Abstracts

Sunday, February 25

4:30 – 6:30 Session 3

3A. Artist as Visionary: Artist as Environmentalist

Ben Linder Room, Erb Memorial Union

Chairs: Deborah Kennedy and Ruth Wallen

Coming Home To Water

Erica Fielder

Despite the discoveries by Copernicus and Darwin, most western humans still think we reside at the center of the universe and are the end product of billions of years of evolution. Such a stance disregards the interdependence of all species and fosters the creation of a spiritless, consumer-based society. In 1975, uncomfortable with this arrogant humanism, I began searching for a spiritual connection between my art and my community work as a naturalist and environmental activist. This investigation brought me to the following conclusion: Our ecological misfit can only be adjusted through a shift in affiliation with life. Necessarily starting with the personal, this new engagement must ultimately permeate all scientific, social and political efforts that attempt to heal the damage we have caused.

Experiments within my own bioregion led me to recognize how the role of watershed connects us to the lives of all beings and guided me into creating an art aimed at revealing and changing our culture's human-centered beliefs. Thus, I make art meant to stimulate a sense of recognition of our place among watershed systems and their inhabitants. This art consists of participatory projects such as "Returning The Bones." Here I give people a salmon bone to place in their habitat's water. Each person also receives a postcard to send back with their written insights about locating their watershed and placing the bone. A world map, with bone sites marked, indicates the spread of watershed sensibilities.

Everything Starts with a Thought: Conceptual Environmental Art

Deborah Kennedy

My artwork seeks to translate environmental issues and information into compelling experiences for my audiences. For example, while I was researching the future of high technology for a public art project, the field of industrial ecology caught my attention. In this hybrid discipline, technology and ecology work together synergistically, rather than in opposition to each other. This synergy is generating many promising ideas and practices needed to ensure a viable future for our biosphere. Some businesses are applying environmental principles like reduce, reuse, and recycle, to their methods of production and distribution. These and other thought provoking ideas from the field of industrial ecology shaped my public art project, EcoTech. This work features a technically demanding melding of metallurgy and stone. This fusion suggests the overall theme of the piece: rethinking and redesigning our technological systems so they operate in a bio-compatible manner.

My next project was guided by Einstein's idea that "no problem can be solved by the consciousness that created it." Our attempts to improve environmental conditions so often replicate our old mistakes (like the gasoline additive MTBE). New ways of thinking that can help us find lasting solutions to our environmental problems are needed. Human intelligence can be integrated with the wisdom of nature, as in the new fields of biomimicry and living machines.

A new more holistic way of thinking can help us understand the interconnectedness of the complex living environments that sustain us. These and other related ideas informed four installations in my university gallery exhibition entitled, Nature Speaks.

Red Light, Green Light: Ecoart Signals Community- Based Restoration

Susan Leibovitz Steinman

Restoring the ecological integrity of urban communities is critical. Poor neighborhoods suffer disproportionate physical and mental health degradation. When money is needed for jobs, housing and education, ecoart appears an unlikely tool for successful community building. The opposite is true. Ecoart is shown to be a viable pragmatic cross-disciplinary strategy for restoration of native habitat, community health, urban beauty and hope.

California artist S. L. Steinman works with two sets of complementary ecoart methodologist: 1. “Red light” are improvisational temporary installations that call attention to conservation issues. 2. “Green light” are projects that meld art and ecology with urban planning and landscape design. The art process involves a multi-year commitment to community building, collaboration, green education, green employment, and healthy habitat restoration.

If Frogs Sicken and Die, What Will Happen to the Princes? A Time for New Stories

Ruth Wallen, Goddard College

Ecological art can serve as a powerful advocate for the health of the planet. Grounded in an ethos that focuses on inter-relationships, ecological art explores the interactions between physical and biological pathways as well as the cultural, political and historical aspects of ecological systems. Artists act not only as interpreters and translators of scientific research but can propose new ways that scientific understanding can be applied to policy and planning decisions. As a first step, artwork can illicit a sense of empathy and interrelationship with the natural world. The artist can also help illuminate the assumptions that inform science as well as basic values informing environmental policy decisions. Most importantly ecological artists can create new metaphors and new stories that envision alternative possibilities for the future.

