SCIENCE AND SOCIETY
Valencius says that her class discusses the use of science in environmental arguments and the discrepancy between scientific consensus and public views regarding climate change.
“Looking at the role of environmental arguments in writing for the public in the last 150 years helps us understand how we would get to a point where Americans have such a different view of science than the scientists do,” she says.
What’s more, Valencius adds, books like Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” show how writing can cast a familiar-seeming world in a revolutionary light.
“I see all kinds of media—books, online sources, blogs—as some of the most powerful forces shaping the material world,” she says.
Lister said he feels the debate about climate change has shifted from whether or not the climate is changing to what we can do about it—though he acknowledges that there are still individuals focused on the first debate.
But for Lister, the facts are straightforward.
“If you mess around with any chemical formula, it will change the outcome of the formula—and we are messing around very seriously with the chemical formula of the atmosphere,” he says. “It’s bound to have some kind of impact.”
But the challenge of environmental reporting, he says, is selecting what’s reasonable to include and what can be left out.
“Do you include the views that some people think the climate isn’t changing?” he asks. “All journalists really have a mission to explain, a responsibility to try and gather the best facts you can about a particular issue and disseminate them in a way that’s clear and comprehensive and fair.”
The historical perspective introduced in some of his classes has contextualized environmental issues in a powerful way, he says.
“It’s tempting to think about climate change as a recent phenomenon, but actually in other ways it’s always been there,” he says.
“The sad truth is that we’re better at wreaking environmental change than any generation that preceded us in human history—the best, or the worst,” he says. “For a journalist, that means that I should be in business for some time.”
—Staff writer Julie R. Barzilay can be reached at jbarzilay13@college.harvard.edu.