View previous stories
	For scientists in a democracy, to dissent is to be reasonable by Halifax Media & agencies   For scientists in a democracy, to dissent is to be reasonable, by George Monbiot.   Government policy in Britain, Canada and Australia is crushing academic integrity on behalf of corporate power.   It"s as clear and chilling a statement of intent as you"re likely to read. Scientists should be "the voice of reason, rather than dissent, in the public arena". Vladimir Putin? Kim Jong-un? No, Professor Ian Boyd, chief scientific adviser at the UK"s Department for Environment.   Boyd"s doctrine is a neat distillation of government policy in Britain, Canada and Australia. These governments have suppressed or misrepresented inconvenient findings on climate change, pollution, pesticides, fisheries and wildlife. They have shut down programmes that produce unwelcome findings and sought to muzzle scientists. This is a modern version of Soviet Lysenkoism: crushing academic dissent on behalf of bad science and corporate power.   Writing in an online journal, Boyd argued that if scientists speak freely, they create conflict between themselves and policymakers, leading to a "chronically deep-seated mistrust of scientists that can undermine the delicate foundation upon which science builds relevance". This, in turn, "could set back the cause of science in government". So they should avoid "suggesting that policies are either right or wrong". If they must speak out, they should do so through "embedded advisers (such as myself), and by being the voice of reason, rather than dissent, in the public arena".   Shut up, speak through me, don"t dissent – or your behaviour will ensure that science becomes irrelevant. Note that the conflicts between science and policy are caused by scientists, rather than by politicians ignoring or abusing the evidence. Or by chief scientific advisers.   In an online question and answer session hosted by his department, Professor Boyd maintained that 50% of tuberculosis infections among cattle herds are caused by badgers. He repeated the claim in an official document called Science to Inform TB Policy. But as the analyst Jamie McMillan points out, the figure has been sexed up from inadequate data. Like the 45-minute claim in the Iraq debate, it is "spurious, simple to take on board, and crucial in convincing parliament".   The badger cull as a whole defies the findings of the £49m study the previous government commissioned. It has been thoroughly dissected by the leading scientists in the field, which might explain why Boyd is so keen to shut them up. It"s one of many ways in which his department has binned the evidence in setting its policies.   Yesterday Boyd"s boss, environment secretary Owen Paterson, told the Tory party conference not to worry about global warming. "I think we should just accept that the climate has been changing for centuries." A few weeks ago on Any Questions, he managed to repeat 10 discredited claims about climate change in one short contribution. His department repeatedly misrepresents science to appease industrial lobbyists. It claimed that its field trials of neonicotinoid pesticides on bees showed that "effects on bees do not occur under normal circumstances". Hopelessly contaminated, the study was in fact worthless, which is why it was not submitted to a peer-reviewed journal.   Similar distortions surround the department"s refusal to establish meaningful marine reserves, its attempt to cull buzzards on behalf of pheasant shoots, and its determination to allow farmers to start dredging streams again, turning them into featureless gutters.   There"s one consolation: Boyd, in his efforts to establish a tinpot dictatorship, has not yet achieved the control enjoyed by his counterparts in Canada. There, scientists with government grants working on any issue that could affect industrial interests – tar sands, climate change, mining, sewage, salmon farms, water trading – are forbidden to speak freely to the public. They are shadowed by government minders and, when they must present their findings, given scripts to memorise and recite. Dozens of turbulent research programmes and institutes have either been cut to the bone or closed altogether.   In Australia, the new government has chosen not to appoint a science minister. Tony Abbott, who once described man-made climate change as "absolute crap", has already shut down the government"s climate commission and climate change authority. But at least Australians are fighting back: the climate commission has been reconvened as an NGO, funded by donations. In Britain we allowed the government to shut down the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution and the Sustainable Development Commission with scarcely a groan of protest.   David Cameron"s government claimed that the tiny savings it made were required to reduce the deficit. Yet somehow it manages to fund a lavish range of planet-wrecking programmes. The latest is the Centre for Doctoral Training in Oil and Gas, just launched by the Natural Environment Research Council. Its aim is "to support the oil and gas sector" by providing "focused training" in fracking, in exploiting tar deposits, and in searching for oil in polar regions. In other words, it is subsidising fossil fuel companies while promoting climate change. How many people believe this is a good use of public money?   To be reasonable, when a government is manipulating and misrepresenting scientific findings, is to dissent. To be reasonable, when it is helping to destroy human life and the natural world, is to dissent. As Julien Benda argued in La Trahison des Clercs, democracy and civilisation depend on intellectuals resisting conformity and power.   