In Conversation: Science for the People
Nafis Hasan is a Bangladeshi Postdoctoral Scholar at Tufts University studying brain tumors. He is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and the Science for the People editorial collective.
Rebecca Orrison is a co-convener of the Science for the People Climate Change Working Group. Locally she is engaged with climate activism, including the Public Power NY Campaign. She is paid to study past climate states and water isotopes as a graduate research assistant at SUNY Albany.
Science for the People (SftP) is unique as a political group of scientists — you focus more on radical science and community organizing as opposed to specific policy discussions or lobbying. What then do you think is the relationship between scientists and politics?
Rebecca: When we're doing our work, we don't stop being people with values and having identities. So, it's really important to explicitly engage politically because we already do implicitly in our work — I think that everything we do is political. You already have to deal with the politics and of the world and the way it sees you and the way you see it, and that doesn't stop when we put on our lab coats. And so I think that there's a real value in then taking your lab coat out of your office and into the street, and having those political conversations as a professional or as a scientist. For me, it comes from this value side: trying to make sure that the way that I do my science is ethical to me based on my value systems and advocating for those values. Also, direct engagement with politics can be by joining an organization where you have solidarity with people and feel like you can engage in a way that builds power in the community.
What are some of the biggest misconceptions you see among scientists in policy and their allies?
Nafis: I’d also like to add that science — and science policy — is not absolute. But, especially in the United States, you see this artificial boundary between politics and science, that somehow, science is value-neutral. You see this in science advocacy organizations that say “we believe in science,” but what does that actually mean? Sure, there's data, but our implicit biases lend themselves to interpreting the data. So when people say, “I believe in science,” I don’t think it means anything unless you have a political position. At this point, if you're not questioning the built environment behind the science, you’re not engaging in politics.
More, as much as I would like to say, “yes we need more science-based policy,” — which, in some cases, is true, such as climate change policy — there’s not always a clear consensus. Why? Because science is a process — we use data, use peer review, use evidence that is constantly developing or interpretations or theories that are emerging. For example, some scientists were advocating that we do not need a lockdown, while other scientists said we need a lockdown. The critical part was the state; we needed the government to step in and say that we are here to protect people's interests and not profits. You can talk about epidemiological risk scores all day long, but none of that matters in the world of policy and material life unless put into context.
Rebecca: For example, some scientists are working for oil companies spreading misinformation about climate change and creating all of this scientific uncertainty about climate change. The same thing happened with tobacco and health. So, I think that “who's funding the science?” and “who is interpreting the science?” are very important and very political questions. Integrating other perspectives of what counts as valuable into the way we do our science really matters.
Nafis: Right! You need to make it happen according to input from the community that lives there. There was this whole story about how Oxfam started giving people goats but that actually harmful to the community because it ate up the spare vegetation in those areas. That is such a good encapsulation of most Western conceptions of what climate change solutions look like — it's like, “oh yeah, we're just gonna do this and everybody's gonna be happy.”
What are some examples of SftP including these ‘other perspectives’?
Nafis: Well, for example, our chapter in Boston is working as part of the “Take Back the Grid” energy democracy campaign there. After many failures by the state regulatory agencies, many community members became radicalized. They wanted democratic power: the energy meets the needs of the community, and the community has input on where data is coming in, how energy is distributed, and how it is being paid for. This struggle in Boston is connected to other struggles against oil pipelines like, for example, SftP’s participation in Minnesota against Enbridge’s Line 3. It's a fundamental struggle to claim people's voice in this whole system of energy.
And the whole point was that we did not want federal policies to be handed down to us from the top-down, for example, like in the Obama era. A lot of the green energy policies came in from the top-down, without consulting the community that was there, and that's not very democratic if you ask me. If we don't listen to the community, how is that democratic? One of the things Science for the People always tries to do is to include voices that policymakers usually ignore at the table.
This bottom-up approach has also been fundamental to the SftP “People’s Green New Deal” Campaign and a recent Science for the People Magazine issue by the same name. Tell me a bit about that.
Rebecca: So when we’re thinking about a Green New Deal, it's not just enough for people to have a voice at a hearing or input into a proposed policy. They must have the space to create new policies and reimagine a new future that works for people and is built from people's voices and experiences and expertise — everybody's an expert in some aspect of their own lives. I think that's a critical aspect of what it means to be a bottom-up, or a People's Green New Deal. That's why it's not a “Green New Deal for the People,” but a “People's Green New Deal.” That means that it's developed by people with input from people and is responsive to their community’s needs. In the same way that our utility grids are different state by state, each locality must have the ability to create programs that work for them.
The issue was a collection of these ideas, but publishing the issue was only the first step in envisioning a People’s Green New Deal. We wanted to bring voices from frontlines — community organizers, labor organizers, academics, and policymakers together to discuss the major topics we covered in the issue and so we launched a virtual teach-in series. The series focused on this variety of perspectives, and helped us see that different parts of the globe are focused on different things. A Green New Deal must draw from a variety of different perspectives, some that are more impacted than others, some that have done more organizing than others, etc., so that we can have this sharing of knowledge.
Finally, the “People’s Green New Deal,” like all JIPP issues, included art. Why did SftP think that was important to have?
Nafis: Some art was data-based to graphically represent climate science. The other part was more traditional art that was not necessarily based on data. Oftentimes, climate science happens in very technocratic terms — the IPCC fights over climate models, emissions, etc. But, when you think about the experience of people undergoing climate crisis, those are represented not just by data. So, how do you personalize that experience for people to understand? Thus, in different ways, we are trying to break the boundary that science only means data or evidence — not to say we’re ignoring the data, just to say that the data can not explain an individual's experience, but art can.
Rebecca: Indeed, we’ve known, in some ways for hundreds of years, that CO2 influences temperature, but the politics didn’t change. The current level of civic discourse around climate change hasn't woken until more recently. You can have as much information as you want, but nothing will change until people are really connecting to it and understanding it. Since art connects to people more on an emotional level rather than an intellectual level, reframing science in that way can be an essential tool for change.