In my presentation I will illustrate claims for the potential for ecological art with examples from my own work. In several projects I use macrophotography to produce a detailed record of changes over time, and through the conflation of time and scale, illustrate larger environmental processes. View Points, an interactive nature walk, includes informational plaques that end with a question as well as viewing scopes that frame and distort view, challenging preconceptions about the local environment. My most recent project uses the frog as an indicator species in broadest sense of term, exploring what the representation of the frog tells us about the changing human relationship to the environment.

Ways of Seeing: An Ecological Education

Patricia Watts

The most pressing issue certainly in this new century is the global environment. In an effort to raise environmental awareness we need to create interesting and inspiring ways to educate the public about the ecological issues at hand and the ways in which we can live sustainably. Today in the post-industrial era, humans are longing to reconnect with nature. While we once had a sense that nature could supply endless resources, we now know that our own survival is at risk. Over the last thirty years, we have awakened to a global over population problem with the terrifying responsibility of conservation and restoration.

Ecological education through artistic practices has been explored since the 1960s, however, only in the last ten years has it evolved to the point that is demanding academic attention. Artists are currently working in collaboration with scientists and public officials restoring sites as environmental art installations. Reclamation of brown fields, filtration of rivers, and restoration of wetlands are activities that are being approached through creativity and aesthetics. These artists are concerned with educating the public by creating a dialogue with the communities in which they are working.

Creating new ways of perceiving and relating with nature aesthetically is a powerful ecological educational tool. Through visual interactions in the natural world humans can conceptually and metaphorically interpret their relationship with nature. The opportunity for implementing an artistic vision in restoring our earth and influencing how we live our daily lives will inspire the passion that needs to take place in order for society to change.

3B. Cyborg Meditations: Rethinking Dualisms

Fir Room, Erb Memorial Union

Chair: Linda Kintz, University of Oregon

Self-Deselection: Technopsychotic Annihilation via Cyborg

Chris Crittenden, Department of Philosophy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

The cry that advanced machines will come to dominate human beings resounds from the time of the Luddites up to the current consternation by the chief scientist of Sun Microsystems Bill Joy. My theme is a twist on this fear: self-deselection, the possibility that humans will voluntarily combine their own bodies with technological enhancements to the point where it could be reasonably said that our species has been replaced by another kind of entity, a hybrid of human and radical enhancement, whether that enhancement stems from genetic alteration or the affixing of robotic parts. The paper discusses why this danger exists, focusing mainly on perilous psychological and cultural tendencies (though the amazing rate of technological change and its likely course are discussed). It then proceeds with arguments as to why such deselection is a kind of suicide and why such suicide would be a bad thing in the context of early 21st century society. In the last portion, ecofeminist theory is employed to sketch a therapeutic model of social and political relationship that contrasts with a patriarchal model of dominative control through aggressive technologies.

Beholding Nature's Agency: Imagining a “Biology of Subjects”: Embodying Vision in Developmental Biology

Natasha Myers, Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University

Theorizing embodiment in relation to biology opens up a broad terrain of discourses that challenge the disembodied onto-epistemologies that inform science practice. The erasure of both the scientist’s and the organism’s agency in ‘objective’ scientific knowledge production forestalls accountability and impedes the integration of ethics into the practice of biology. Neo-Darwinian, molecular genetic approaches to developmental biology often depict organisms as the accidental ‘objects’ of evolutionary forces and autonomic gene action. How might biological practice be transformed to recognize and respect the multiple and shifting modes of embodiment of both the biologist and the organism? Drawing on theories of embodiment in feminist science studies and in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, this paper investigates the possibility of integrating an eco-feminist and phenomenological framework into a ‘biology of subjects.’ Rooted in an organicist approach to development, this paper extends Donna Haraway’s theory of embodied objectivity and Merleau-Ponty’s notions of ‘the flesh,’ movement and intentionality, and the embodiment of vision, to imagine a biology that can ‘behold nature’s agency’ in the developmental ‘dance’ of organisms caught up in the dynamic processes of ‘becoming.’ This paper presents a critique of fixed-frame imaging strategies in biology which reduce the dynamics of developmental processes to static images and mechanistic analyses of single gene action. In the spirit of cyborg feminist subversions, this paper proposes creative possibilities for reclaiming new and emerging video-based technologies that can follow living organisms fluidly through developmental time, and ‘make visible’ the embodiment, movement and intentionality of organisms in their very ontogeny.

3C. From Estuary to Laboratory - and Back?

