entitled “That Sinking Feeling: The Water’s Rising. The Island’s Subsiding. And Galveston Keeps on Building.” The story - and the headline - tried to capture the folly of building on a vulnerable barrier island.

Despite increasingly stern warnings from scientists and the protestations of environmentalists, Galveston’s unprotected West End is exploding with development. Developers are building homes and hotels on beaches expected to erode within decades. In some cases, geologists say, the builders are disrupting the very integrity of the island, carving away the land for canals, marinas, and ponds. Such excavation could enhance the potential for breaches of the island during storms by creating pathways for water. In an extreme case, Galveston could even be split into multiple pieces, the geologists warn.

The scenario does not faze many islanders. An abiding faith in the power of engineering and technology has reassured them that the forces of nature an be resisted. So they build in the face of a looming disaster.

The disaster is no longer looming. The slow-motion phenomena I described in the story have suddenly been brought to the fore. As the Fort Worth Star-Telegram aptly summed it up yesterday: “The devastating hit that Hurricane Ike delivered to the upper Texas coast has many experts questioning the breakneck pace of development along the beaches.” But it’s not just the experts. Read the comments section of any story about rebuilding the West End. On one side you have folks, admirably undefeated by the storm, promising to rebuild at any cost. On the other, you have people calling for a halt to the endless proliferation of tony condos and beachside mansions built within spitting distance of the Gulf and outside the protection of the seawall.

Scientists and residents are beginning to assess the damage to the West End. John Anderson, a professor of oceanography at Rice and critic of unchecked Galveston development, shared some of his preliminary observations. The West End, Anderson observes, for the most part “dodged a bullet.” The storm surge was less than anticipated and Bolivar bore the brunt of the “dirty side” of the hurricane. Though the precise extent won’t be known for some time, Anderson says there appears to be significant beach erosion, leaving many homes stranded on the public beaches. (Land commissioner Jerry Patterson reports “hundreds” of houses.)

“Some of those houses that were built months or a year ago are now sitting seaward of the vegetation line,” Anderson said. “That’s just really deplorable.” Anderson has reason to be miffed. He was one of the authors of a 2007 “geohazards” study commissioned by the city that challenged city leaders to steer development away from sensitive areas - eroding beaches, wetlands, and low-lying areas.

The study was effectively shelved. Development continued apace.

In my story lat year, I wrote about a $500 million master-planned community called Pointe West built on probably the most vulnerable part of the island, next to San Luis Pass on the far western tip. Here was one geologists’ prediction of Pointe West’s fate:

“[Pointe West] will be run over by a hurricane someday and totally flattened, and if that doesn’t happen, there will be a shift in shoreline movement, and some of those places will be in danger of falling into the ocean,” says Jim Gibeaut, a research professor at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi and the lead author of the geohazards map.

So how did Pointe West fare? Most of the very pricey homes seem to have survived Ike. But some of the almost brand-new beachside houses appear to be perilously close to the public beach, if not on it. See these before and after shots.

Closer to the seawall, the beaches appear to have encroached even more.

“I hate to say I told you so but sometimes you have to so people take you seriously,” Anderson says.

Another big I-told-you-so: Last October, land commissioner Jerry Patterson stood at the end of the seawall and announced the “biggest effort to preserve the Texas coast since the Galveston Seawall” — $13.5 million to nourish three miles of beach west of the seawall. The project was still in the planning stages when Ike hit. Coastal geologists, including Anderson, warned at the time that the source of sand — a large underwater shoal off Galveston’s eastern tip — should be preserved for a storm. “it’s a damn good thing he didn’t get his way,” Anderson says.

Patterson’s $13.5 million project now seems like small potatoes. On Tuesday, Galveston mayor Lyda Ann Thomas asked Congress for $100 million, out of a $2.4 billion request, to fund beach nourishment projects on the island. Will Congress balk at spending that kind of money to dump sand on eroding beaches?Would anybody be asking for that money if hugely expensive developments weren’t fronting the beaches?

In other respects, Ike has served as a Deus ex machina, settling long-running arguments overnight. For example, land commissioner Patterson had been locked in a legal dispute with 14 homeowners in Surfside Beach whose homes had been sitting on the public beach. Patterson wanted the houses moved, but the owners sued instead. Ten of those homes are now gone, rendering the lawsuits moot. The storm has also cleared the way for Patterson to introduce more stringent setback rules that would keep new homes out of the dunes and away from the public beaches, at least for a while.

