The History Channel decided to capitalize on the X-Men franchise and produced a series finding people with “superpowers”. The Ice Man could withstand extreme cold that would kill an ordinary person; another man was able to turn himself into a human lightning rod powering lightbulbs. The series looked at the science behind their “superpowers”. Thanks to cable, there are numerous channels devoted to explaining the science of our lives. But public access to scientific understanding, if that is even possible, has been subject to criticism.

Science in Public explores the academic debate about pushing science into the marketplace of ideas. On the one hand, public outcry over scientific theories – such as creationists lobbying for the removal of evolution theory instruction in public schools – offends the scientific community. On the other, critics from other disciplines have challenged the very roots of scientific thinking, complaining about gender or racial bias. Stephen Jay Gould explored this idea in The Mismeasure of Man, looking at how science is manipulated to promote racist policies a la social Darwinism. 

Anti-Science Movements Within Academia

Scientists have countered criticisms, most notably in Higher Superstition, by Norman Levitt and Paul R. Gross. They challenge the social constructivists who say the work of scientists is designed to reinforce existing preconceptions.

Weltbild – Mediating between Science and Anti-Science

History of science professor Gerald Holton proposes a Weltbild – a world picture – to respond to the contradictions of the criticisms of the social constructivists. In much the same way, he is advocating the biologist E.O. Wilson’s idea of consilience: disciplines coming together to reveal both limitations and potential.

Opposition to Public Accessibility of Science

In the midst of several popular science writers, Bryan Appleyard at The Times made the case that science is “spiritually corrosive”. He questioned science’s role in replacing traditions, and called what science had to offer “a hollow mechanistic vision…the reduced version of ourselves.”

Scientific Literacy

The goal of popularizing science may be to make the public aware of scientific achievements, but is it contributing to scientific literacy? Studies indicate not, and social psychologists have argued that shouldn’t be too surprising, since the majority of the public isn’t trained to be a scientist. As the authors point out, when it comes to biology, physicists are lay people too. This deficit model keeps scientists at the top of the hierarchy of knowledge.

The question of scientific literacy comes to a head when a sensitive policy is being decided, or a new disease has emerged. When women are allowed to have abortions has increasingly been framed through medical descriptions of fetus development, rather than as a human or civil right issue. Loaded legislation titles, like the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, implies a gruesome, induced labor of a stillborn baby, and with great political effect.

Science Courts, Science Watch: Engaging the Public

Scientists have always had a public relations problem. Instead of bemoaning the lack of public scientific literacy, Morris Shamos has proposed a couple intermediaries: science courts and a lay science watch. This addresses the elitism of science: that it is something only a small segment of the population can understand.

What is the Public?

How to even define the public is problematic. Habermas’s concept of Oeffentlichkeit – the public sphere -  sometimes includes us, sometimes not, as the authors describe. How to maintain democratic sensibilities while debating scientific issues and problems is difficult when the ability to know science requires not only an education, but cultivation of information in the long term.

Public Trust

Particularly in the United States, elites are mistrusted. While the U.S. has intellectual traditions, intellectualism is not lauded on the whole. The country also has fundamentalist religious roots that look askant at scientific revelations as opposed to spiritual ones. The notion of freedom, including the freedom to be ignorant, not to vote, not to embrace rationalism and the scientific method, become thorny issues. The gay marriage debate many years ago was once framed by opponents as “unnatural”. Rather ironically, the same people who questioned established evolutionary theory embraced the “natural” breeding of male and female zygotes in the animal world as proof that humans were subject to the same “natural” laws.

As western societies develop technology to address global warming, diseases, resource management, the public is going to want to know how it affects them. The contact between scientists and the public is significant at a time when many people distrust the media delivering information.

But the government protection of public participation, and access to information is relatively recent, post World War II. The Administrative Procedure Act in 1946 opened the door for subsequent legislation empowering citizens to hold government agencies accountable.

In terms of environmental issues, it’s been a slower curve, likely in part due to the fact the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy weren’t created until the 1970’s. More government bureaucracy creates more information generated!

Besides the right to know, the government recognizes the right to comment and the right to sue the federal government. The last one is criticized as part of making the United States overly litigious, but I think it’s a uniquely American way of creating checks and balances. Rather than depending on the government as a watchdog, American courts serve as arbitrators. Environmental advocacy groups have pressed their concerns at the Supreme Court level in determining federal environmental policy in cases like Sierra Club v. Morton and Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife.

