Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

On Press Freedom Day, little to celebrate for Hong Kong’s journalists

Young Georgians want to be part of Europe. Their government is in the way.

Taxes are inevitable. Paying to prepare them doesn’t have to be.

Biden honors distinguished Americans; Trump back in N.Y. court

Hope Hicks witnessed nearly every Trump scandal. Now she must testify.

State laws measure if a woman is close enough to death for an abortion

Israel’s offensive is destroying Gaza’s ability to grow its own food

Riot police and over 2,000 arrests: A look at 2 weeks of campus protests

‘It’s been abused’ Rep. McCaul on motion to vacate threat

The Capitals, a team in transition, know what they want this offseason

Is Pastis as good as our food critic thought? He sent spies to find out.

Nationals can’t solve Nate Eovaldi, drop series finale to Rangers

Trump Media auditor charged by SEC with ‘massive fraud’

Google’s empire is massive. A judge will soon rule if it’s a monopoly.

Teen grabs wheel when driver passes out and school bus veers into traffic

Cat climbed into Amazon return box, found alive 630 miles away

Brave Little Hunter is free: Baby orca escapes lagoon for open seas

What’s the best bus to New York? We tested 5 for comfort and value.

You asked: Do I need a passport for my cruise?

Adaptive equipment is making national parks more inclusive

The New York Times, alone in its outrage over access to Biden

Wait, what is Stephen A. Smith talking about? Find out with our quiz.

Stephen A. Smith would like even more of your attention

Ask Amy: Should I be the best man if I think the bride is abusive?

Carolyn Hax: Husband keeps pushing modest spouse to wear sexier clothes

Miss Manners: Host eats luxurious breakfast, leaves cereal for guest

Journalism in India is under assault

The dangerous new call for regime change in Beijing

Ukrainian men abroad voice anger over pressure to return home to fight 

An I bond is now at 4.28 percent. Are they still a good deal?

Use these 6 points to say no to a college you and your kid can’t afford

How this new rule protects retirement savers from costly advice

Reporting on Earth’s changing climate and the search for solutions

See more coverage in your recommendations

Climate & environment

The Climate Coach newsletter

Climate alerts

Tens of thousands of scientists and their allies are <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/the-next-big-protest-in-washington-is-this-weekends-march-for-science-and-there-are-more-to-follow/2017/04/20/494c15ce-2528-11e7-b503-9d616bd5a305_story.html">expected</a> to demonstrate in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, with <a href="https://www.marchforscience.com/satellite-marches/">hundreds of additional satellite marches</a> planned to boot.

Organizers insist the march is simply calling for “political leaders and policymakers to enact evidence-based policies in the public interest.” And yet the sentiments driving it could perhaps only have emerged in the Trump administration: A concern about valid information itself and its role in public policy, combined with deep fear about the fate of federal science budgets, which Trump has targeted for sweeping cuts.

[D.C. March for Science: ‘The oceans are rising, and so are we’]

There have, to be sure, been countless past flare-ups at the interface of science, politics, and society. And yet they’ve rarely been so mobilizing for the research world.

“The march is pretty unprecedented in terms of the scale and breadth of the scientific community that’s involved, and it does recall Physicians for Social Responsibility and various scientific groups against nuclear war in the Reagan era, that’s I think the most recent precedent,” said Robert Proctor, a professor of the history of science at Stanford University. “But this is even broader in the sense that there’s a broader perception of a massive attack on sacred notions of truth that are sacred to the scientific community.”

“The current concerns, and let’s say movement, on the parts of many, many scientists and other citizens — and the movements of the current administration — those really do feel pretty unusual,” added David Kaiser, a historian of science at MIT. “And if they’re not completely brand new under the sun, they do feel like a pretty big swing.”

Proctor, Kaiser, and two other historians of science reached for this article cited many partial past analogues for what’s happening in the world of U.S. science right now. But they also noted ways in which the present moment seems distinct. The main reason: While scientists and their allies have argued about and even occasionally protested on specific political topics over the years, taking to the streets in a sweeping defense of scientific truth itself and its role in policymaking seems considerably broader and, for the research world, more fundamental.

McKenna Ewen

It certainly isn’t news that scientific knowledge is politically potent and tends to get under people’s skin. Many of history’s most important scientists — Galileo, Darwin — clashed with authorities or the dominant cultures of their time.

Nor is it surprising to find that individual scientists can have strong opinions. Albert Einstein took up countless causes in his life, from pacifism to civil rights. Carl Sagan was another celebrity scientist who stood up for many political positions, and especially arms control and resistance to Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” program.

The current march, however, is best understood as a key moment in the U.S.’s government’s special relationship with science that began during World War II, and especially after the Soviet launch of Sputnik.

During this era, scientists became deeply attached to the federal government. They helped win wars through military and weapons research. They advised presidents. They also got used to receiving large amounts of public money for more basic and nonclassified research. Meanwhile, an administrative state grew up that relies on technical expertise, not only employing large numbers of scientists directly but also seating them in many formal advisory roles.

In this modern era, there was often friction between science and the American state. There were an unending string of controversies over environmental science (acid rain, ozone depletion, climate change), certain types of biomedical research (fetal tissue, embryonic stem cells), and more. And there were many controversies centered around scientific funding choices as well (Google “<a href="https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&amp;ion=1&amp;espv=2&amp;ie=UTF-8#q=superconducting+super+collider">Superconducting Super Collider</a>”).