Walnut Room, Erb Memorial Union

Chair: Christopher Preston, University of South Carolina

Pure Science in a Polluted Environment

Alfred Nordmann, Philosophy Department, University of South Carolina

This paper applies the suggestions of "classical" laboratory studies to the researches and publications of the MARE-group. It explores in a skeptical manner the tension between scientific research and environmental citizenship.

In the typical, physically enclosed laboratory of physics the objects of study are already isolated from their natural environment. The floating laboratory of the MARE-group therefore needs to work much harder to transform phenomena of experience into scientific data. Even the many definitions of their object of study (geophysical, hydrological, chemical, biological) suggest that they cannot study an estuary as a whole but most delimit a site at which it presents itself in a definite manner. All estuaries extend as far as tidal action reaches or as far as salinity is measurable, etc., that is, they have no clear bounds and are best studied where tidal action is strong or salinity significant. However, the ideal location where the dilution of sea-water is strong enough to produce a gravitational movement of water masses is by definition a place where the dilution of run-off from adjacent paper-mills is so weak as to be undetectable. Similarly, the movement of and emissions from the floating laboratory itself are "subtracted" to allow a clean representation of the relationship between chosen variables.

Good science controls and corrects for polluting factors. As long as the idea of a "successor science" remains elusive, there also remains an unbridgable gap between the aesthetic or socio-political appreciation of the polluted estuary and the observation of pure scientific data.

Science as Citizenship: From Estuary to Policy

Christopher Preston, Philosophy Department, University of South Carolina

This paper will use insights drawn from contemporary science studies to argue that the field research of USC’s MARE group in coastal South Carolina’s Winyah Bay yields exactly the kind of experimental data that should be used to inform environmental policy. In sharp contrast to the other critical paper in this panel, I will argue that the control and correction of ‘polluting factors’ that the complexities of the estuary demands is not the problem that it might first appear. Contemporary science studies demands that the work of the MARE group should be reflexively situated relative to a number of variables. These variables include (but are not limited to) the goals of the research team, the limits and pressures provided by the particular research environment, the technologies used to collect the data, and modes of presentation of the research results. Contrary to the views expressed by the other panelist, I will argue that these levels of situatedness do not taint the results. On the contrary, I will support Donna Haraway’s contention that it is exactly this situating process that makes the data objective. Moreover, the kind of objectivity that this situating allows makes the data particularly well tailored to inform publicly negotiated environmental decision-making.

To Situate or not to Situate, that is the Question for Student Scientists of MARE

Douglas F. Williams, Stefka Eddins, and Peter Sederberg, Marine Science Program, University of South Carolina

The Marine and Aquatic Research Experience (MARE; mare, Latin for sea) program is a model for hands-on, team-based, environmental science research and education for undergraduates by undergraduates. The overall goal of MARE is to enhance the learning opportunities for students aspiring to become scientists, for students to practice being scientists from conception, to planning, to execution of scientific tasks. MARE was originally conceived by undergraduates as an opportunity to study the environmental health of a major estuary with potential impacts from industry (pulp and steel mills), agriculture and development (residential, commercial and recreational, especially golf courses and marinas). This adopted estuary, a dynamic and ever changing laboratory, is part of the second largest watershed on the eastern seaboard. The idea of students adopting such a major estuary, connected to such a complicated watershed, is both ambitious and naïve. Understanding this system completely is beyond the reach of any individual student or even assemblage of student members within the span of their time in college. And yet, MARE is thriving not despite these challenges but because of them.

MARE is unusual in many other fundamental aspects from most undergraduate research experiences. Its philosophical underpinning is Research-Based Learning (Eddins et al., 1997;Eddins and Williams, 1997a,b). We as faculty mentors guide the MARE activities but do not exert direction except when safety, legal or potentially erroneous procedures are involved, especially in regard to data collection, archival and interpretation. As MARE mentors we attempt to keep our perspectives, biases and viewpoints to a minimum. During the panel discussion we will try to describe what it is like watching these young people learn to situate even as they do not realize that they are dealing with not only some essential elements of learning but also some fundamental issues in contemporary science studies.