Death by slow response: The Freedom of Information Act

While the government may protect certain rights of the public to have access to information, and participate in public comment periods, there’s no stipulation at how long it takes the government to comply. A lot of heavy lifting is required by citizens who want answers, and who want accountability. Journalists historically have played that role, but with fewer professional journalist positions, we’re going to see a future where the individual citizen, or citizen groups are going to bear the responsibility of keeping track of environmental issues, and distributing it.

Balancing Civil Liberties and National Security

            “Those who would give up an essential freedom for temporary security deserve neither liberty nor security.” –Benjamin Franklin

Post 9/11 legislation has decreased public access to information, but also increased the government’s access to citizen’s private records. Concerns over access to sensitive infrastructure information have led to the rejection of FOIA requests, even by journalists, typically a protected group.

Alternatives to Public Participation

Conflict resolution through alternative methods have cropped up in recent years to solve antagonism between groups. Grassroots organizations have inserted themselves into the decision making processes of local and regional agencies. It’s a response to the perceived tokenism of public comment: it seems like the government cares about public input, but the comments get quickly filed away from view without being taken into consideration.

The Attributes of Collaboration

Collaboration allows for community groups to interact with government agencies in an ongoing process, rather than in the fits and starts of a public comment period. In fact, unlikely political careers are born this way – an abrasive college professor who advocated on behalf of small family farms in southern Minnesota ended up against improbable odds becoming a U.S. Senator. Paul Wellstone ultimately became a respected policymaker by both Democrats and Republicans.

After he got elected in 1990 on the other side of the table, he was confronted with his first major political challenge. His opposition to the first Gulf War got him into some political trouble with veterans groups. He met with them, threw himself into researching veterans affairs, and ultimately passed bipartisan legislation with his colleague, John McCain, to support veterans and their families. Where there would typically be ideological gridlock, Wellstone used a collaborative process that served him well during reelection. Wellstone’s ideological heir, Barack Obama, has similar skills with his experience as a community organizer.

Failures of Consensus

The authors point out that collaboration doesn’t always produce results, or even compromise. The Port of Savannah case study is a good example of tokenism on the part of government to appear collaborative, but in name only. In practice, the government agency imposed deadlines that killed collaboration, removing the discussion from a public sphere into a more technical one.

Limitations

McCloskey makes a very good point about the limits of collaboration. The United States is founded on a core principle of localism. It permeates all facets of policymaking, from the structure of our media system to funding local school districts. Our communities are laboratories with the federal government best left out.

But as McCloskey points out, “place-based collaboration undermines national standards” of natural resource management, rather than reinforcing them. But this is the dilemma of managing a gigantic landscape such as the United States. How do you sustain civic engagement on environmental issues when those issues are rooted in places and local communities with a direct impact? It’s very difficult to maintain citizen participation while keeping an eye on the big picture. And more often than not, the American value placed on localism in news may also be undermining the public’s ability to see a broader environmental landscape of which they are a part. 

But as the recent swine flu epidemic has shown, the solutions to our environmental challenges are still being managed by nation states, rather than a larger, global bureaucracy. David Brooks recently wrote an editorial on this very topic in the New York Times: are domestic governments best suited to address these issues or international agencies? And what are the broader implications for imposing a modern day western hegemony when these international agencies are typically run by bureaucrats from western countries? Do stakeholders, from the indigenous tribes of the Amazon to a manufacturing worker in China, get lost?

 Ann Alquist

I’m biased. I think public broadcasting and better government regulation can save the world.

OK, maybe not save it. But in terms of a mission driven information distributor, public media, in particular public radio, has the best shot. NPR is innovating by leaps and bounds, poaching talent from USA Today and the New York Times to ramp up their online distribution and across mobile devices. (Although I’ll be honest, I am fearful about bringing in so many commercial folks into public broadcasting – to me, it just shows how bad the System has been about cultivating talent – but that is for another blog post.)

Newspaper readers have been in decline since the 90′s…public radio listenership has only been going up. After Rush Limbaugh, most Americans listen to Morning Edition. Is this a great country, or what?

Public media has the ability to partner, and has historically done so. Collaborating with the Smithsonian, National Geographic, foundations, the BBC (who’s future is also on the line – again, another blog post).

