Difference between revisions of "Team:Dalhousie/Human Practices"

Despite the unequivocal evidence for climate change, a recent poll (2017) commissioned by the Ontario Science Center (Canada) found that 47% of the public (up from 40% last year) agreed that “the science behind global warming is still unclear.” A quote by the chief executive officer of the Ontario Science Center summarizes the problem that arises from this statistic: "If you think that climate change is one of the main issues that we face as a society, and almost half of us think that the science is still unclear when there's a pretty broad scientific consensus about it, this affects the chances that we have to act in a unified way about it." While our team was taken aback by the statistic, we were not entirely surprised as there are many prominent public figures such as politicians and celebrities who deny climate changing is occurring. How, as a society, we move forward to address complex scientific issues is going to become increasingly more important in the future. On the positive side, despite 31% of respondents agreeing that “because scientific ideas are fluid and subject to change they can’t be trusted,” 79% agreed that they are comfortable “knowing that scientific answers may not be definitive”, and 82% said they “would like to know more about science and how it affects our world”.

Our project by no means is an answer to stop climate change, but it could potentially help reduce the environmental impact of various industries if we succeed in modifying E. coli to degrade cellulose into glucose. With the knowledge that the public wants to learn about science and with the understanding that in order to address climate change everyone needs to be on board, we developed our integrated human practices strategy. There are five ways in which we integrated human practices into our experimental design: talking with experts, discussing safety, researching other Canadian biofuel companies, presenting our project to different audiences, and an extensive outreach program we developed to establish an open communication platform between the public and scientists. We hope to foster curiosity, answer questions and concerns, and get more people talking about science!