My mistake, please don’t repeat it

About five years ago I bought a book and began to read it. For reasons I don’t remember, I got part way into it and put it aside. As I look about the world’s crises, it’s clear I probably should have kept reading. The book’s title? The War On Science, by Shawn Otto. The linked title will take you to a review published in Scientific American, from which  we extracted these paragraphs:

Otto grounds his inquiry into current antiscience attitudes by examining their cultural and intellectual roots in, among other things, the anti-Darwinist reaction of the 19th century, the wholesale retreat by many scientists from civic discourse after World War II and the postmodernist movement of the late 20th century.

At times, Otto seems to be criticizing everyone—from academics to industrialists to journalists to politicians. But, despite cogently eviscerating the ultraliberal anti-vaccine element and the “brutal, blame-the-victim aspect of New Age thinking,” he reserves his greatest ire for the “antiscience of those on the right—a coalition of fundamentalist churches and corporations largely in the resource extraction, petrochemical and agrochemical industries.” Their effort, Otto writes, “has far more dangerous public policy implications because it is about forestalling policy based on evidence to protect destructive business models.”

 There are several subtitles on the book’s cover

• Who’s Waging It


• Why It Matters


• What We Can Do About It

It’s the last item that is of particular interest to me. In the five or six years since Milkweed Editions published the book, the country has elected a charlatan as president and suffered more than 650,000 deaths during and due to a pandemic that’s continuing as this is being typed. I’ve been pondering for some time how we can deal with  the next pandemic, or its ilk, if we still have up to one third of the country refusing vaccination and politicians too afraid of civil unrest or losing the the next election to make vaccination mandatory. Democracy requires an informed electorate. We seem to be heading in the wrong direction on that issue and need to make addressing that a much greater priority. Who knows, if more people were informed about the options for responding appropriately to our climate crisis we might even make some timely progress there.

I’m going to correct my mistake and start again reading The War On Science this afternoon. I suggest you give some careful consideration to seeing if your library, your independent bookstore, or Milkweed Editions has a copy for you.

Science

By Alison Hawthorne Deming

Then it was the future, though what’s arrived   

isn’t what we had in mind, all chrome and   

cybernetics, when we set up exhibits

in the cafeteria for the judges

to review what we’d made of our hypotheses.

The class skeptic (he later refused to sign   

anyone’s yearbook, calling it a sentimental   

degradation of language) chloroformed mice,   

weighing the bodies before and after

to catch the weight of the soul,

wanting to prove the invisible

real as a bagful of nails. A girl

who knew it all made cookies from euglena,

a one-celled compromise between animal and plant,   

she had cultured in a flask.

We’re smart enough, she concluded,

to survive our mistakes, showing photos of farmland,   

poisoned, gouged, eroded. No one believed

he really had built it when a kid no one knew   

showed up with an atom smasher, confirming that

the tiniest particles could be changed   

into something even harder to break.

And one whose mother had cancer (hard to admit now,   

it was me) distilled the tar of cigarettes   

to paint it on the backs of shaven mice.

She wanted to know what it took,

a little vial of sure malignancy,

to prove a daily intake smaller

than a single aspirin could finish

something as large as a life. I thought of this

because, today, the dusky seaside sparrow

became extinct. It may never be as famous

as the pterodactyl or the dodo,

but the last one died today, a resident

of Walt Disney World where now its tissue samples

lie frozen, in case someday we learn to clone

one from a few cells. Like those instant dinosaurs

that come in a gelatin capsule—just add water   

and they inflate. One other thing this

brings to mind. The euglena girl won first prize

both for science and, I think, in retrospect, for hope.

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