Tied in with public media’s role in distributing information about environmental issues is our public library system. Public libraries were dying 15 years ago. Now they are vital information access points in bridging the gap between the information rich and the information poor. I’d love to see public libraries as part of a revitalized public sphere, where we come together to talk about these issues. Using mobile technology to connect people digitally, the public library is the physical space where words become action, action becomes policy, policy becomes change. What I love about the public library model is that it mimics the Internet as well. Each library as a hub with its community network spreading out, connecting with other hubs.

I really believe librarians are going to serve a much more significant role as information midwives as newspapers decline and the role of journalism shifts away from gatekeeping. Can you tell I love libraries?

Of course, we cannot forget Google. But even before getting to Google, I want to start with communications policymaking. The system is desperate need of reconfiguration, and the Internet needs to be at the heart of it. It’s pretty much the Wild West right now in terms of regulation, and the lobbyists and the activists are in the trenches fighting over access and affordability issues. But I’d like to see some provision for not just access. Just because you have access to the Internet, doesn’t mean you are media competent or literate. You don’t know what you don’t know – which is why we still need a distribution system to expose people to information they wouldn’t dream of seeking out themselves. The commercial broadcasters have to pay into an education fund that support Internet access in public school – call me a social welfare drone, but let’s tax Google and Microsoft to pump some money into aforementioned public media and public libraries.

Enter Google! They are working on this as we speak. There are other companies as well like Stumblethat “learns” from the content you are searching for, plus connects with a social network of people who are using the same site. Kind of like how Amazon recommends books – you bought this book, other people who bought this book, also bought…you get the picture. EPIC 2015 was right…Googlezon is coming!

The opener to her statement spoke volumes about her understanding of how mainstream society responds to Native American sensitivities to the environment. And she was right to speak with trepidation about her worldview. My colleague sitting next to me rolled his eyes. I noticed a few others too.

The general manager had placed a marginalized opinion about how to treat the landscape into the public space to provoke communication about the environment. It’s one of the three core principles of Robert Cox’s Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere.

The general manager was very much in the minority: she renovated the station to be more green, not to save money (in fact, she said it didn’t save any money at all), but because she thought the radio station should be a leader in conservation. Literally, she had taken the communication ability of the radio station to distribute awareness about environmental issues and converted it into action, another core principle.

Another member of the panel was the chief engineer for an AM talk station in San Francisco. The bottom line was paramount, and while the stations efforts to power the broadcasts through wind and solar had been marginally successful, the chief engineer always came back to his first priority: keeping the station on the air, and alternative forms of electricity were too risky to rely on 100%. The difference in how they talked about their stations, and approaches to “greening” the buildings showed the constitutive function rhetoric plays in the shaping of environmental communication – the symbol for the commercial station was always the bottom line; for the Native American general manager it was couched in terms of environmental stewardship. But their approaches were still pragmatic.

From Fear to Transcendentalism to Preservation to Conservation

The history of how western societies, particularly the United States, have described first the wilderness, than later the environment strikes me as evolutionary, and borne out of antagonisms, as Cox calls them.

As the Americas were conquered, romance set in. Somewhere inbetween the fear of the wilderness and admiration for it are Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, the leaders of the expedition to explore the new territories acquired by the Louisiana Purchase. Their diaries are remarkably detailed on the botany and wildlife, but also are great examples of not only appreciation for the overwhelmingly power of the American landscape, but also fear of it. In the end, their descriptions were manipulated as rhetoric to bolster manifest destiny – the individual’s ability to shape his future and tame the landscape. They believed the “wilderness” was so immense and powerful it would take centuries for people to develop an infrastructure; instead it took less than two generations. They mark the end of a worldview and the beginning of one where technology is the key to exploiting the environment.

Historians, and documentary filmmakers, and writers can go back to those original documents and find the rhetoric of appreciation and stewardship. Republicans have done this very effectively with Theodore Roosevelt, to the point where he is considered the president of conservation. Environmentalism has become more of a bipartisan issue, though certainly still tipped towards Democrats.

Visual Rhetoric

The most obvious shift that has occurred is in car advertising. 10, 20 years ago the car was portrayed as capable of dominating nature – traversing mountains, streams, rocks. In recent years it’s about fuel efficiency, and occasionally, reducing carbon emissions. The message sent out to us about how we use cars has been modified from one where the car is used to penetrate the landscape (a form of rape if you will) to a tool that enables us to responsibly afford our standard of living. Environmentalism as a lifestyle choice, but never as an imperative.

