Bold Scientists: Dispatches from the Battle for Honest Science

In the Beginning

The desire of power in excess caused the angels to fall; the desire of knowledge in excess caused man to fall.

— SIR FRANCIS BACON, Essays, 1625

SCIENTISTS KNOW. Sometimes they know less than they think they know, but often they know more than most of us, at least in the particular realms they study. In a time when science carries a certain authority, we tend to believe its practitioners as some of us believe clergy. They are supposed to know.

Sadly, some scientists turn this trust into a lucrative trade as experts for hire, paid to convince the rest of us that we have nothing to fear from whatever product or process their benefactor designates: genetic manipulation, smoking, nuclear power, pharmaceuticals, tar sands, global warming. The pay is good, and a well-trained mind can rationalize almost anything. Other scientists go about their work with their heads down, wrap themselves in innocence, and deny any responsibility for malignant end uses of their knowledge. In doing so, they disconnect cause from effect.

I went looking for scientists of another kind, people who create new paths by defying the status quo, bending the rules, and asking prickly questions they aren’t supposed to ask. Such actions have costs. But these thinkers have each concluded in their own way that the price of silence and complicity is intolerable. These are not famous people, except in circles that know enough to appreciate their contributions. I hope you’ll find each of them as unique and splendid as I do.

My original impulse to write this book sprang from an encounter some years ago with 17th-century politician-philosopher Francis Bacon. I was writing a radio play about the origins of the King James Bible, which was published during Bacon’s lifetime. Bacon famously asserted that if we could break down nature into its parts—her parts, he said—we would learn her secrets and thus be able to control her to our benefit. The tool he proposed for this conquest was analytical science.

Four hundred years later, I’d say the results are mixed, and questions need to be asked. Some of them are vital to our survival.

I’m no scientist, but my work as a writer is propelled by a spirit of restless inquiry, a lifelong habit of asking questions and then questioning the answers. I consider this spirit fundamental to any pursuit of knowledge, including science.

Bold Scientists emerged from my own fear, anger, and curiosity. I’m afraid for the earth, for imagination, for compassion, truth telling, humility, and common sense. We are so smart in our inventions that we believe we’re omniscient, and so powerful in our effects that we believe we’re omnipotent. But we are neither, and believing we are makes us crazy.

I’m angry because so few people hold so much power, with no just cause, and do so much harm with it. I’m angry because so many of us fail to exercise the limited but real power we still have. I include myself in that charge: it’s not that I do nothing, but neither do I do enough.

To satisfy my curiosity, I’ve searched for a range of scientists in Canada, the United States, and Central America who insist on revealing knowledge that the authorities would prefer to conceal. The scientists you meet here may seem a random selection, but I chose them carefully for who they are, what knowledge they pursue, what they find, and what they risk.

Bold Scientists plumbs the deepening fault lines between nature, science, and power. By nature I mean the universe, which is not of our making and in which we are becoming, more and more, a pest. By science I mean the pursuit of knowledge, which can be sought and used in infinite ways. And by power I mean the capacity to act, which all of us have.

Tyrants are fond of telling us there is no alternative. They lie. There are alternatives, always. When tyrants prevent us from seeing them, visionaries insist on imagining alternatives and fighting for them.

Bold Scientists emerges from that imagining and that fight. I think of it as an antidote to despair.

1

When the River Roared

AT KAWEHNO:KE the leaves have fallen. The air is crisp, the sky laden with dark cloud, winter pending. Traffic whines overhead, crossing the steel-grate bridge between Canada and the United States. Linking the two countries, the bridge stands squarely on Akwesasne Mohawk land. Off the island’s south shore, the bulk freighter Maccoa glides east. The freighter, registered in Cyprus, rides low in the water, its passage through the St. Lawrence Seaway marked by a deep throb.

Flowing around Kawehno:ke, named Cornwall Island by English invaders, the St. Lawrence River—so named by French invaders—licks at manicured shores and wetlands bustling with invisible life. On a windless day the river flows deep and flat, slate grey, silent. It wasn’t always so docile.

