Team:Dalhousie/Human Practices
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 four ways in
which we integrated human practices into our experimental design: talking with experts,
discussing safety, researching other Canadian biofuel companies, and presenting our project to
different audiences. In addition, we developed an extensive outreach program to establish an
open communication platform between the public and scientists (click here to few our
engagement activities). We hope to foster curiosity, answer questions and concerns, and get
more people talking about science!
Learn more... hopefully have links to next pages here
