By David E. Nye, MIT Press Reader
Does nature represent eternity, ancestors, science, the present, the future, or a young earth? Is it to be revered, conserved, exploited, or sacrificed? A nation that identifies itself with nature begins to fall apart when it can no longer agree on what nature is.
By Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights
We are having worldwide fight not over our view of "the facts", but over what constitutes "the facts." It has ever been thus, philosopher Paul Feyeraband tells us. It's just that now that fight is breaking out into the open and disrupting our lives and our institutions without a clear way to resolve it.
By Robert Costanza, Solutions
The United States was founded on ideas that reflected Enlightenment thinking, including the importance of science and the separation of church and state.
By Wes Jackson, Robert Jensen, Podcast from the Prairie
In Episode 3, titled “Mad about Science,” host Robert Jensen asks Wes how formal science differs from, and is similar to, the folk science he learned on the farm growing up.
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
SCIENCE is a political claim that the human world should be organized in a particular way on the basis of ‘scientific principles’ or what ‘the science’ tells us to do, or other formulations of that sort (some people call this scientism).
By John Biewen, Chenjerai Kumanyika, Scene on Radio
Scientists weren’t the first to divide humanity along racial – and racist – lines. But for hundreds of years, racial scientists claimed to provide proof for those racist hierarchies – and some still do.
By Tad Patzek, Life Itself
How naive it is to think than the "New Green Deal" will allow us to continue our current lifestyles, just by other greener means. This, my friends in the developed, power and resource hogging countries is impossible.
By Mat Hope, DeSmog Blog
The fossil fuel industry and the tobacco industry are funding disinformation campaigns so societies and countries can’t take action in ways that would generally benefit everyone except the fossil fuel and tobacco industries.
By George Nicholas, The Conversation
Science is a multicultural enterprise that benefits from and indeed requires competing views. Indigenous observations, perspectives and values enrich, not threaten, our collective knowledge of the world.
By Ugo Bardi, Cassandra's legacy
I understand that by publishing this post I may be giving ammunition to the anti-science crowd. But we can't just hide in the ivory tower and tell people that science is perfect as it is. We need deep reforms in the way science is done.
By Philip Loring, Ensia
Calls for strict science-based decision making on complex issues like GMOs and geoengineering can shortchange consideration of ethics and social impacts.
By Staff, March for Science, Climate and Capitalism
Why do we “March for Science”? A central impulse is to fight the exercise of power for private gain at the expense of broad interest; oil companies ought not determine the quality of climate science!