Surprise! Anti-science at the Outer Banks:
In December, soon after Hurricane Sandy and two nor’easters, Dare County Commissioner Allen Burrus, geologist Robert Young and attorney Derb Carter from the Southern Environmental Law Center were interviewed on “The State of Things,” a public-radio program on WUNC.
“You never understand nature but so much,” Burrus said, adding that Highway 12 is “really convenient,” and that he was concerned about “people that live in other places telling us what we need to do and how we need to do it.”
He said “the lead professor” at East Carolina University (an apparent reference to geologist Riggs) sells books and gives talks and “has very little science to back his opinions.”
When the general public is funding a quasi-public good then the general public has a right to make suggestions about what you need to do and how you need to do it. If you don't want to be told what to do then Dare County should sell revenue bonds and make NC-12 a toll road. And then Dare County would be holding the risk if Dr. Riggs is right about how the North Carolina barrier islands tend to move and are likely to be diminished by sea level rise.
Here is how Dr. Young put it:
“I’m a little bit disappointed that Mr. Burrus would disparage the credibility of a group of scientists at ECU who have worked hard to develop an incredibly good understanding of the geology of eastern North Carolina. To suggest that the science that they’re doing is somehow motivated by the royalties that one receives from a book that’s published by the University of North Carolina Press is a little bit over the top. … I’m just afraid that … the path we’re going down is not going to provide that access that everyone would like to have.”
