Front-page news

Natural History, June, 2003 by Peter Brown

For more than a decade I've been pointing out to anyone who would listen that science and nature are big news. Disease organisms are news--think of AIDS, or anthrax, or SARS. Space exploration is news. The crisis in biodiversity is news. Environmental degradation, earthquake prediction, energy resources, the Iceman, and genetically modified crops are all news. You can't be current on the events of the day without being on top of what's happening in science.

Seldom have we at Natural History more keenly felt this observation than we have this month. In Baghdad looters rushed into the National Museum, plundering priceless archaeological artifacts. We decided to cover the disaster primarily by showing some of the artifacts--and leaving the reader to contemplate the fact that some of them may never be seen again. We also invited David Keys, a freelance reporter who specializes in archaeology, to pull together the main threads of the story so far. Finally, John Malcolm Russell, an expert in Near East archaeology who wrote "Robbing the Archaeological Cradle" for the February 2001 issue of Natural History, has graciously allowed us to reprint excerpts from his still all-too-relevant article. All three elements are collected under the title "Lost Time" (page 42).

As we go to press, another breaking news story has touched us closely. We have learned to our dismay that Subhankar Banerjee, the photographer of "Arctic Covenant" in our April 2003 issue, has become caught in the continuing political cross fire over oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Banerjee's photographs documented the wildlife and flora of the refuge against the stunning backdrop of mountains and floodplain.

On March 19 Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, held up Banerjee's book--from which our portfolio was excerpted--on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Advocates of drilling, particularly Senator Ted Stevens, a Republican from Alaska, had portrayed the region as a barren land, devoid of wildlife for all but a few months a year. Boxer challenged that view, citing the book.

The reaction was virtually immediate. According to The New York Times, Banerjee's photographs, which were scheduled for display in the main-level rotunda at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., were moved to a far less prominent gallery there. Captions for the photographs were shortened from discursive to telegraphic. A letter from Lawrence M. Small, the head of the Smithsonian, responding to a request for an explanation by Illinois Democratic Senator Richard J. Durbin, maintained that the earlier captions "might have been construed as advocacy" for ANWR, and were therefore excluded as a matter of Smithsonian policy.

The entire episode reflects the personalizing and retributive nature of contemporary political discourse. According to the Times, Stevens had told his Senate colleagues: "People who vote against [the drilling] are voting against me. I will not forget it." Stevens serves on the Senate oversight subcommittee for the Smithsonian, as does Durbin, and so the Smithsonian can hardly be blamed for fretting about its political support. Stevens's office denies putting any pressure on the museum. But self-censorship--if that's what it is--is still a slap in the face of free expression, and a repugnant consequence of the struggle to survive in a climate of intimidation.