In the New Yorker article “A Valuable Reputation” the author details one man’s fight against a company and a chemical. The company is Syngenta, who produces Atrazine, an agricultural chemical proved by Scientist Tyrone Hayes to have negative effects in both frogs and humans. The article describes the chemical company and their connections in the academic, scientific and media communities attempts to debunk Hayes’ findings. This article directly relates to EPA’s letter to Robert Wyatt and the “Economic Impacts of Remediating the Portland Harbor Superfund Site” report put forth by the Brattle Group. The main thread connecting these documents is complexity. This diverse set of documents highlights from a range of perspectives, the complexity of the polluters, stakeholders, the economic “risks”, all the way to the politics of the science being conducted. The politics of science is the most important level of complexity because the scientific evidence of chemical hazards are what all further decisions of banning chemicals or cleaning up superfund sites are based upon. These decisions in turn, have economic impacts as described in the Brattle Group’s report. The letter to Mr. Wyatt shows appears to be constructive discourse about a report studying the contamination of the Portland Harbor. The article regarding Tyrone Hayes’ fight against Atrazine however unveils a darker side of scientific conversations. Namely, that the arguments made against his work were not about the science at all. The lengths that Syngenta has gone through to discredit Hayes’ work serves as a reminder that the science behind these chemicals and cleanups must be scrutinized. Keeping in mind the fact that science is political, in part because of how much is at stake economically is important when analyzing the Portland Harbor cleanup. Kirk
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