A world in which scientists speak only through minders and in which dissent is considered the antithesis of reason is a world shorn of meaningful democratic choices. You can judge a government by its treatment of inconvenient facts and the people who expose them. This one does not emerge well.   http://www.monbiot.com/2013/09/30/age-of-unreason/ http://www.monbiot.com/2013/10/04/climate-breakdown/   September 2013   Rallies across Canada ask Canadians to "Stand Up for Science". (Halifax Media)   The future of science in Canada is grim, warns a new advocacy group fighting for its survival.   Evidence for Democracy, a national non-partisan group comprised largely of scientists, journalists and concerned citizens, is asking the federal government to reverse what it sees as disconcerting trends in how science has been treated in Canada since the Conservative Party took power in 2006.   On Monday, it will host Stand Up for Science events across Canada — including Halifax — to bring attention to the deterioration of federally funded research, the dearth of evidence-based policy decision-making, and broken communication between scientists and the public.   “This isn’t just about scientists and our careers, but really what we’re trying to get across is the fact that science really does matter to all Canadians, that we all have a vested interest in keeping science healthy in Canada,” says Katie Gibbs, executive director of Evidence for Democracy.   A recent PhD recipient from the University of Ottawa’s biology department, Gibbs helped organize last July’s Death of Evidence rally at Parliament Hill in Ottawa. The mock funeral shed light on what was at the time fresh wounds to the scientific field.   Last April, the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory (PEARL) in Nunavut lost its funding, closing the doors of a centre critical for the collection of data on air quality, climate change and the ozone.   The following month, the federal government announced it would cease funding the Experimental Lakes Area, a large operation that monitored everything from ecological systems to climate change.   The month after that, the government passed Bill C-38, also known as the “omnibus bill,” over one quarter of which had direct impacts on science-based decision making at the federal level. The Canadian Environmental Assessment Act was ditched and its agency crippled; the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act was nixed; the Fisheries Act, Navigable Waters Protection Act and Species at Risk Act were weakened; several environmental monitoring programs were killed; the list goes on.   “You’d be hard pressed to find somebody that’s not affected by the cutbacks,” says Prof. Thomas Duck, who works with the Department of Physics and Atmospheric Science at Dalhousie University.   He’s also a former PEARL researcher and will be participating in Halifax’s Stand Up for Science. On top of seeing his Arctic studies crumble, Duck has seen much of his high-tech laser radar work in Halifax disappear, and his beloved colleagues leave the country for opportunities elsewhere.   It’s not just the lack of funding that has dissuaded them; Duck, who has been vocal about the cutbacks, says the government has muzzled scientists, breaking off critical communication lines with the media and the general public.   Although cuts to scientific research have occurred across many fields, Duck and Gibbs agree that environmental science has been the hardest hit.   “This government certainly hasn’t hidden the fact that one of the goals of their mandate is to make Canada an energy super player, and it’s suspected that a lot of the cutting of environmental monitoring was to help expand oil development without having to run into science saying that that’s not good,” says Gibbs.   Cuts to environmental monitoring have also led to a lack of publicly available evidence to inform discussions across Canada on the oil sands, says Duck.   “It appears now that our current government would like to be governing in the dark,” he says. “They would rather develop their policies based on something other than evidence. How they’re going to do that is anyone’s guess.”   The ramifications can already be felt on the ground, says Duck. In Nova Scotia, a local Environment Canada team that tracked mercury levels in the province was eliminated, potentially endangering the ecosystem and residents.   Duck says Environment Canada “is a really damaged organization” that could take a “generation or more” to rebuild.   Outside of the environmental field, Gibbs says Canada is reeling from the 2010 decision to eliminate the mandatory long form census. This May, when the first results of the National Household Survey since the change were released, statisticians lamented a lack of confidence in the numbers.   Whether they agree with these changes or not, Duck says it is difficult for provinces to counteract them. Many, like Nova Scotia, have little money for scientific research funding, a budgetary item historically taken up by the feds. However, Duck says provinces can impose their own safeguards against changes to environmental protection policy by putting their own regulatory acts and bodies into action.   Gibbs says Stand Up for Science serves as a message to the federal government that now is the time to correct some of its decisions before its too late. http://evidencefordemocracy.ca/