Moving Targets: Evolving Science Studies of an Evolving System

S. Armstrong, B. Glett, R.T. Pumphery, L. Wise, M. Clouse, J. Durant, M. Ranhofer, E. Majzlik, T. Jett, and C. Durham, MARE (The Marine and Aquatic Research Experience)

The Marine and Aquatic Research Experience (MARE) program for undergraduates investigates the interaction of oceanic tidal pumping and land area inputs of both atmospheric and anthropogenic derivation in order to study the environmental health of a major estuary called Winyah Bay. MARE consists of an undergraduate, interdisciplinary, research scientist community. The program and the individual student scientists are continuously evolving to meet the challenges of studying a broad set of environmental and anthropogenic variables. The MARE student scientists have organized themselves into various disciplinary “crews”, each with a leader, a couple of advisors, and a faculty representative assembly. The amount of resources also evolve as the student scientists gain credibility by the conducting research expeditions, making professional presentations at scientific meetings, and writing grant proposals for funding. Setting research priorities begins with the crew meetings. These are often informal sessions in which knowledge and experience are exchanged, data sets and results are reviewed, and ideas are discussed. Each crew then steps forward at a MARE membership meeting, presenting proposals for investigation. The ideas and plans are heard and, pending membership approval for allocation of MARE resources, a float plan for the next expedition is drafted. Members of other crews are free to step forward presenting ideas and seeking approval to have their plans incorporated into the float plan of the next expedition. The float plan includes the vessels required, human resources needed for specific duties, necessary instrumentation, fuel and food resources required. This float plan is reviewed several times over, by the general membership, the assembly, and the treasurer. Funding is approved, vessels and essential instruments are reserved, and schedules are drafted. Each crew is expected to produce a cruise report following each research expedition. This includes procedures, participants, instruments, as well as data, and results. The information discussed in preparing such a report tends to produce material which can then be applied to local, regional and national conferences, in which the dedicated participants are encouraged to participate.

The rewards for these efforts are not tied to course credit. Instead, each MARE student scientist derives something in relation to what is put forth. MARE includes students from a variety of disciplines. It is true that most students are from the discipline of marine science, and as a vague domain, in itself provides for a broad opinion of what is MARE’s relationship with the environment. Many individuals have grown a sort of feeling or ‘place in their heart’ for Winyah Bay. Many others feel that Winyah Bay is a laboratory that provides a wonderful resource for study. Either way, we all agree that the Winyah Bay system is influenced by many variables and literally changes with the weather. We also feel that the MARE program is continuously evolving to better understand the processes involved in the great and challenging Winyah Bay system and to meet the needs of its growing and expanding community of student scientists.

3D. Taking Interdisciplinarity Seriously

Library Browsing Room, Knight Library

Chair: Irene Klaver, University of North Texas

The main thesis of our panel is that 'taking nature seriously' implies 'taking interdisciplinarity seriously.' We explore the preconditions, possibilities, necessities and limits of interdisciplinarity, specifically in relation to environmental issues. Coming from different scientific and humanistic disciplines, we will discuss how 'taking nature/interdisciplinarity seriously' necessitates a cooperation of the sciences and humanities. Thinking about environmental problems and decision-making in environmental politics entails a complex mixture of interdependent scientific, political, social, cultural and conceptual factors.

Underlying these networks of inter-activity is the possibility of accessibility of the different approaches. Translation is crucial in this context. Translation is facilitated through mutual concerns and the explicit determining of intermediate cases, so-called boundary objects. These are 'vehicles' that invite translation and connection of different worlds, cultures or social groups with various, if not mutually exclusive, interests. They lead to cooperation and generalization across boundaries without reducing heterogenous worlds to a uniform consensus. Especially in the realm of creating/discovering these intermediaries, interaction between sciences and humanities can be fruitful.

Ultimately a re-conceptualization of nature and culture is at stake in which the two are seen as entertwined, their borders porous and continuously shifting. In our panel we will take up the political and trans-disciplinary ramifications of this boundary-crossing/shifting and argue that only through these processes we begin to take nature seriously.

Panelists: Richard Grusin, English/Cultural Studies, Georgia Institute of Technology; Irene Klaver, Environmental Philosophy, University of North Texas; Tom Lapoint, Environmental Science/Biology, University of North Texas; Jay Stratton Noller, Department of Soil Science, Oregon State University

3E. Environmental Histories: Morals, Myths, and Burdens

Maple Room, Erb Memorial Union

Chair: Madronna Holden, Linfield College

The Mammoth: Endangered Species or Vanishing Race?

