The May issue of Discover magazine came in my mail the other week (perhaps appropriately it arrived with the image of the Earth all torn up—see above) and I was excited by the ‘Better Planet Special Issue’ banner at the top of the cover. However, as I looked down just a bit further on the cover, I saw the headline: “How Science will heal the Earth.”
The Introduction to the special section was written by Laurie David, a climate activist (and co-producer of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth) who calls for a “complete shift in consciousness” regarding global change. She says the decisions we as a human race will have to make will be difficult and the consequences will not be easy to take. But, she goes on to say, we should act on the knowledge that these hard decisions today will make things much less worse for the future.
Those are points that I generally agree with but that’s where the dialogue stopped. The magazine then goes into ‘science will save us’ mode, completely contradicting what that author of the forward is calling for. The articles are well written and focus on important topics, but how will developing better technologies for energy, food, water, air, and conservation help aid a complete shift in consciousness? Granted these technologies are important, and as someone working loosely in these fields, I hope there remains a continued push in these directions, but as I’ve argued previously on Nature Network, there should be focus on the ‘people’ part of the solution too, even by scientists. I suspect the cover was an attempt to be provocative by the editors of Discover but what kind of message does this send to non-scientists? Think of the millions of people that will see the cover in grocery stores, airports, and bookstores.
I promised I was going on hiatus a couple weeks ago until I defend my PhD (which remains only six days away!), but this is something that was really bothering me. How can science really heal the Earth? There is no silver bullet waiting out there, no matter how hard scientists and engineers look for it, if we continue to live in a world that values unmitigated consumption, growth, etc. These types of headlines allow people to put too much faith into science and become complacent, waiting for a solution to come to them as opposed to actually doing something.
So, that’s what I think, but I want to pose this question to any readers out there: Do you think science can save the Earth?
There is a funny post on Dilbert’s blog (Scott Adams) one day this week saying he can now lie all his troubles to rest. He does so by citing six or eight misleading media headlines along lines of “cancer cured”. The media seem to operate in all-or-none-mode (science good vs bad), as well as “big issue” mode—to make it interesting, any science story has to be “solving (or creating) a big problem”.
That doesn’t answer your question, does it? My answer is that basically it is people who are going to save the world, via behaviour. Or not. Science can help and of course the advance of scientific knowledge is what it is all about at the end of the day. But, it is people who behave and act in the light of what they know (or don’t know), and people who decide whether learning more about the natural world is a priority compared with other human activities.
Mrs Thatcher could not have been more wrong when she said that there is no such thing as society.
Clearly Science with a capital ‘S’ isn’t going to save the Earth in exactly the same way that it hasn’t solved any practical problems that have been faced in the past. Science is a way of approaching the world around us which has produced, and is constantly refining, a crude model of the universe which on a good day isn’t too clunky about predicting how things have and will happen.
But, and its a big but, without science the Earth most certainly isn’t going to be saved. The power of science is that its crude and always approximate model can define the possible. Without that model we wouldn’t even know that the earth needed saving. With the model we know that it surely will and doing nothing isn’t going to acheive it.
Engineers might be able to claim some hand in providing some tools with which to save the Earth, Science can suggest how those tools might be applied but as Maxine says it can only be the actions of people that does the actual saving.
Sadly that will never happen unless much more of the World’s population are a whole lot better educated about what ‘Science’ can and can’t do.
Nicholas – I agree with you completely: the answer to your question is ‘no’. No amount of science will help without the political will to use it effectively.
More importantly, though – I wish you the very best of luck with your Ph.D. defence, and that this time next week we’ll be able to join in your celebrations.
Well, if this responsibility is not left only on science and if this responsibility is shared by industries, politics, people, etc. etc., the healing may actually happen!
Science with a wide knowledge, can surely help to improve the situation and can play a key role to calculate the consequences of any steps taken and may work out on some suggestions/options for the future of the planet. After all science is made of intellectual people with wide variety of knowledge. But surely, we need a huge team to work on this problem. I think that
Science, Politics, Industries, and Wisdowm spreaded in people, may make a perfect team to work on the problem. If all these play their specific roles in order to really heal the earth, certainly the result can be achieved.