But there’s one factor — not addressed in any of the press coverage I’ve seen — that looms over all of the post-Ike deliberations: climate change. We tend to focus on the instantaneous devastation of hurricanes. But the slow-motion pain that climate-induced rising sea levels will bring to low-lying islands like Galveston is much greater. Much of Galveston, including pretty much all of the West End, is only a few feet above sea level. Recent scientific research has suggested that seas could rise as much as six and a half feet by 2100. Lowball estimates that don’t include melting ice sheets are closer to half a foot to two feet. If the scientists are correct, Galveston’s future is bleak. Now is a teachable moment. Will we seize it?

For four years the geologists at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality have struggled to answer a few basic questions about Waste Control Specialists‘ proposed radioactive waste landfills: How close will the buried radioactive waste be to the groundwater? What is the likelihood that the waste will come into contact with water over the lifespan of the dumps? And most important, has Waste Control proved that the radioactive material - all 30 million cubic feet of it - can be safely contained for tens of thousands of years, as the law requires?

After reading most of the voluminous environmental assessment released last week by TCEQ (a heroic task, if I do say so myself), the answers to those fundamental questions - again, four years into the process - still seem inconclusive, at best. And, on the balance, the potential for contamination looks worse than before.

What the agency specialists have determined is that two water tables “appear to be” within feet of the dump. One of the water tables is currently “everywhere beneath the bottom” of the proposed landfill and as close as 14 feet. Worse, because rainfall is expected to increase in the future, modeling shows that the groundwater is likely to expand into the disposal cells where the radioactive waste is contained, according to the assessment.

Tellingly, recent data submitted by Waste Control now show that several wells “previously dry now contain several feet of water” after a period of only slightly above-average rainfall. In TCEQ’s estimation the dry line - the boundary separating dry soil from wet - may be several thousand feet closer to the dump than previously thought. Nonetheless, the assessment makes clear that TCEQ is still uncertain exactly where water exists in relation to the dumps or what may happen in the future. Maybe everything’s hunky-dory or maybe the radioactive dumps will be a disaster. They just don’t know.

Nonetheless, the agency still saw fit to issue Waste Control a draft license. Their solution - if one can call it that - is to add “conditions” to the license. One of those conditions would require Waste Control to move the federal waste landfill fifty feet away from the dry line and make it ten feet shallower. Glenn Lewis, a former TCEQ employee who quit in disgust in December, said the decision to shrink the landfill was announced last year by then-Executive Director Glen Shankle, apparently without consulting the technical staff. “They don’t know where the water is,” Lewis told the Observer in March. “They haven’t made the applicant definitively assess where the water is so this was their strategy – we’ll just make it a little smaller, that ought to make it a little bit safer. There is no data in existence that justifies those decisions.”

Another license condition would allow for a 100-feet “buffer zone” around the landfills where the company could monitor for water seeping into the radioactive waste. Detection of water, the assessment states, “would trigger cessation of waste disposal operations and immediate notification of the Executive Director.” And then what? TCEQ is prepared to give Waste Control the green-light on building what is expected to become a de facto national repository for low-level radioactive waste and then cross their fingers and hope nothing goes wrong.

The environmental report also makes it clear that Waste Control’s hazardous waste dump, which has been open since 1994, is itself radioactive. Half of that dump - 450,000 cubic yards - is composed of waste containing radioactive material - 20,000-plus curies of tritium, cesium, radium, thorium, uranium and americium. The Department of State Health Services, which oversaw Waste Control until 2007, never required Waste Control to monitor whether these radioactive wastes are getting into the groundwater, the report notes. This must be - what? - Texas’ millionth regulatory failure. The health department licensed a hazardous waste landfill that’s turned into a radioactive waste landfill but somehow forgot to require the company to monitor the radiation.

The existence of radioactivity in the hazardous waste facility makes it difficult to establish the natural radioactive background at Waste Control’s property. As the reports notes, “there have been events of elevated radioactive measurements at the site,” including a leak of tritium in 2001 and the contamination of a septic system in 2005 with plutonium and other radionuclides.

The health department did require Waste Control to monitor for chemicals leaching into the groundwater. In 2000, according to the environmental assessment, “positive results were found for many of the constituents.” Amazingly, Waste Control doesn’t provide any explanation for the contamination. And there’s no indication TCEQ has asked for it.

