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In environmental circles, uncertainty reigns supreme. Whereas science has traditionally been regarded as an authoritative tool for providing solutions to many knowledge-based problems, it has been less successful in the recent environmental context because of increasing competition from other interests.
scientific findings are married with local knowledges, community surveys, leaked documents, and investigative journalism, breeding more confusion and less consensus. It doesn't matter how many scientists stand up and say that we should be really, really concerned about global warming or mercury poisoning or the loss of biodiversity, we're still not acting.
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- If there is uncertainty in science, then scientists have an obligation to inform the public about these uncertainties when they influence their health, lives, and livelihoods.

WiserEarth

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environment sustainability community networks collaboration activism newssc07

12 Apr 08

The Science Creative Quarterly » THE MYTHOLOGY – AND POTENTIAL – OF THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL. LEARNING FROM RACHEL CARSON

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science public intellectual activism

What is remarkable about Carson’s approach is not just that she used science to support her claims, but that she successfully combined complex scientific findings with a public action message in a campaign that swept across a predominantly non-scientific audience.
One lesson to be learned from Carson’s work is the power of the integration of information and narrative – our science has value only to the extent that we use it wisely, while our policies have merit only when we understand the nature of the world to which they apply.
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- critical importance of interdisciplinary thought and communication across sectors
- Public intellectuals are symbolic figures in society, who represent social ideas and utopic visions rather than individual perspectives.
- awakening the public imagination
- Alcoff warns that “the purpose of reason, after all, is to establish belief and justify claims of certainty, not simply to destabilize”[5].
- This suggests that there is a prophetic role for the individual, and takes the academic out of the sphere of positive research and into the realm of normative prescriptions and judgments. Cushman similarly talks about the “civic duties of intellectuals”[7] to not just popularize academic work by translating its jargon, but to actually influence public action.
- As scientist and as thinkers, we share a moral imperative to communicate this knowledge, with each other, across disciplinary boundaries, and outside the academic and research spheres.
- Carson’s success was based in part on her ability to communicate in the language of the dominant scientific paradigm.
- the power of her message came equally from her ability to capture the public imagination as from her carefully documented research.
- De Neufville and Barton wrote of the power of myth – which they defined as “stories which draw on tradition and taken for granted knowledge”[9] – in defining the understanding of policy problems. Interpretive narratives influence the approach taken to dealing with social issues, and shape the perception of both the problems and the proposed solutions.
- The power of language in the dominant paradigms of academia and of the policy world underscores the importance of providing alternate metaphors and imagery for issues of public concern.
- a public intellectual is a “publicly accountable intellectual”
- For the position of a public intellectual to have transformatory power, an individual must transcend being a person with a message and must become an emblem of that message; however, the humanity of the individuals who take on these roles must be supported and protected.
- We should take from Rachel Carson the hope that her actions conveyed: that great change can come through research, that people do want to know more, and that narrative can bridge the gap.
- We must support our public intellectuals – question their conclusions, but champion their causes; critique their claims, but provide them with alternative information. We need to communicate our research more clearly, participate in dialogue and explanation, and engage with the issues of our time in collaborative, constructive, critical, and public ways. We have the potential to effect great change, even in the most improbable of cases, and even on the most intractable of problems.

Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog » On Frictionless Scale-Making

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technology community collaboration activism anthropology scale

10 Mar 08

GREEN FOR ALL: Media

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activism economy environment justice video work

16 Dec 07

Tenants group, Brandeis students grow together - The Boston Globe

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academia activism brandeis local waltham

apophenia: valuing inefficiencies and unreliability

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activism attention civic communications community media politics social technology time

Social technologies that make things more efficient reduce the cost of action. Yet, that cost is often an important signal. We want communication to cost something because that cost signals that we value the other person, that we value them enough to spare our time and attention.

10 Dec 07