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climate change, environment, government, institutional reform, new blog, politics, science, science activism, science suppression
March for Science event in Washington D.C. in April 2017. Photo by Aaron Bernstein / Reuters
As a research scientist, I thought I should share this article titled ‘How Science can survive hostile governments’ published in The Atlantic.
The article headline states “Scientists have a history of using political attacks to galvanize support for reform.” It describes examples of how scientists under governments who were unsupportive of science development, especially climate change related science, fought those governments.
“People are outraged by the recent developments in the United States, but if you compare the experiences of scientists in different countries, you can see that there are some underlying issues that transcend administrations,” says Carlos Carroll, a conservation biologist at the Klamath Center for Conservation Research in California and the lead author of the paper.
Gibbs, another co-author of the Conservation Biology paper, says that scientists laboring under unfriendly administrations should be sure to document firsthand evidence of scientific suppression. In Canada during the Harper administration, a single anonymous photograph of a pile of scientific books and papers in a dumpster stoked national outrage about the government’s destruction of seven historic fisheries libraries—and helped turn the political tide against Harper.
Gibbs and her co-authors add that “when government scientists are silenced, scientists employed by universities and non-profit organizations can lead the fight for institutional reforms—both as individuals and through scientific societies.”
Link to the full article: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/07/science-hostile-governments/534789/