The “Movement”

Environmentalism has entered the mainstream. It is the mainstay of high school and college community service projects. But at the same time it is not. As technology and science have advanced, it has become difficult to keep up with all of the information available. The formation of niche groups seem to be competing for space in the media to call attention to their issues. With the Internet, entering the mainstream public sphere may no longer be necessary.

How do we manipulate rhetoric from historical sources to support our political goals?
How do new technologies create alternative public spaces to spur action – and challenge/reinforce the Dominant Social Paradigm of how we perceive environmental issues?
With increased audience fragmentation, how do activists and scientists and writers reach “the public” to stimulate civic participation on environmental issues?

This line in particular:
“Google isn’t responsible for saving the newspaper industry or journalism. Publishers and editors are.”

I disagree. I think a root issue for newspapers (among other media) is that the industry hasn’t reached out. Instead, as the Newsosaur describes, they’ve spent the last several years whining.

There are also great examples of non traditional media outlets – in cable access, in public broadcasting, on the web – tackling the issue of how to generate independent, relevant journalism in the upside-down economics of Internet distribution. I would argue that We the People – individuals, institutions, policymakers, academics – are responsible for addressing the question of sustaining journalism. The same way We the People are obligated to address the issues of our day. We are obligated to be civically engaged. (Oh my God, I sound like my mother!)

I do think Google has a civic obligation to think about how it will shape journalism, as well as other corporate, government and non for profit organizations. And we do too: individuals now more than ever are responsible for making sure they have access to the information they need as citizens and consumers.

The days of the highly profitable, benevolent news outlet creating information for an informed democracy has been shrinking for decades. But we’re at a unique point in history where the government can regulate media to empower individuals to inform themselves.

But he also deserves mention for another reason in a science writing how to book: he was a great nature lover and wrote a lot about the natural world. He used the natural world to express his desire for his lover, and eventually wife, Katharine, and then later as a writer of children’s fiction. In fact, his classic book, Charlotte’s Web could be interpreted as an homage to the writer. Charlotte the spider uses her writing ability to save her friend, a pig named Wilbur, from a future as a side of bacon. Her writing saves his life. 

Hancock’s guidance on writing for science takes a similar vein. The knowledge synthesized by the science writer can save lives. But how to refine it, and motivate the writer are the themes of the last two chapters.

Hancock’s advice on editing is sound: read your draft as a reader and write down your responses; “when in doubt, throw it out”; avoid throat clearing, those meandering paragraphs that lead up to the point of your story; and then the annoying things that plague even the best writers. Redundancy, cliches, garbage words, uneconomic language. 

My background is in broadcast, so I have a few other items to add to Elise Hancock’s suggestions. This is true for print, but especially for radio: writing bildlich. It means writing a picture, or for a visual, which is such a cliche in radio writing 101 – “create a word picture”. It is however an imperative. 

In the world of multimedia, the range of tools available to science journalists are also greater. Hancock makes a point to talk about the structure of a story. I would add that the medium matters too. How do you collect ambient sound for a radio story about the new discovery about the causes of deafness? It’s hard to set a scene. But a reporter could put together a slideshow with an article, or produce a video. 

Hancock also tackles the greatest fear of any reporter: getting stuck. She doesn’t do this, but she talks about two different ways to address it. 

Inner Issues

Are you the problem? Perhaps you’re distracted by something in your life. Maybe it’s time to take a lap, a nap, a walk, spend time with your family, bake a cake. 

She also identifies what I call the News Crush/Villain Syndrome. I have suffered from this. I remember doing an interview with Julia “Butterfly” Hill, the woman who lived in a tree for several months to prevent them from being cut down. I went into the interview quite combative, but she was so charming and articulate, I was her slave by the end of it. If she’d asked me to promise my first born to Greenpeace, I would have signed on the bottom line. 

Are you in a war with your editor? Perhaps you need to negotiate a little to get some perspective. 

Is the material overwhelming? Are you emotionally invested in the piece? It happens. 

Writing and Story Issues

The other issues are more about time management and research. Hancock makes a good point about the difference between a topic and story idea. Sometimes a topic isn’t developed enough for a story. Sometimes it needs to percolate. 

