Uploaded March 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Despite decades of academic work inspired by the goal of making it so, governance and politics are a far cry from the paragons of rationality. American bureaucracies are staffed by well-trained, credentialed, and dedicated technical experts who have at their disposal a historically unprecedented amount of peer reviewed published research, massive datasets, and extraordinary computing power. This flourishing technical capacity has done nothing to grant their work public acceptance; rather, the opposite has happened: as more science has become available to inform decisions, the more bitterly contested every administrative and regulatory decision is.
What’s going on here? Many of us have been taught to expect that science is how we achieve rational decision making. Unfortunately, unfounded assumptions permeate common understandings of what science can and do in a democracy. This presentation will present some of these misunderstandings and offer an alternative vision for science in society.
The Environmental Speaker Series is free and open to the public. Talks are held each Thursday at 4:30pm in Academic Instructional Center West, room 204. Join us at WWU or online on Zoom!
Despite decades of academic work inspired by the goal of making it so, governance and politics are a far cry from the paragons of rationality. American bureaucracies are staffed by well-trained, credentialed, and dedicated technical experts who have at their disposal a historically unprecedented amount of peer reviewed published research, massive datasets, and extraordinary computing power. This flourishing technical capacity has done nothing to grant their work public acceptance; rather, the opposite has happened: as more science has become available to inform decisions, the more bitterly contested every administrative and regulatory decision is.
What’s going on here? Many of us have been taught to expect that science is how we achieve rational decision making. Unfortunately, unfounded assumptions permeate common understandings of what science can and do in a democracy. This presentation will present some of these misunderstandings and offer an alternative vision for science in society.
The Environmental Speaker Series is free and open to the public. Talks are held each Thursday at 4:30pm in Academic Instructional Center West, room 204. Join us at WWU or online on Zoom!