At his office at the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne, Environmental Science Officer Henry Lickers takes me back a few millennia. Some of our earliest stories about this area talk about a time when the river roared. Now, as a scientist I know that the last ice age occurred about fifteen thousand years ago, when a glacier came down and covered this area. Five thousand years or so later, a fault in the land shifted and split that tongue of ice. The ice had functioned like a dam, holding back an inland sea that covered the whole area of the present Great Lakes. When the dam gave way, this enormous volume of water flowed out to create the river. That’s when the river roared. As a biologist, I look at stories like this not as myths, but as sometimes really accurate accounts of how things were.

In my initial approach to Henry Lickers, I mentioned that I’d like to explore with him the deepening fault lines between nature, science, and power. What did he think, could we talk?

Henry replied, This question is most intriguing and has occupied much of my thoughts for many years. I’d say nature, science, and power can co-exist if they are viewed through a lens of peace. But used as engines of greed or commerce, they are unbridled and destructive. Yes, I think we should talk. He opened his reply with She:kon (How goes the way with you?) and closed with Sken:nen (May you go in peace). These, he tells me later, are elemental courtesies. Refreshing, I’d say, in this age of txt.

The power of stories

Of the Seneca Nation, Turtle Clan, and father of three children, Henry is a scientist who understands the power of stories, whether it’s other people’s held over your head, or your own, found and lived. He learned his stories young. Henry came into the world on May 1, 1947. A red letter day, he says, his long grey hair gathered and loosely tied behind his head. In the Celtic calendar that’s Beltane, when the dark of winter gives way to the light of spring.

He was born at home, on the kitchen table, in Six Nations of the Grand River, the only territory in North America where all six Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) nations live together. Henry got off to a rocky start. I was very premature, he says. They rushed me to hospital in Brantford, and from coming out so early, I’ve always had a tricky heart. On his bulletin board I notice a yellow Post-it, emphatically reminding: Take your pills!!

Back then, he continues, they used to put you on pure oxygen, which damages the eyes. So mine haven’t worked too well. Growing up I was always the sick kid—scarlet fever, rheumatic fever, and so on—and until eight or nine, I was the only one of thirteen kids [in the family] who couldn’t go outside. At the time that was horrible, the worst thing. Everyone else was out playing and my mother out working, but I had to stay home all day listening to my great-grandmother, my grandmother, my grandfather too when he came home at night. Now I realize this is when I took in all the legends, the stories of our people, in several languages—Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, a little Tuscarora. My grandparents and uncles would speak one of these when they talked about us kids, thinking none of us would understand. But I learned pretty quick! He chuckles with delight, or mischief.

Now I think, where would I be without those stories in my head? I can tell them to other people: this is where a particular reference comes from—like when the river roared—and this is what it means. Often they’ll say, I never heard that before, I had no idea.

At age twelve Henry moved with his mother to Toronto. The city was a huge shock to me, he says. "It seemed crazy. I grew up in a traditional family and believed the whole world was like that. So I did what I knew best. For a few years I ran a trap line from Dufferin Street to Yonge Street, in an alley that runs across the north side of Bloor. I caught the biggest raccoons you ever saw, skunks, squirrels, and I made really good money at it because nobody else was doing that.

I also harvested geese in High Park. I would go down there on my bike with a bag of popcorn and a stick, and on any given night I could collect four, five geese. It was easy, and nobody seemed to care. If you went after geese on the reserve, you had to really prepare because they were wily as hell; they knew enough to avoid you. Not in High Park. I had been taught the ceremonies, so I’d always do those whenever I caught geese. Then I’d bring them home, pluck and prepare them, and my mother would cook them up into a really good stew that she loved to make and I loved to eat. A chuckle follows, marking a fond memory.

Henry survived high school, but emerged with marks too low for the big old universities. However, a small new one called Trent had just opened in Peterborough, Ontario, and they asked him to come for an interview. On a dismal transcript, the biology and geography department heads had spotted two surprises: 98 per cent in biology, 97 per cent in geography. Henry remembers being nervous and tongue-tied until they asked him what books he’d been reading. Sparked, he launched into a passionate, detailed account of one he had just finished, Treatise on Limnology, by George Evelyn Hutchinson.

After a while one of them tried to interrupt me, but I said, No, no, you’ve gotta hear this. The ecology of lakes, carbon cycling—this stuff is so vital to life! Then they said, Okay, okay, you’re in. The next four years was just as exciting for me, all that learning—I needed thirty courses and took thirty-eight! He also married at Trent.

