Tomorrow is the March for Science. Who's going?

[lpetrich]

Canada fought the war on science. Here’s how scientists won. - Vox

For Canadians like me, the March for Science, in particular, brought not just encouragement but a sense of déjà vu, tinged with relief. For President Trump is not the first chief executive of a major Western nation to wage a war on science. Until Stephen Harper’s Conservative government was voted out of power in 2015, it spent nearly a decade as the free world’s chief aggressor on this front. Under Harper, the Canadian government waged a steady attack on science and data the administration deemed unnecessary or unhelpful to its agenda. Harper cancelled the long-form census — the government’s most important data-gathering tool — and slashed budgets for climate science programs. He mothballed vital environmental research labs and rewrote environmental protection legislation in the fine print of budget bills.

The Department of Fisheries, a frequent regulatory opponent of the oil and gas projects Harper’s government was pushing, saw some of the deepest cuts: When it was forced to shutter the majority of its libraries, books full of irreplaceable research wound up in dumpsters. Media access to government scientists working on climate and environmental topics all but vanished, and in several egregious cases individual scientists were directly muzzled, forbidden to speak at all in public about their work. Harper also pulled Canada out of the Kyoto treaty and became a notorious heel dragger at international climate talks.

Then in 2012, some scientists did a "Death of Evidence" mock funeral.

A few years later, a much more sensible political party was voted into office.

Granted, the American war on science promises to be a much meaner and more reckless battle than the Canadian one, led as it is by a president and administration whose erratic, know-nothing tendencies are without analogue in any democratic nation, ever. (Stephen Harper, despite his many sins, respected the basic tenets of democracy and had a knowledge of what government was for that extended beyond last night’s Fox News broadcast.)

What lessons can be learned?

1) Marching was the right way to start.
It's a good way of advertising one's position.

However,
2) Marching is only a start. The biggest challenges are still to come.
Organizing and lobbying.

3) Science can be a winning wedge issue because no one wants to be against it.

4) Personal stories and small, specific absurdities are more powerful than fact sheets and dramatic outrage.

The government’s decision to order Department of Fisheries scientist Kristi Miller not to speak about a major 2011 paper on declining salmon populations kept her out of the press for a couple of days. But her story soon supplied incontrovertible evidence of governmental interference, involving officials at the highest levels of government. It would be told and retold dozens of times.

5) Follow the data. And archive it.

6) The good guys in the lab coats will win the war.