But what’s different about the March for Science and the movement it seems to entail is that it is expressing concern about this modern science-politics relationship in a comprehensive way, rather than on individual issues.

And that corresponds to the Trump administration itself, which has come out of the gates by posing deep challenges to the traditional relationship that scientists have had with their government. Trump is proposing sweeping science budget cuts, even as he’s also raising concerns about the scientific advisory apparatus — the place of scientists in decision-making — by <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/03/13/one-big-thing-that-trumps-government-is-missing-scientists/">failing to name appointment</a><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/03/13/one-big-thing-that-trumps-government-is-missing-scientists/">s</a> to leading government scientific and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/the-trump-administration-is-ill-prepared-for-a-global-pandemic/2017/04/08/59605bc6-1a49-11e7-9887-1a5314b56a08_story.html?utm_term=.9d8585d65200">public health</a> positions and aiming cuts at advisory bodies like the EPA’s <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/04/04/trump-doesnt-just-want-to-cut-the-epas-science-he-wants-to-cut-its-expertise/">Science Advisory Board</a>.

And that, in turn, has triggered the sharp scientist response.

“There’s different ways scientists have expressed opposition,” said Harvard science historian Naomi Oreskes. “In history, taking to the streets is kind of viewed as a last resort, it’s not the thing that most scientists would go to first.”

Still, there are notable past examples. Perhaps one of the biggest involved arms control and nuclear weapons, where a large scale political and protest movement reserved a special place for scientists and especially physicists, who had not only originally created the bomb but were in a special position to provide technical critiques of arms policies.

“Arms control is the obvious analogy,” said Oreskes. “And I think it’s the only one that’s really comparable in the sense of scientists not just speaking privately in corridors of power, but taking to the streets. Becoming active in the way that people are doing now.”

In a popular sense, this movement was larger than the March for Science. To give just one example, in 1982, hundreds of thousands of people — perhaps close to a million — <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1982/06/13/world/throngs-fill-manhattan-to-protest-nuclear-weapons.html?pagewanted=all">attended an antinuclear rally</a> in New York’s Central Park. Obviously, not all of those were scientists, but scientists were central to this movement.

In terms of protests, MIT’s Kaiser sees another example from the past worth comparing: Demonstrations that began on college campuses in the late 1960s, closely tied to the antiwar protest movement, that <a href="http://science.sciencemag.org/content/163/3872/1175">challenged</a> whether universities and scientists should be taking research dollars from the Pentagon.

“It was about the role of the defense agencies in funding basic research,” said Kaiser. “It wasn’t only the physicists ….It was a fairly broad based coalition that had a lot of passion and a lot of buy-in from students and faculty across many fields of study.” That movement, he points out, was closely tied to the <a href="http://www.ucsusa.org/about/founding-document-1968.html#.WPpV5vnyvmE">founding of the Union of Concerned Scientists</a>, perhaps the most influential nonprofit and advocacy group operating at the science-politics intersection.

If you look to other countries, meanwhile, you find other relevant examples. In the 1980s in the UK, a group named “<a href="http://www.nature.com/news/we-are-still-saving-british-science-from-margaret-thatcher-1.12800">Save British Science</a>” sprang up in the face of deep research spending cuts enacted by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the context of a recession.

“Thatcher was quite consistent in her view that all sections of public expenditure should take their share of the burden of cutting public expenditure to meet the recession, and so she cut funding for the research councils, the equivalent of the NSF and the NIH,” said John Durant, a science historian and director of the MIT Museum. “And this caused something close to panic in the scientific community in the UK.” But Durant says the big difference today is that the current movement has a “populist” streak — after all, it’s centered on marching. The British scientists, in contrast, started with a newspaper advertisement.

So as scientists hit the streets on Saturday, they are making history — although it is very hard to say what will come of that intervention.

“I don’t know if most Americans even know what NOAA is,” said Oreskes. “So I think a rally like this is extremely important to making clear to the public, what’s going on … Not because I think it will make Donald Trump change his mind.”

More from Energy and Environment:

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/04/19/humans-have-filled-the-pristine-arctic-ocean-with-300-billion-pieces-of-floating-plastic/">The pristine Arctic has become a garbage trap for 300 billion pieces of plastic</a>

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/04/19/top-trump-advisors-at-odds-over-paris-climate-deal/">Top Trump advisers at odds over Paris climate deal</a>

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/04/20/as-coral-reefs-die-huge-swaths-of-the-ocean-floor-are-vanishing-with-them/">As coral reefs die, huge swaths of the ocean floor are eroding along with them</a>

For more, you can sign up for our weekly newsletter <a href="http://wapo.st/1MomKU6">here</a> and follow us on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/postgreen">here</a>.

2020 Pulitzer Prize, explanatory reporting.

Yale University, BA in English

Chris Mooney is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter covering climate change, energy, and the environment. He has reported from the 2015 Paris climate negotiations, the Northwest Passage, and the Greenland ice sheet, among other locations, and has written four books about science, politics and climate change.

Chris Mooney

The Washington Post

Environment

Weather

Climate Solutions

Climate Lab

Green Living

Business of Climate

Climate

prism://prism.query/site-articles-only,/climate-environment&limit=20

Sign up for the Climate Coach newsletter and get advice for life on our changing planet, in your inbox every Tuesday and Thursday.

Washington Post coverage of climate and environment-related issues.

prism://prism.query/tag,climate202&limit=3

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-202-newsletters/the-climate-202/