To pursue graduate studies, Henry won a Queen Victoria scholarship, originally intended for Native students but apparently a well-kept secret; no one had applied since the late 1800s. The university had to be somewhere in the empire, so my wife and I said, Let’s go someplace in the world where nobody we know has ever been. We picked New Zealand and went to the University of Waikato. It was quite exciting, for a biologist, to walk off the plane there and the only plant I recognized was a dandelion!

Soon enough, the excitement wore off. Whether you’re an undergrad or a graduate student, the approach to education there was very British—you learn what they tell you, and then you repeat it back to them. I was working on the ecology of the black swan population, and discovered that the wildlife service was this old boys’ club that managed New Zealand like an English estate. They would bring in any species they liked, and they succeeded in destroying 90 per cent of the swan’s natural habitat. I disagreed with that approach, got a kind of Ducks Unlimited started, and ended up fighting with half my professors.

At the same time, he was working with Maori young warriors, Nga Tamatoa, on a battle over land. Interesting how things come around in your life, says Henry. There was this Maori sacred site, taken by the Ministry of Defence during the war. It was supposed to be given back, but the government refused. Instead it was going to become a golf course—sound familiar? It does: in 1990, Mohawks in Kanesatake (near Oka, Quebec) resisted municipal plans to turn a burial ground of theirs into a golf course. The government responded with a massive seventy-eight-day police/army siege, to remind the Mohawks of their place. Still unresolved, the confrontation left deep rifts and scars.

[In New Zealand] there were huge demonstrations that I took part in and helped organize. I was also a riding manager for the Labour Party, and we actually managed to get our candidate elected. Doing these things strengthened my belief in myself, but as you can imagine, they don’t win you any friends in the conservative government that came in. They told me, either toe the line or they’d revoke my student visa. It was tough—Do I keep my head down and get my degree, or do I do what I think is right?—but once that line was drawn, it was relatively easy to decide.

Land where the partridge drums

Back in Canada, Henry was offered a chance to study for a PhD, but by then he’d had enough of the academic mill. Instead he went to Ottawa to look for a job with the federal Department of Indian Affairs. "So what do they do? They see a kid with biology, geography, and computer science majors, and they offer me a job in housing. Housing? What am I supposed to do with that? I came out the door, and ran into one of the Trent professors who interviewed me. He had just come from a meeting at Environment Canada, and he said, A First Nation community—St. Regis near Cornwall—needs a biologist. Why don’t you go work for them? I came down here, talked to the chief for about an hour, and he said, You’re hired; can you start this Thursday? We’ve got a meeting and I’d like you to be there." Henry was there.

And here he is today, in what was the St. Regis Mohawk reserve, named after a Jesuit priest, but now called Akwesasne, a nation of about thirteen thousand people. Reclaimed by Mohawks, the ancient name means land where the ruffed grouse (or partridge) drums—a drumming sound made with the wings is part of the bird’s mating show. But even the naming, like everything else here, is complicated by the fact that Akwesasne straddles not only the St. Lawrence River but also two imposing national entities, two provinces, and a state, all of them only a short bridge away.

Henry explains the jurisdictional maze like this: "On the northern portion of our community, which Canada claims, is the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne; on the southern portion, which the American government claims, is the St. Regis Mohawk Tribal Council. Over both of those is the Mohawk Nation Council of Chiefs, the traditional sovereign government of Akwesasne. We put it this way: the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne extends to its people the programs and projects that the Canadian government provides by law to Aboriginal people in Canada. On the St. Regis side, the same is true vis-à-vis the U.S. government.

At the people level, a Mohawk who lives in Canada is also registered in the U.S., and vice versa, so, for example, we can access health care in both. We fought two really big, long fights in court. First to get recognition that we are all Mohawks, one nation we call Kanien’kehá:ka; then to get recognition that as a sovereign nation, we have a right to land claimed by both Canada and the U.S., and to services promised by both. Just because governments change doesn’t mean treaties cease to exist. The problem is you’re never quite sure what they’re going to say or do next.

