The Birth of Climate Denial
Notes from America with Kai Wright
WNYC Studios
4.4 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 18 September 2023
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Starting with the 1925 Scopes Trial — also known as the "trial of the century" — we look at one of the most controversial topics in our time: the debate over evolution versus a Fundamentalist understanding of the Bible.
It started with a substitute teacher in Tennessee who believed that evolution should be taught in the classroom. What followed was a fiery debate that rocketed around the world. From that moment on through to the withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord, we’ll unpack the major moments of the movement denying climate change.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's knows from America with Kai Wright. I'm Regina and I'm a producer on the show. |
| 0:13.2 | Every Sunday we make our show from our studios in New York City and this week in NYC, it's |
| 0:19.1 | climate week. So to honor this important week here, we decided to revisit a segment that |
| 0:25.3 | originally aired back in 2017 as part of our show when we were at the United States |
| 0:30.1 | of Anxiety. It takes us through the history of when we as a society began to doubt the |
| 0:36.1 | whole idea of climate change. The year is 1925 and it's a trial of the century, the Scopes |
| 0:44.0 | trial. The Scopes trial reminds us that science has often upset the establishment and our |
| 0:50.8 | host Kai Wright explores the legacy of that trial and how those in power have tried to |
| 0:56.6 | convince us that science gets it wrong. Here's Kai. |
| 1:04.9 | If you stepped into a courtroom in Dayton Tennessee on a July day in 1925, you could have heard |
| 1:12.0 | this testimony. Your name is Howard Morgan? Yes, sir. |
| 1:16.0 | A teacher, John Scopes, was on trial for teaching young Howard and his classmates Darwin's |
| 1:22.7 | theory of evolution. How old are you, Morgan? 14 years. |
| 1:28.4 | There are lots of reasons this was called the trial of the century. You had two great |
| 1:32.6 | attorneys, Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, going head to head over science and |
| 1:37.4 | religion. And the gist of it was, are we God's creations? Are we descended from monkeys? |
| 1:45.3 | One of the reasons that this case became so famous is that you didn't need to be in |
| 1:49.2 | Tennessee to follow it. This is WDN, the voice of the people of Chicago. |
| 1:54.8 | This new, fangled thing called radio had pretty much just been introduced and WGN laid |
| 2:01.4 | cables and set up microphones in the courthouse in order to bring the first live broadcast |
| 2:06.3 | of a trial into thousands of homes. Broadcast media had arrived. And it wasn't just |
| 2:13.1 | a radio. Newspaper made in movie camera operators flocked to the small town of Dayton, Tennessee |
... |
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