The scientist, the politician, and the…do-er?

By Mikayla Kifer

            Should science be useful? There is no clear answer to this question. Robert Lackey in 2007 expressed concern that scientists have been slipping to the point of allowing their personal political goals to influence their work. He believes that scientists should refrain from using words like “healthy,” “degraded,” or “poor,” to describe aspects of the natural world. Science, after all, is meant to be descriptive (making statements about what things “are”), rather than normative (making statements about how things “should” be). Making normative claims about the world risks both the integrity of science and the privilege of having scientific knowledge respected and taken seriously. In essence, Lackey argues that we should leave science to the scientists and decision-making to the politicians—it’s their job, after all.

            In many ways, I agree with Lackey. Science is meant to be the pursuit of truth, untainted by human preference and bias. If we can’t trust scientists to represent the truth accurately, then who can we trust? But, as always, reality is not so simple. Lackey’s system makes sense provided that a strong infrastructure exists for translating unbiased scientific findings into policy and action. After scientists publish studies, their work should be taken up by an army of philosophers, economists, and anthropologists to determine how it can and should be applied to policy-making decisions. Then politicians should educate themselves and decide how to implement this new knowledge. In this system, scientists can happily be scientists and know that their work will be considered and applied as appropriate.

            Unfortunately, no such infrastructure exists. As it stands, scientists have to be their own advocates and it is a constant struggle to get most politicians (at least in the United States) to take any science seriously. So it makes sense that scientists sometimes use a few normative phrases to get their point across.

            Clearly this system isn’t sustainable. These are the times when we most need scientific knowledge translated into action. Many scientists do their work because it’s interesting to study the natural world. But most also care about preserving the amazing nature around them. Despite this goal, although vast amounts of scientific knowledge are generated that can mollify and repair human influence on the natural world, so much of it never makes it beyond the journal pages and literature cited sections. This is work that matters, but, though desperately needed, it is rarely applied.

            For instance, we recently had a lecture about habitat fragmentation and learned that planting live fences (where tree limbs that are planted as fence posts eventually grow into trees) can reduce the effects of habitat fragmentation by acting as habitat corridors for some species. Amazing! What a breakthrough! But what will come of it? Some educational efforts undertaken by organizations like the Las Cruces Biological Station can encourage farmers to plant live fences if they need to clear pasturelands. But with thousands of papers being published annually, educational organizations can’t keep up, and governments rarely try to.

            The bottom line is that we need people who can translate scientific findings into reality. It is unfair to burden scientists further by asking them to produce their work and aggressively advocate for it. There aren’t enough hours in the day for that. We need people to fulfill the hopes of researchers by bringing their work into the world and putting it to use. Before students commit to saving the world as scientists, they must consider whether their work will actually make the world a better place. The cold reality right now is that the knowledge is there, but it’s not being adequately utilized. When more people realize this, I hope that we will build up and strengthen those institutions that allow scientific intentions to become reality. Once we can really start translating science into action, we have a chance of reducing the effects of climate change and other forms of human destruction of our world.