User:Victimofleisure

I've been an occasional editor of Wikipedia since 2007, driven by my abiding passions for truth, justice, and rhetoric. My qualifications include nearly half a century of writing, primarily as a professional technical writer and magazine editor, but also as a lyricist, critic, and correspondent. I mostly confine myself to grammar, spelling, and the finer points of music theory, but I have occasionally waded into disputes over neutrality, point of view, and unwarranted page deletion.

For example in a 2011 dispute over whether the US EPA's page should include the National Treasury Employees Union's criticism of EPA, I defended the affirmative side, on the grounds that NTEU 280 represents EPA’s researchers, and strives to reduce politically-motivated interface in their scientific work. The since-deleted "Barriers to enforcing environmental justice" section was crucial to understanding that EPA’s failings did not occur in a vacuum, but were the result of a protracted, well-organized assault on EPA’s authority by a succession of administrations determined to achieve economic growth at any cost. The best-known example is Bush II’s administration, which not only gutted EPA but suppressed its findings to the point of public scandal, climaxing in EPA’s refusal to regulate greenhouse gases until it was forced to do so by the U.S. Supreme Court (Mass v. EPA, 2007). The extent to which EPA has recovered its previous effectiveness under Obama in uncertain, and crucial given the stunning urgency of climate change and the need for U.S. leadership in worldwide mitigation efforts. NTEU 280 plays an important role in the struggle to revive EPA, not only by protecting scientists and their work, but by asking the right questions, such as “How can empowering and protecting science and scientists in federal agencies help not just America but the world survive these challenges? How can government institutions employ science in a new and better way that will allow our collective intellect to bring us through to a future worth living instead of a new Dark Age?” (Protecting Federal Sector Scientists; NTEU Speech On Scientific Integrity by J. William Hirzy, Ph.D., July 11, 2008)