I would add one more item though. Reporters needs editors, of course. But reporters also need to be prepared to defend their work, stand up for it, if need be. Hancock paints the editorial relationship as an ideal, but the truth is it’s messy. Speaking from personal experience, you’re not always going to like your editor. You’re going to have different taste; the important thing is to be able to explain why a paragraph is placed where it is, and why you chose this word over another. If you do that as you write – writing deliberately – than you’ll be in a good position to defend your work.

It’s the red messenger bag with the seat belt buckle that gives me away. The bag says I probably ride a bike (though there are plenty of people who have messenger bags who are not bike commuters); the oil and mud splatters confirm it, and also that I must be somewhat tough because I ride in bad weather. It’s also a political statement: that bag is an emblem of my bias towards conservation and reducing my own carbon footprint.

It also, through no design of my own, has granted me acceptance into a unique club of ardent environmentalists. A college boyfriend got me into it. How lust can change our fates. I quickly dumped him for a dark green Fuji touring bike. The Fuji was less maintenance.

I’ve been a bike commuter on and off for the last 10 years, mostly on. It’s a commitment, and at times a lonely one. I’ve been the victim of angry motorists, belligerent drunks, and cops who’ve witnessed these events and done nothing. I get annoyed with people, like my classmate last winter, who told me I was crazy if I thought he would bike in the cold. But I also understand it: a car drenching you as it runs through an icy puddle is no fun. It’s hard to take one for the environment when it means contracting pneumonia, or getting hit by a car.

But I’m still going to pedal year round. I’ll still drive here and there (this is America after all), but I want to show people it can be done. I’ve had enough people say to me “you know, I’m going to bike  to work tomorrow, or to the grocery store” because they saw me do it. I feel like an ambassador to the People’s Republic of Bicycling!

This might be car country, but it’s my country too, and I’m going to bike it.

I wish I had a moving anecdote recounting my revelation about the great contribution of science in my life. I don’t. 

Much of the science that makes our lives comfortable, and possible (like the life-saving emergency appendectomy I had as a teenager) is hidden. When a classmate asked our 8th grade math teacher why we multiply across the top and bottom to get the correct answer in fractions, she replied, “When I turn on my car in the morning, I don’t understand how it works. It just is.”

We, quite literally, take the the fabric, as well as the nuts and bolts, of our lives for granted. 

As Gregory and Miller point out in Science in Public, science is a commodity – like any type of information. In particular, during the Cold War, it held political value that led to public investment in science education and new agencies such as NASA. I find it ironic that the fear of Russian dominance resulted in pouring millions of dollars into American public schools to create a generation of scientists who developed cures for disease, birth control, communications technologies, the microchip. There was an intended consequence, and yet so many unintended consequences that occurred as a result. 

The post war period as well, thanks to radio and television, brought science through interviews and science fiction programs to a mass audience. Again, the Cold War, inspired high school students to study science in order to take part in the space race and creating smarter weapons in the face of the Russian threat. The authors didn’t bring this up, but it would be interesting to see if there have been any studies on how news coverage of the Cold War in the U.S. may have influenced the decisions of young people to study science as part of the anti-Russian effort. 

The authors bring up the controversy of a divide between natural science and social science – the “literary” and the “scientific” cultures as defined by C.P. Snow. The biologist E.O. Wilson also wrote about the need to resolve these tensions in a dense, but great book titled Consilience. He speaks directly about the need for interdisciplinary collaboration in the academy, including on environmental issues. I plan to write about some of his ideas in future response papers. 

The authors don’t discuss this (and perhaps they will in future chapters) but there was also great sexism at the time this divide was recognized by Snow. The president of my alma mater, Jane Jervis, gave a very moving lecture about how she “chose” to become an historian of science: her college wouldn’t give out a B.S. to a woman. My own mother had aspirations of becoming a doctor; too proud to become a nurse, she got a teaching degree instead. Even within teaching, women were expected to teach kindergarden or elementary school. The specialized subjects, especially the sciences, were taught by men at the higher levels. When I reflect, I had one female science teacher in the early 1990′s when I was in high school. I wonder why.

Given the historical accounts in Science in Public, how is science being used (perhaps manipulated) to push policies regarding climate change? (In particular, I’m thinking of the debate over ethanol to “reduce dependence on foreign oil” – and yet the process to produce ethanol requires more energy than the energy created.)

Are there contemporary examples of consilience – interdisciplinary collaboration between scientists, social scientists, policymakers, poets, activists to tackle environmental issues? Who is bridging the science information divide?