Consider this scenario: You arrive at work on a Monday morning and your plant manager gives you an order to shut down the blowers — the idea that wastewater treatment depends on oxygen is a hoax perpetrated by a political party.
What would you do? You would first of all think your boss had gone crazy. Then you would protest. Then you might report him or her to the regulatory authorities. You probably would resign sooner than carry out a directive you knew to be not just wrong but destructive — a danger to the environment and public health.
A great deal of harm can be done when science is put on the sidelines. And yet that’s exactly what is happening with a couple of absolutely critical issues facing the country and the world.
Making it partisan
First, consider climate change. Somehow we turned it into not just a political but a partisan issue. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change asserts, “Scientific evidence for warming of the climate system is unequivocal.”
NASA goes farther, stating, “The current warming trend is of particular significance because most of it is extremely likely (greater than 95% probability) to be the result of human activity since the mid-20th century and proceeding at a rate that is unprecedented over decades to millennia.” However, if you subscribe to a particular political ideology, you are not supposed to believe this; global warming is a hoax, or part of a natural cycle that has no human cause.
It’s possible to understand climate skepticism, since the change is slow in coming and is not obviously apparent. We don’t on a daily basis see glaciers melting and sea levels rising. We still get days of 20-degrees-below-zero temperatures. “What global warming?”
Then there’s COVID-19. By the time you read this, more than 500,000 Americans will have died from the coronavirus, yet many people, again based on a political ideology, believe it does not exist — it is a hoax. They persist in this belief even as people in their community die; even as they themselves are stricken: “It can’t be COVID. It must be something else.” They refuse to wear masks or keep social distance as instructed by the doctors and scientists. And more people get infected as a consequence.
Genuine danger
Horrible things can happen when we reject science for ideological or other reasons. Consider how many people have died because they dismissed research that said smoking tobacco caused heart disease and lung cancer. Consider how diseases like measles and whooping cough are in danger of re-emerging — and how COVID-19 could persist — because growing numbers of people reject the science behind vaccines.
Through the ages, science has solved innumerable problems, not the least of them being how to treat wastewater, making our waters fishable and swimmable after years of abuse, and protecting communities against outbreaks of disease.
And yet, many Americans seem to be growing up science-illiterate, or willing to set science to the side when it suits some kind of political or social agenda to do so. So despite all its benefits, does science itself need some sort of public information campaign to restore and amplify its reputation?
Credible sources
After all, believe in COVID-19 or not, science is what will get us out of the pandemic. Believe in climate change or not, science will be key in discovering and applying solutions. And who better to argue on behalf of science than people — like water and wastewater operators — working in science-driven professions? Who, in the end, is more credible?
Maybe, at the end of plant tours or classroom presentations, it would benefit the common good for water professionals to give a strong plug for the importance of science, and of listening to what the scientists say?
No need to engage in arguments on topics that unfortunately have become contentious. Just emphasize the role science plays in treating water and the role it has historically played in soothing all manner of our societies’ ills. Something to think on, anyway.
