Earth Day and March for Science — An Uncomfortable Alliance
The War on Science may distract us from recognizing that we need much more than science to save our planet.
Today is Earth Day, and this year also the day where millions across various cities across the United States will participate in Marches for Science. The conflation of these two movements is no doubt a grassroots political response to the anti-science actions of the American president and his cabinet, and their gutting of many important protections for environmental health and safety.
Brace yourself, because some might consider what I am about to say provocative, and even controversial.
I will assert that a pro-science agenda is not only inadequate to promote a pro-Earth ethos, but in certain ways, actually distracts us from doing the things we critically need to do to realign human activities with the limits and capacities of our planet.
Let me try to explain.
1. “Climate science deniers” fully understand the science.
The War on Science, at its origins, is not really based on a genuine and sincere disagreement on the science. Contrary to their words, so-called “climate science deniers” actually understand the science of climate change. These deniers also happen to have more at stake economically that almost anyone should regulations be enacted to address carbon pollution. Hence in order to protect their own short-term economic interests, they are willing to adopt the playbook of Big Tobacco and create obfuscation in the science of climate change, to sow the seeds of doubt and repeat anti-science statements a gagillion times until the very foundations of public scientific understanding start to shake so much that any effective policy response to the problem becomes almost impossible.
According to Naomi Klein in her book This Changes Everything (2014), climate deniers are economic elites who “understand the real significance of climate change better than most of the ‘warmists’ in the political center, the ones who are still insisting that the response can be gradual and painless and that we don’t need to go to war with anybody… The deniers get plenty of the details wrong… But when it comes to the scope and depth of change required to avert catastrophe, they are right on the money.” The deniers are not disbelievers. They are in fact the biggest believers of climate science, but stand to profit enormously in having the rest of our collective scientific understanding waver, and stand to lose a lot if the rest of us get wise about the climate realities.
Really then, the fight between anti-science and pro-science is really a proxy fight between the haves and have-nots. It is not, at its root, waged by disbelievers of science, but by powerful wealth hoarders that see a threat to their economic interests.
2. We can’t out-science our way out of our environmental crisis.
Science gives us the tools to diagnose the severity the various environmental crisis our our day, such as climate change, soil degradation, endangerment of biodiversity and others. Some would also have you believe that science and technology alone can save us from collapse, whether it is in the mass transformation of our energy system from fossil fuel consumption to the use of renewable energy, or the greening our our chemical inventory to some environmentally more benign one. And if we miss our carbon emission targets, these same folks tell us that we might still be able to resort to large scale manipulations of our planetary processes to avert climate change, also known as geoengineering.
The thing is, none of these technologies really solve the root causes of this mess, they merely address the symptoms. One root cause, as I have previously described, is that we have inherited a political and economic system based on the indefinite and continuous extraction, exploitation, and wealth-hoarding of resources by the powerful few on a planet of finite natural resources. Addressing this root cause requires much more than advances in science and technology, but also requires significant advances in our understanding of how to shift patterns of human behavior on a systems and planetary scale (essentially, world cultures) so that, for instance, we collectively stop measuring success and progress through erroneous notions of “economic growth.” For an excellent discussion of how we have completely perverted the concept of economic growth, read Erik Lindberg’s excellent primer on the topic.
According to Chip and Dan Heath in their excellent book Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard — appealing to the intellectual reasoning of people (“direct the rider”) is only one of three important elements needed to affect systems change. Also needed are appeals to people’s emotions (“motivate the elephant”), and making it easy for people to engage in the changed behavior (“shape the path”). Science literacy will help with directing the rider, but we need story tellers, artists, psychologists, sociologists, designers and others to help with motivating the elephant and shaping the path.
3. Science and technology have shaped certain worldviews that have led us into this mess in the first place.
Not all branches of science inspire environmental consciousness. In fact, most sciences sometimes do more harm than good in this respect. Contrary to what you, the reader, may think, I am not about to go on a tirade on how modern technologies have ravaged our ecosystems. Rather, I am interested in discerning how scientific knowledge has shaped our worldviews, particularly in the industrial age. Physics and chemistry, and even molecular biology, for instance, seek to boil down the truth of our world down to basic building blocks, such as gravity, atoms and DNA, through a process of observation, experimentation, and ultimately deconstruction or reductionism. It is then supposed, quite mechanically, that our world is composed of a series or aggregation of all these “atomized” building blocks, at scale. Yet, such linear extrapolation of atomized parts are by themselves unable to account for some of our deepest mysteries of the whole, such as the emergence of life on this planet and human consciousness, to name a few.
Furthermore, such atomization has given us the illusion that we have mastered the truths of the universe, that we have conquered all, and given us false confidence that with science and technology, we need not be concerned about our ecological limits. Atomization also disregards the integral role of relationships and interconnections among elements and actors at all scales, and the evolutionary processes that shape them over time, so much so that at the human level, we have forgotten our deep connections not only to the planet that gives us life, but to every other living and non-living thing in our environment.
Tragically and ironically in what has been described by Robert N. Ladeau in The Environmental Endgame (2006) as one of the strangest developments of intellectual history, founders of mainstream economic theory quite literally adopted equations of atomized Newtonian physics that would soon become out-of-date and swapped out physical variables with economic variables in order to mathemathecize their field. As a result of these flawed attempts to imitate the mathematical concreteness of physical science, mainstream economic theory teaches us that the price mechanism is sacrosanct and treats humans as perfectly rational but self-interested decision-makers existing as single nodes within an overall system. As a result, mainstream economics pays scant regard to the fact that there are many things in life that we value but are unable to put a monetary value on, or that we are emotional beings that make irrational decisions with regularity, or that we are tribal in our psychology and often make decisions based on how it may affect our communities and not just our individual selves.
Taken together, much of science has cultivated our narrow, reductionist view of the world. Only ecology, a subfield of biology which does not garner nearly the same kinds of respect or prestige as other branches of physical or life sciences, encourages us to think systemically about interrelationships between actors within an ecosystem and their effects over time. Ecology has also laid the groundwork for some of the more holistic syntheses of academic disciplines and new fields such as systems dynamics that may offer us very helpful tools in better managing our crisis.
Let me be absolutely clear. I am not saying that we should in anyway discourage the pursuit of scientific inquiry or that we should not acknowledge all the benefits to humanity that scientific knowledge has brought. I was a Biology major myself, and I fully support the March for Science Principles and Goals. What I am saying is that while science is necessary, it is not sufficient.
In our quest for sustainability, there are many other important areas of intellectual inquiry in the humanities, social sciences and arts that are needed, in addition to the hard sciences. A more holistic and interdisciplinary approach will help us better understand how we came to create this ecological mess to begin with, to recognize that as inherently social creatures that we ought draw from the learnings of other non-human superorganisms (think ant colonies and coral reefs) to tackle our most complex global problems, and to effect the kinds of cultural changes necessary to heal our collective disconnect with Planet Earth.
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