Gordon Sayre, Department of English, University of Oregon

Paleoecologist Paul S. Martin is the foremost advocate of the theory of Prehistoric Overkill, which holds that the pleistocene megafauna of North America, notably the mastodon, were driven extinct by human hunters. I interpret Martin's proposal in light of the critique of his theory by American Indian historian Vine Deloria Jr., and against eighteenth and nineteenth-century American writers' speculations about the relations between mastodons and humans. At a conference last year, Prof. Martin proposed reintroducing the elephant to the desert Southwest, a step that he claimed could help restore the region's native grasslands. His proposal implied that modern humans might atone for the ecological damage done by their prehistoric forbears if we treated the elephant, which like the mastodon belongs to the order Proboscidea, as an endangered species. But should the paleolithic people of the Clovis point culture, who hunted mammoths, be identified with Native Americans or with colonial Europeans? A remarkable 1839 novel, Behemoth: A Legend of the Mound Builders, proposes that the last mastodon was killed in an epic battle against this mysterious ancient civilization of the Ohio Valley. I believe that images of the mastodon, or mammoth, are bound up with ideological claims about who is "native" to North America, and who is an invader. The mammoth has alternately been identified as the avatar of the continent's nature fallen victim to invaders from Siberia, or as a savage threat to the continent's ancient civilized inhabitants.

Country: The Real Human Rights

Deborah Rose, Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, The Australian National University

Aboriginal Australians use the term ‘country’ to refer to their homelands. Each country is the focus and source of Indigenous law and life practice, and each is a communicative system within which responsibilities and reciprocities are recursive. To use the Levinas's term, country is a ‘nourishing terrain’; emplaced practices of care become productive in the flourishing of life through time in place.

The late David Burrumarra, a philosophical thinker from North Australia, defined responsibilities to country as ‘the real human rights’. He thus articulated a practice of human rights that is folded into the conjunction of social and ecological justice. In this paper I explore some of the implications of his view for settler societies where both rights and responsibilities are contested across cultural, historical, and political divides. In particular, I will consider the possibilities revealed by an intersubjective ethic of care that demands responsibilities and knowledge, and that requires settlers to understand the burdens of their environmental histories. My purpose is to open a path toward a reparative theory of knowledge, and reparative practice in the world.

The Myth of Wild Nature in Early America

Paul Semonin, independent scholar

The Eyes of the Earth Are Looking at You: Nature, Culture, and Conscience

Madronna Holden, Linfield College

Western views of nature pose well-known hazards for the development of conscience. The belief that humanity is above nature has justified oppressive treatment both of the natural world and of human beings associated with nature. Further, images of human nature as linked to aggression, competition, and territoriality have justified oppressive, even genocidal behavior as not only inevitable but even adaptive. There is, however, a contrasting image of nature-- in which nature is viewed not as an excuse for human brutality, but the standard for human conscience. This is the view of nature developed by this land's original peoples. As Scott Momaday points out, between the mastodon hunter and the arrival of Euroamerican settlers, there were a hundred centuries for the indigenous residents of this land to learn a sense of ecological conscience. The archeological history of the Northwest's original peoples suggests the increasing adaptation of their culture to the land over their some l0, 000 years of residence here.

Chehalis/Chinook elder Henry Cultee summarized the ethic of his people in the refrain repeated to children as they trained for the vision that would reveal to them the course of their lives: "The eyes of the earth are looking at you." This paper will sketch aspects of this ethical system of the land's original peoples-- in which nature is viewed as the standard of human conscience. And in conclusion, it will offer a few examples of what it might mean to hold to this standard in contemporary environmental policy.

3F. Community Science: The Essential Dialogue

Gerlinger Lounge, Gerlinger Hall

Chair: Lynne Fessenden, University of Oregon

Conservation Volunteers: Why We Need Community Science

Anna Carr, Centre for Resource & Environmental Studies, Australian National University

In this paper we review the notion of community science. We argue for the inclusion of the community in science not just to involve the public, or have the public understand science and scientific methods but to illustrate the necessity of having community practitioners do science. We believe that community science is not simply a way to have the public ‘participate’ in professional science. Nor is it a knowledge tradition which is to be contrasted with professional science as practiced in universities and science agencies.

First we identify the contemporary contexts and catalysts for the rise of community science. Second, we address questions of boundaries such as; how does community science differ from agency science from civic science; from citizen science?. Third we will identify various models of community science with respect to criteria such as primary activity, level of participation and geographic and temporal scale of activity. Lastly we identify those factors which will facilitate community science projects and policies.

