Editorial: Superstition, Violence and Power
by Tisaranee Gunasekara
“If we can’t think for ourselves, if we’re unwilling to question authority, then we are just putty in the hands of those in power”- Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World).
( June 14, 2015, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) In 2011, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection issued a verbal directive banning its employees from using the phrases ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’[i]. The state’s new governor Rick Scott was then a Tea Party darling; denying anthropogenic climate change was a key axiom of their common political creed. Governor Scott obviously did not want one of his own departments to speak about the connection between Florida’s climatic woes and environmental degradation. The bizarre order may have helped Mr. Scott politically and electorally but it has not saved Florida voters from being battered by killer storms and rising sea levels and may doom Miami to eventual inundation[ii].
