Today’s ceremonies likely mark the beginning of a new level of discord between scientific evidence and American policy. I’ve written here about the dark days of Canada’s own war on science under Stephen Harper, which mercifully have ended, though the work that was damaged has by no means recovered. Now, under the Trudeau government we are establishing a new role of Chief Science Advisor and actively recruiting candidates.
Science advisors share some of their challenges with other science communicators like journalists and university public relations writers, in that they attempt to make technical and complex research accessible to non-scientists. But their role is subtly different because of their placement inside the policy-making circles.
A science advisor can do more than inject the scientific consensus into a policy discussion—as the broader academy can do from the outside at a single point in the process through deliberative reports. They also have the privilege of guarding the integrity of this input throughout the discussion, making sure the science doesn’t get distorted or misused, right until the moment a decision is made.
This week, vacations from the ordinary from LWON writers.
Perhaps 500 yards from my door—up an icy, winding driveway, a short way down a gravel road, beyond barbed wire fences and snow-skirffed pastures and the wind-twisted trunks of piñon and juniper trees—is a barn that shelters two sailboats in the middle of the Colorado desert. I first spotted them on a walk and stopped to stare. The nearest large reservoir is more than two hours away from the house I am borrowing here; the ocean, more than 16 hours away.