The World Trade Center terror and its aftermath have swept local Lansing news off the front pages. Everything else pales in comparison. As the dust settles, people are looking for answers. Why would people fly planes into buildings? The president likes to say, simply, that the terrorists hate "America’s freedom."

Freedom of speech is touted as the centerpiece of America’s freedom. But on Sept.19, a Lansing environmental health story broke which invites us all to reflect on the nuanced relationships between "free speech" and "costly speech" (i.e. the risks and costs for speaking out). Between governmental secrecy and freedom of information (i.e. the rights of citizens to know everything their representatives are doing with their tax money). Ultimately, between freedom and suppression in our own country. You may have overlooked the story amid the media focus on the Sept. 11 tragedy.

A national environmental watchdog group named PEER (Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility) made the charge that the Ingham County Health Department had shelved an important 130-page report on the greater Lansing area’s water resources. PEER asserted the Health Department published instead a "watered down" 20-page brochure that omitted most of the bad news about growing toxins in the Saginaw aquifer, the Grand River, Lake Lansing and other local water bodies.

PEER has been through this all before. A service organization for government employees charged with safeguarding the nation’s natural resources, PEER is perhaps best well known, of late, for its defense of Ian Thomas in March 2001. Thomas, a U.S. Geological Survey mapmaker, was fired on the first work day after he posted a map to the Web showing caribou migration patterns in the politically sensitive Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. His case was immortalized in a weeklong Doonsebury comic strip.

PEER notes that public employees are an untapped national resource "who work at the fault line of tension between reality and rhetoric." They serve as a safe haven for insiders to speak out about politically based or scientifically flawed policies. With seven offices nationwide PEER has, in just the past few weeks, led the opposition to Bush EPA Office Of Enforcement nominee Donald Schregardus, organized media resistance to bulldozing in a state forest on Martha’s Vineyard (a project threatening 29 rare species without any required environmental studies) and filed an informal complaint against a new power plant construction near Point of Rocks, Md.

PEER prefers governmental whistleblowers to remain anonymous, for fear that they will be punished or fired for speaking out, so they did not identify the current and former Health Department employees who leaked them the Ingham County water story. PEER is very much aware of the paradox of free expression in this country. That is, free speech is often NOT free. It can be quite costly.
It’s sadly ironic that citizens who know the most about environmental abuses and toxins – government environmental professionals -- are usually afraid to come forward and exercise their "free speech" rights.

That’s what PEER uncovered in a 1998 survey of Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality employees. The PEER survey found that more than half of MDEQ employees (52 percent) expressed fear of job retaliation for advocating environmental enforcement. A similar percentage (54 percent) knew of cases where employees were transferred or reassigned for "doing their job 'too well' in a controversial project. PEER mailed surveys to 1,462 DEQ employees and had a 41.6 response rate, 609 responses). View the responses yourself at: http://www.peer.org/publications/srvy_mi_deq.html.
Dave Dempsey, a policy adviser with the Michigan Environmental Council, insists that this is true. "DEQ management ruthlessly suppresses almost any data that is inconsistent with its mantra that the environment is getting better every day, in every way. An example is its environmental quality report, which tells the good news but skirts bad news like the skyrocketing volume of imported trash, worsening ozone pollution and beach closings, and accelerating wetland losses."

Some DEQ workers have turned to PEER with good effect. In 1997 PEER released another anonymous Michigan study, "See No Evil," that documented the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality’s atrociously lax protection of our wetlands.
Last week I interviewed the study’s author, whom I’ll call Tom Paine.

"There’s severe censorship in Harding’s DEQ," said Paine. "When my official government report was originally released in the DEQ, Harding turned the negative conclusions into a positive. The report was totally re-written, so much so that I didn’t recognize it as mine. He’s a master at his trade."
Paine was never found out, at least formally. "You know they never said one word about the PEER report [that came out subsequent to the DEQ’s censorship]. But they have their suspicions," he said. "I’ve been blacklisted for a number of years" subsequent to the report’s release. Paine would not reveal the punishments he’s endured because it might identify him. He was of course fully aware of the potential consequences. In fact he steered the entire PEER process. He wanted his story told!

"Why don’t more DEQ employees turn to PEER?" I asked.

"I think it’s fear," Paine said. "Remember, DEQ workers deal with highly specialized issues. They see terrible abuses and would love to expose it, but since there are only one or two people with enough expertise in a given area, the whistleblower could, in many cases, be easily identified."
Still, Paine strongly encourages environmental workers who know of abuses to go to PEER. "With me, I’m not a professional writer. They took a raw product and made it better. They were very helpful. I have nothing but good things to say about them."

Eric Wingerter, PEER’s national field director, says government managers seek to exercise "damage control" when a PEER story breaks. If the whistleblower is known, the government will typically marginalize the free speaker, assigning them a variety of disparaging labels: "disgruntled employee," "he was suffering personal problems," "he had an ax to grind," "he got the facts all wrong," and so on. If these tactics fail the speaker might even be labeled as crazy. Everything is done to divert attention from the actual facts of the study.

That’s a mammoth hurdle for governmental worker-citizens to face. As a country dedicated to the high ideals of "freedom," shouldn’t we do all we can to protect government employees from suffering negative consequences for practicing their free speech rights? Indeed, if government workers are afraid of suffering all those managerial abuses for speaking up, how is this any different from living under a repressive government?
How can a country ever grow to full maturity if the real issues are avoided, kept secret or suppressed?