	Building a just economic and political system, from the bottom up by Edge Fund   September 2013   As child poverty in the UK rises, it"s time to ask about a century of charitable giving: does philanthropy just exist to protect a system which makes some people very rich?   Oxfam released a report yesterday predicting that Government cuts will result in 800,000 more children living in poverty by 2020. This supports another recent report on inequality and disadvantage, which shows that the situation for children has not improved in nearly 50 years. Today 3.6 million children are growing up in relative poverty, compared to 2 million in 1969. This figure is expected to keep rising.   On the other side of the coin, currently we have over 600,000 millionaires in Britain, 10,000 of whom have wealth exceeding £19 million. The number of millionaires is expected to grow by a third by 2020, reaching 826,000. That’s right, we have rising numbers of both millionaires and children living in poverty. And what’s more, while poor families struggle to get by, most millionaires don’t even consider themselves to be wealthy.   Our economic system is failing us. Crisis, the charity for homeless people, recently said we live under an "anti-human system" that "treats people as commodities, to be exploited and abused and thrown away and trashed if no profit can be made out of it". Even the wealthy are beginning to see that our economic system needs a serious shake up. In a survey of wealthy individuals, over 35% of those aged 18-44 agreed with the statement that ‘capitalism seems to be flawed’. But it seems people are still scared of talking about capitalism or daring to believe we could create something better.   It might be a surprise to some that after 50 years and many millions of pounds of donations to charity, there’s been no improvement in child poverty. Surely charity is one solution to poverty? There is, of course, a strong link between capitalism and philanthropy, not least the fact that much of the latter is only made possible by the former. This leads to the question; can we ever expect philanthropy to eradicate poverty? What are philanthropists aiming to achieve?   In the book Philanthro-capitalism, which refers to the growing trend of applying business strategies to philanthropy and charitable work, the authors make an interesting point:   Each past boom in giving was associated with massive wealth creation linked to innovation in business, and also to social upheaval that left big problems to solve. Often this was accompanied by political unrest that seemed to threaten capitalism, adding urgency to the need for a philanthropic response.   In other words, when capitalism is thriving but comes under threat due to people seeing the links between capitalism, poverty and inequality, capitalists give away some of their wealth in an attempt to convince people that capitalism serves the poor. It does not. And neither does philanthropy in many cases as often it’s controlled by those with no interest in changing our economic system, as it"s what allows them to build their empires. A high profile example concerns one of the first and largest private foundations, the Rockefeller Foundation, which was subject to investigations in 1915 where critics pointed out that its objectives included justifying the status quo, appeasing badly treated workers and promoting anti-union views. Following investigations the United States Commission on Industrial Relations identified the new philanthropic foundations as “thinly disguised capitalist manipulation of the social order”. Has anything changed?   There are certainly plenty of corporations today that use charitable giving to distract people from their unethical practices and create a positive public image for themselves. Often they choose causes popular with the public, such as health. The focus of individual philanthropists is very different. The most popular causes of the rich British philanthropist are higher education, arts and culture, and international development. This is very much in line with findings in the US, prompting Ken Stern to comment that the US charity system is “fundamentally regressive, and works in favor of the institutions of the elite”. He reveals that “not one of the top 50 individual charitable gifts in the US went to a social-service organisation or to a charity that principally serves the poor and the dispossessed”.   Two of the most popular beneficiaries for rich philanthropists in the UK are Oxford and Cambridge universities. This is hardly surprising when you consider that together they have produced 762 alumni worth £20 million or more. Could it be that rich philanthropists support universities because they produce the next generation of capitalists and keep the whole system going?   Philanthropy tends to be undemocratic, elitist and unaccountable, a tool with which the rich can mould the world to their pleasing. In the most part rich philanthropists aim to further the interests of the elite, and to appease the critics of their extreme wealth by offering short-term solutions to the symptoms of poverty, without touching the underlying causes. The big charities – often run by professionals speaking on behalf of others – dependent on the funds of corporations, government and the rich know they’ll loose their funding if they demand real change, causing some to criticise them for playing a part in maintaining the status quo.   We need a different plan. There’s a growing movement of donors and foundations who are addressing some of these issues by putting decisions into the hands of communities and funding work that aims to challenge and replace the systemic causes of inequality. Let’s strive for a world where poverty and inequality cannot exist, which means building a just economic and political system, from the bottom up. It also means philanthropy will not exist in future, because it can only exist in an unequal world.   * Edge Fund is a member-run fund which supports grassroots groups working for justice and equality. Funding decisions are made by members and applicants; their membership includes representatives from communities and groups their funding supports.   http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/edge-fund/rising-child-poverty-%E2%80%93-what-role-does-philanthropy-play
	View more stories