That’s Not Science!

Please, President Biden, don’t make me defend Earth Day:

There’s a weird way a certain mid-wit brain conflates Nature with Science. You see it on online forums where people post pictures of a breathtaking cyclone and caption it: “I Effing Love Science!” No, you are awed by Nature. Science is something else.

Earth Day was instituted to celebrate and promote efforts at conservation and environmental protection. Lately, it has been used almost entirely as an occasion for promoting efforts to stop or reverse climate change. But, at least while my kids are young, the schools seem to use it as an occasion for nothing more offensive than a coloring book with pictures of blue skies and rich, dark brown soil.

I think what bothers me about the way Nature and Science are popularly mixed up is that it is connected to the even more serious conflation of knowledge with authority. The conclusions of science can inform our decisions, but for the most part they cannot, by themselves, direct them. And yet, it’s a very popular superstition that somehow “allying” yourself to the scientific method, or scientific endeavors, grants a person special authority on moral and political matters.