Skip to main content

Happy World Oceans Day from North Carolina!

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American


It’s World Oceans Day today (in North Carolina it’s “No It’s Not!” Day), so the moment seemed opportune for a very brief followup on the Plugged-In post of a week or so ago about the NC state legislature considering a law that would make it all kinds of illegal for you to try to figure out what the ocean was likely to do in the next century. That in turn generated a bit of attention for the pure madness that passes for legislation in my state of North Carolina.

Some of the news since then is terrible – I got a lot of pushback (look for it on my Facebook page, on June 1) about my post being “hysterical North Carolina bashing,” what with the legislation being merely floated and having no actual champion. Well, that’s changed: the legislation has since then passed –unanimously! – out of the NC Senate’s Environment, Agriculture, and Natural Resources Committee, and its on-the-record champion is state senator David Rouzer, a Republican “Young Gun” currently looking to take his message of “Science is dumb” to the U.S. Congress. The NC Senate, perhaps abashed to consider such absurdity on World Oceans Day, will discuss the matter further next week.

Some of the news is better. The Colbert Report took the NC legislators to task for their knuckleheaddery, which has helped draw more attention to both NC and oceanic reality.


On supporting science journalism

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.


North Carolinians like me still hope that shining a light on this will keep this legislation from going much further, but then again we thought shining a light on it the first time would keep it from going any further at all. With the whole world laughing at them, the members of the committee voted unanimously to move forward. So our hopes, though high, are diminished.

By the way – if you’re wondering, here’s the report the NC Coastal Resources Commission first requested and then rejected.

And here, once again, is the original legislation the hopes to make it illegal not only for anybody not in the Division of Coastal Management to develop a sea level rise estimate (including, many fear, the university science departments themselves) but for anybody at all to make such an estimate based on anything but linear projection of the historical record.

So: happy World Oceans Day from North Carolina, where some of us expect to have a lot more oceans to love over the next century, and others want to put those of us who believe that in jail.

 

Scott Huler was born in 1959 in Cleveland and raised in that city's eastern suburbs. He graduated from Washington University in 1981; he was made a member of Phi Beta Kappa because of the breadth of his studies, and that breadth has been a signature of his writing work. He has written on everything from the death penalty to bikini waxing, from NASCAR racing to the stealth bomber, for such newspapers as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Los Angeles Times and such magazines as ESPN, Backpacker, and Fortune. His award-winning radio work has been heard on "All Things Considered" and "Day to Day" on National Public Radio and on "Marketplace" and "Splendid Table" on American Public Media. He has been a staff writer for the Philadelphia Daily News and the Raleigh News & Observer and a staff reporter and producer for Nashville Public Radio. He was the founding and managing editor of the Nashville City Paper. He has taught at such colleges as Berry College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His books include Defining the Wind, about the Beaufort Scale of wind force, and No-Man's Lands, about retracing the journey of Odysseus. His most recent book, On the Grid, was his sixth. His work has been included in such compilations as Appalachian Adventure and in such anthologies as Literary Trails of the North Carolina Piedmont, The Appalachian Trail Reader and Speed: Stories of Survival from Behind the Wheel. For 2014-2015 Scott is a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, which is funding his work on the Lawson Trek, an effort to retrace the journey of explorer John Lawson through the Carolinas in 1700-1701. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife, the writer June Spence, and their two sons.

More by Scott Huler