The traditional form of Mohawk government that Henry mentions emerged organically from ancient laws and cultural practices. In many First Nations or American Indian territories it co-exists, or contends, with the band/ tribal council government, a structure imposed by colonial pressure. The two forms are radically different in both processes and outcomes. Since one is favoured and the other often opposed by the colonial regimes, clashes are not uncommon between adherents of the two forms of government. In Akwesasne, people have worked hard for the past three decades to build a more collaborative relationship between the elected Mohawk Council of Akwesasne and the traditional Mohawk Nation Council of Chiefs.

Henry identifies as traditional. As our conversation evolves, it becomes clear what this means. In 1976, when he launched the Akwesasne Department of the Environment, he wouldn’t have told the band council [he] was traditional because there was more conflict then. He explains, I would have been on the outside, where I couldn’t have done my job. But now almost all of us in the department are traditional people, and the council pretty much says, You guys know how to take care of the environment, so we’ll leave you to it.

The river was abundant

I ask Henry what ecological changes he’s seen in his four decades here. The big changes came earlier, he replies, with the Seaway. "We have people here who remember how things were before the Seaway came. Atlantic salmon used to run the whole river, right up into Lake Ontario. If you look at middens [ancient domestic dump sites] of our people from thousands of years ago, it’s not unusual to find salmon, sturgeon, eel, and white bass bones, lots of them, which means those were probably the major food fish here. All of them are gone now. And we grew corn, beans, and squash—the staples, what we call the Three Sisters—in abundance, so much that by 1930s, during the Depression, we sent the excess to Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto for the soup kitchens.

Here on the island we think [that by 1950] there were seventy-three barns, close to two thousand head of dairy cattle that supplied two cheese factories here, and thousands of gallons of milk and cream to nine dairies in Cornwall. You can still find the records. So here you see a people very dependent on an abundant environment. Some worked away—usually in high-steel construction—but they had a good life here, good food, taught their kids, had the structures they needed to maintain themselves. And most important, they had the river, the abundant river. Then the Seaway hit.

Having grown up in Montreal, I remember the orchestrated thrill when the Seaway opened in 1959, Queen Elizabeth and President Eisenhower waving grandly from the royal yacht. The St. Lawrence Seaway, the media trumpeted—an engineering marvel. The great river was bullied into a 3,700-kilometre marine highway for commerce from the Atlantic Ocean to Lake Ontario, and then on to Lake Superior, through a series of locks that lifted ships 183.5 metres from sea level to the final lake.

What were its repercussions for Akwesasne? Huge, Henry replies. "By inserting the locks and power dams [one of them a little upstream from Cornwall Island], they changed the water environment radically from open river to a series of interconnecting lakes. Of course the fish changed accordingly, from species like the Atlantic salmon that used to run the whole river to lake fish—pike, bass, perch, pickerel. But even those had a hard time due to all the contaminants.

Industry saw the Seaway as a highway to and from the ocean, to bring things in and take things out; also a cheap source of power from the dams. Late fifties through the seventies it was boom time on the river—pulp and paper plants, rayon, nylon, chemicals, and on the U.S. side, aluminum smelting and industries that used it. All those industries figured the easiest solution to pollution was dilution, so the river became a huge sewer, right down to the Gulf and out to the Atlantic.

This was the alarming reality faced in 1976 by the new Akwesasne Department of the Environment. There were just two of us then, says Henry. "We ran around looking at everything we could, trying to figure out what was going on and what we could do about it. The first big issue to hit here was fluoride from the aluminum plants [Reynolds and Alcoa, both upstream and upwind from Akwesasne], which we discovered was killing cattle on the island. We researched that for a number of years, and in 1980 Irving Selikoff from Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City did probably the largest health study ever done on Native people in Canada.

They came here, but unfortunately seven thousand people is considered too small a sample for a proper epidemiological study—remember, it took millions of people studied to show that cigarettes cause lung cancer. They said they could find no significant medical dysfunction among the people at Akwesasne, but concluded that there would likely be problems in the future. Thirty years later, we’re starting to see some of those problems, but nobody has the heart or the will to go after the industries.

