Political Science

According to public health researcher Caroline Weinberg, a national co-chair of the March for Science along with University of Texas postdoc Jonathan Berman, “Science, scientists and evidence-based policymaking are under attack.” The young Trump administration’s moratorium on federal researchers publicizing ongoing results, issued January 24, “infuriated” Weinberg, she told an audience of reporters and fellow activists at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., Monday morning. “Aggressive silencing” of this sort is a normal practice for a presidential transition—but in the age of Twitter, not to mention in the age of Trump, it’s easy to cast as a censorious evil.

Shortly after the scientists’ march on Washington began gathering media attention, push-back mounted among those serious-minded men and women of science who prefer to keep the taint of frantic protest off their lab coats. Geologist Robert Young, for instance, wrote in a New York Times op-ed in late January, “If tens of thousands of us show up, it will simply increase the size of the echo chamber”—warning that a science march can only foster disunity and serve to pit the science community against the powers they’d be protesting. Not so surprisingly perhaps, the vast majority of committed participants aren’t actual scientists.

“Only 24.8 percent of the people who submitted a form to volunteer actually identified as scientists—everyone else were teachers, parents, students, science supporters,” Weinberg said. “Just thousands of people around the world who shared our conviction that it was time to defend the role of science in society and that science must inform policy.” It’s high time we go to bat for science, she said back in January, because “scientists worldwide have been alarmed by the clear anti-science actions taken by the Trump administration.”

And yet next week’s march now claims to eschew bias. The 202 and mounting partner organizations can’t quite afford to antagonize the powers that be, apparently. Talking around the movement’s roots in partisan rage posed an occasional challenge at the Press Club, where Science March organizers seemed to the untrained observers to submit to a not very scientific doublethink. “I have committed my career to ensuring that science forms the foundation of policy decisions, but our government has never been less committed to that principle,” mourned one Ayana Johnson, the co-director of Science March partnerships, who also works at the intersection of ocean conservation and social justice, (wherever that is): “I never ever thought that I’d be helping organize a march for science, because I never expected my entire professional field to be threatened.” One reporter wondered whether these organizers were at all concerned that marching to vent a unified frustration over funding cut and ecological data needing to be archived would only play into the flat-earthers’ biases. Doesn’t politicizing science, in other words, inherently corrupt the whole evidence-based system that brought us old favorites like gravity and penicillin? “I think science has always been political but people have been reluctant to accept that,” Johnson replied.

Aggrieved federal scientists are aiding the organizers behind the scenes, Weinberg revealed. She described one brave FDA employee who’s been corresponding with resistance activists via encrypted messaging—to avoid the prying eyes of the federal agency’s anti-science overlords. Even Christine McEntee, executive director and CEO of the American Geophysical Union, after skillfully equivocating, “Scientists are like all of us, they are Democrats and Republicans, mothers and fathers, friends and neighbors, colleagues and community members,” would add that “now is a critical time in the history of our nation for scientists to share why science is essential.” American Geophysical Union members have a lot of feelings right now, she said. “Some are extremely anxious and fearful, some are angry.”

Swiss scientist Claudio Paganini joined the panel remotely from Germany, where he’s organizing a companion Science March. “Looking back, people will ask, ‘What did you do?’,” Paganini said, referring to this high-stakes historical moment. It’s a little unfair to the Americans, really: When people do ask, he’ll get to say he led the resistance from Berlin. (Beats pressuring scientists to cave to political headwinds, anyway.)

Weinberg even had to tell a well-meaning NPR reporter she didn’t yet know the march route, which cities would have the biggest marches, or approximately how many supporters might show up. She’s still waiting for the RSVPs to pile in.

The best estimation of what to expect come Earth Day came from panelist Kristian Aloma, organizer of Chicago’s Science March. He contradicted Johnson, who’d admitted earlier that “Hurtling forward guided by nothing but opinions and feelings is dangerous.” Much like a sacred text, the Science March contains multitudes. Aloma, a doctoral student in psychology, told reporters that “emotion leads to motivation” and, therefore, the Science March finds its deepest roots—according to the reigning wisdom of this social scientist—in a knot of raw emotional turmoil.

He talked vaguely about “seeing and experiencing and hearing emotions of all different kinds around these issues [in science]”—and about shouldering the responsibility “to focus that emotion” and “to create that sort of loudness.”

Now we have only to wait, not quite two weeks, for the loudness of an unnumbered mass of mostly non-scientists.