We argue that it is time to take community science more seriously. It has come of age in an era where risk and uncertainty are prevalent. Therefore, we need to hear from more voices in the community. We need more perspectives on what counts and why. We need more positions and situated knowledge traditions. Community science is a collaborative effort and only through a dialogue between people whose voices are regularly excluded and those privileged in the scientific tradition will we develop the trust and necessary relationships for a just and sustainable society.

Community Science: What is Essential about this Strange Dialogue?

Stuart Lee and Wolff-Michael Roth, Education Department, University of Victoria

The multiple forms that science, performed as "Community Science", takes, be it stream surveys done by local stream restoration groups, or water quality measurements performed by local contractors, reflects the complexity of North American communities. Practitioners navigate regulatory landscapes that are a complex mixture of individual, municipal, regional, state and federal policies and prohibitions. The science is often done in response to urgent concerns of residents, with limited funding, and sometimes finds itself in the middle of heated conflicts whose resolution carries high stakes. Community science becomes part of the community dialogue, unable to extricate itself from entrenched positions. This type of science looks quite different from that produced by individuals working in the simplified environments of funded institutions. In this paper, we analyze data from a three-year ethnographic project within one community. Here, community science is enacted in the service of generating long-term solutions to water quantity and quality problems among a group of homeowners who wish a municipality to extend a water pipeline through a rural area to their community. We make salient the critical insights from our work through an analysis of one public technical meeting in which different groups purportedly discuss the merits of the different technical solutions to their problem. Through a semiotic reading, we highlight the integration of science by all the sides in the dispute. This allows us to extend the analysis and show how science is inseparable from the conflicts between groups with different practices and directives.

Ultimately we propose some answers to the question: ‘What is essential about scientific dialogue within the community?’

Toxics-R-Us: Tales of Participant Observation with Environmental Activists in a Northwest Community

Greg McLauchlan, Sociology Department, University of Oregon

The politics and science of toxic chemicals are central to numerous environmental justice and local sustainability struggles. I examine how an activist coalition of scientists, citizens, and community leaders, Citizens for Public Accountability (CPA), organized to pass and then implement one of the nation's toughest local Toxics-Right-to-Know laws in Eugene, Oregon. Of particular concern is how citizens with limited knowledge of toxics and their effects nevertheless persevered to an electoral victory that established a toxics reporting regime that informs the community of the broad parameters of toxics use and discharge. Additionally, I examine the politics of Toxics-Right-to-Know as a tool for growth management, corporate accountability, and building a politics of local sustainability. The paper is based on four years of field research.

Community-based Health Surveys: A Challenge to Develop New People-Oriented Health Research Strategies

Rudi Nussbaum, Professor Emeritus of Physics and Environmental Sciences, Portland State University and Patricia Hoover, Northwest Radiation Health Alliance

At the request of residents of the areas downwind from the Hanford, WA nuclear weapons production facility, Downwinders, physicians, scientists and social justice activists formed an alliance. Northwest Radiation Health Alliance (NWRHA) designed, distributed, and collected questionnaires to evaluate officially denied serious health impact from accidental and deliberate massive releases of radioactivity into the rural environment around Hanford since the mid-1940s. NWRHA is a project of the Oregon chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility, with financial support by Oregon community foundations. The information from 801 returned questionnaires, spanning about 50 years of observation, was coded and computerized for quantitative analysis.

The uncertainties and obvious presence of bias inherent in this kind of data base (self-selected respondents, retrospective recall of doctors’ diagnoses and dates) limit quantitative analysis to gross effects, plausibly associated with environmental contamination. Most peer reviewers for scientific journals have been trained to demand formal statistical criteria for control of bias and “significance,” in effect often denying that any useful information can ever be extracted from a collection of “anecdotal” data, even if such data are the only ones available. Thus, achieving publication of results from our community-based health study in medical-scientific journals has continued to challenge the creativity of the scientists in our alliance to find and present reasonable external comparison data, as well as internal checks on the database in order to argue that for some reported diseases the magnitude of observed detriment cannot reasonably be explained by selection bias in our data, and that a much more likely hypothesis is its association with radioactive contamination of the Downwinders’ environment, testable only by large-scale epidemiological studies.

-- Back to conference schedule --