More to come…

The Texas Education Agency has approved the expansion of an online charter school that allows students to skip lessons on evolution, the Observer has learned. With the addition of several new regions (Corpus Christi, Austin, and San Antonio), the Texas Virtual Academy at Southwest now can enroll up to 1,500 students in the eastern half of Texas for grades K-8.

The school, which receives public funding and operates under state rules, uses a curriculum developed by K12 Inc, a publicly traded company co-founded by Bill Bennett, the conservative former secretary of education and drug czar. (Bennett served as the chairman of K12 Inc. until 2005, when he stepped down over remarks he made suggesting that aborting black babies would reduce the crime rate.)

According to K12 and the Virtual Academy’s Web site, learning evolution is optional:

How does K¹² teach Evolution?

The concepts of evolution and creationism do not come up in grades K-2. In later grades, we teach evolution as a theory broadly accepted in the scientific community as an organizing theory of biology. We believe that a complete education includes understanding the basics of what this theory is about, even if one disagrees with it. K¹² emphasizes that parents have every right to explain to their children why they do or do not accept the theory and what they believe instead, including the concept of creationism. If parents aren’t interested in any teachings surrounding the theory of evolution, they can skip these lessons.

Online schools often cater to homeschooling parents, many of whom are Christian conservatives who believe in creationism. The Virtual Academy appears to be marketing its evolution-optional policy as a selling point. Nonetheless, the Texas Virtual Academy receives public funding and must abide by Texas’ education standards known as the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS). It’s the law. The TEKS require that each “student knows the theory of biological evolution.”

“Parents could opt out of those classes but their child is still held responsible for learning the curriculum,” said TEA spokeswoman Debbie Graves Ratcliffe. “[T]hey need to do so with the understanding that their child could still be tested over that material.”

She said she’s never heard of a public school advertising an opt-out policy for evolution.

The Texas Education Agency and Commissioner Robert Scott have answered the federal lawsuit filed against them by former science curriculum director Chris Comer. (Comer was forced out in December over an email she sent to science teachers announcing a talk by an evolution expert.) In her suit, Comer alleges that she was fired for violating an unconstitutional TEA policy of “neutrality” on evolution.

The fatal flaw in Comer’s argument, according to TEA’s Motion to Dismiss (.pdf), “arises from a fundamental misconception of the relationship between the Texas Education Agency, headed by defendant Scott, and the State Board of Education.” The 15-member elected board of education develops curriculum, including what Texas schoolchildren learn about evolution, the motion states. TEA only administers that curriculum and provides oversight. “TEA staff, in their capacity as state employees, must not take positions, even by implication, on contested curriculum issues the State Board will be called upon to resolve,” the motion states.

TEA’s motion lists a number of other controversial curriculum issues on which TEA staff may not voice an opinion in public:

• Whether schools should teach “whole language” or “phonics” in English Language Arts;

• Whether schools should have grammar as a separate section of the English curriculum or embedded in the overall curriculum;

• How schools should present the treatment of minorities in U.S. or Texas history;

• Whether schools should have required reading lists in English or other subjects (and if so what books should be included on them);

• Whether schools should emphasize scientific processes or content;

• Whether schools should require laboratory instruction in science courses;

• How schools should integrate the Spanish-language grammar or decoding skills into English TEKS for students with limited English proficiency (LEP);

• Whether to include instruction on contraceptives along with abstinence, in the presentation of human sexuality in health education.

TEA stresses in its court filings that the “neutrality” policy only applies to its employees, not classroom teachers, who must follow the direction of the board of education.

The agency may have the upper hand, legally speaking — I haven’t a clue about the law in this area — but what a sad thought that career educators and public servants are effectively muzzled on any issue the conservative majority on the SBOE deems “controversial.” Consider what the far-right members of the board of education has done to textbooks over the years. The L.A. Times summarizes a few choice samples:

In a nod to those who believe God created the Earth 6,000 years ago, a sentence saying the ice age took place “millions of years ago” was changed to “in the distant past.” Descriptions of environmentalism have been attacked as antithetical to free-enterprise ideals; a passage describing the cruelty of slavery was derided as “overkill.”

Still, the teaching of evolution is the official policy of the state. If TEA staffers generally, and the science curriculum director in particular, are tasked with administering the state’s policy on science, how can they reasonably be expected to remain “neutral” on evolution? What does that even mean?