Following our afternoon together, Henry will go over to the town of Massena on the New York side for a meeting on cleanup plans for the Grasse River, which feeds into the St. Lawrence. High levels of toxic PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) persist in the river bottom, residues from an abandoned generating station and the Alcoa plant. In an early attempt at cleanup, the company tried to cap the river bottom so that the chemicals could be contained. The plan failed. Next they tried sucking up the sludge for burial on Alcoa’s property. That seems to be about all they can come up with, to bury everything. But some of our people are saying, No, you can’t do that, it won’t work. It will just leach into the soil, and eventually the PCBs will end up—well, guess where.

Sovereignty = survival

Each of these environmental assaults represents the costs of manifest destiny, a colonial conceit that presumes a God-given mission to civilize others by conquest. It’s a mission that meshes smoothly with capitalism. Historically, Canada and the United States have both been in frequent conflict with the Haudenosaunee, the People of the Longhouse, including the Mohawk nation. For these communities, says Henry, the long struggle for our rights has sharpened how we understand ourselves in relation to the world around us. It has forced us to develop a strong sense of sovereignty, and to fight for it when we have to.

Sovereignty. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as a country’s independent authority and the right to govern itself. Then it adds, more broadly, freedom from external control.

The insatiable ambitions of manifest destiny often require Indigenous land. To the high priests of manifest destiny there is no such thing as Indigenous land, and history suggests that anyone who gets in the colonizers’ way is first a problem, then a threat, then a target. At Akwesasne and across continents, in any place invaded and occupied by imperial power, the struggle for sovereignty—freedom from external control—is driven by the elemental instinct to survive.

The same story is told the length and breadth of Turtle Island, as the land now called North America is named in Haudenosaunee creation stories: in the southwestern United States, Navajos fight uranium mining and nuclear waste dumping on their land; in northern Canada, Lubicon and Cree fight the devastation of land, water, and air by tar sands mining; in eastern Canada, Elsipogtog and Mi’kmaq fight toxic hydraulic fracturing of the earth to extract gas; in southern Chile, Mapuche fight the corporate plundering of Indigenous forests for export . . .

A short history of the long struggle at Akwesasne illustrates how the story goes:

1794: The Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation, Between His Britannic Majesty and The United States of America (the Jay Treaty) is signed. Article III acknowledges the age-old right of Indians to freely cross the newly created border by land or by water, and to do so with no duties imposed on their trade.

1925: In dismissing charges against a Mohawk high-steel worker accused of illegal immigration from Canada to the United States, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that Mohawks are an imperium in imperio, a nation within a nation, and are thus not restricted by Canada–U.S. border rules.

1929: The U.S. Supreme Court rules that the Jay Treaty was terminated by the War of 1812. Since then other courts have made other rulings on the matter, back and forth, to and fro . . .

1950s: St. Lawrence Seaway construction takes Akwesasne Mohawk land, especially on the U.S. side, and creates havoc in the fisheries. Construction of the south and north channel bridges in 1958 and 1962 takes more Mohawk land. In 1958, when Lake St. Lawrence is created to feed the new hydroelectric dam, it floods several thousand acres of Mohawk land.

1956: The Canadian Supreme Court rules that Mohawk Louis Francis has to pay duties on U.S. goods he’d brought into Akwesasne (the Canadian side), arguing that the Jay Treaty has no force in Canada because it has never been ratified by the Canadian government.

1968, autumn: The Canadian government imposes duties on all goods valued over five dollars, including food, brought into Akwesasne from the U.S. side.

1968, December: To protest this imposition of federal duties, which directly contravenes the Jay Treaty, Akwesasne Mohawks blockade the Seaway International Bridge. Forty-seven protesters are arrested. The duties are not cancelled.

1983: In Ottawa, the Special Parliamentary Committee on Indian Self-Government recommends that Parliament take immediate steps to implement Article III of the Jay Treaty. By 2013 it had still not done so.

1988: Along with several other First Nation chiefs and about four hundred Akwesasne Mohawks, Grand Chief Michael Kanentakeron Mitchell walks across the Seaway International Bridge from the United States into Canada. They bring with them goods for community use and as gifts for the Tyendinaga Mohawk community, west of Akwesasne. Grand Chief Mitchell is arrested, charged with violations of the Customs Act, and tried in the Federal Court of Canada.

1997: Finally the Federal Court rules that the Mohawk people do indeed have an Aboriginal right to pass freely across what is now the Canada–U.S. border, and the right to bring goods from the United States into Canada for personal and