Marchers take the scientific approach
Doctors and scientists and other general defenders of facts gathered at City Hall Saturday afternoon to fight for and pay tribute to science.
The Hamilton March for Science was one of more than 500 of its kind to take place in cities across North America this Earth Day.
Anchored in Washington, the marches — which were expected to draw hundreds of thousands of people — were devised in the face of “an alarming trend toward discrediting scientific consensus and restricting scientific discovery” under U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration.
The sentiment was clearly felt in Hamilton Saturday.
“There’s so much to protest, I brought a reusable sign,” one man’s whiteboard sign read.
Ryerson University professor Lynda McCarthy was one of many speakers to address the local crowd gathered outside City Hall at noon, lamenting the “barrage of pseudo science” that has bred an “emboldened ignorance” that is compromising Earth today.
“Lake Erie is again massively polluted, preventable childhood diseases are on the rise, and the once mighty and noble United States Environmental Protection Agency is in the process — after almost half a century of trying to help protect the environment — of being dismantled under the current political administration in America,” she said.
“Emboldened ignorance seems to have the upper hand — but only for a moment in my world. It is now time to push back and let our voices be heard.” Her words were met with whooping applause from the 200 or so marchers.
Allison Sekuler, a professor of psychology, neuroscience and behaviour at McMaster University, noted that this unrest, particularly in the neighbouring United States, presents an opportunity for Canada to step up.
“Given the current state of the world, we now are at an inflection point in history,” she said.
“It’s Canada’s chance to take the lead in supporting foundational research — to show that we want science-based policies, not policy based science.”
She also stressed the need for more diversity in labs and around the general “science table.”
“There’s a saying: If they can’t see it, they can’t be it. The next generation must see themselves at the science table, no matter who they are or where they come from,” she said.
James Knibb-Lamouche, the associate director of indigenous student services at Mac, agreed. Particularly when it comes to indigenous youth and marginalized communities, he said, we need to work harder at engaging and recruiting different perspectives.
“We are doing a poor job of making sure that the little indigenous kid in the middle of nowhere has an opportunity to go to McMaster,” he said.
“And women — who form more than half the undergraduate population — are still not becoming lead researchers or primary investigators or tenured professors at the same rate. And we need to make that happen.”
Outreach and mentorship, Knibb-Lamouche said, is crucial — especially “for the kids that don’t see themselves in the faces of the people on the walls at a lot of these institutions.”
And while the event was certainly more rally than protest, some speakers couldn’t help but get political about Canada’s approach to science and the environment.
McMaster University biology professor Jim Quinn spoke out against recent remarks by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — who he noted was elected in part as an environmental leader — about the oil industry.
“Recently he was heard saying to a bunch of oil men in Houston … that anyone who would leave 174 billion barrels of oil in the ground would be crazy,” Quinn recalled.
Quinn added, “I think it’s very clear our current prime minister has made his choice … it’s pretty clear that this is an economic prime minister and nothing more.”
He acknowledged the reluctance that scientists have over politics.
“But I think it’s important for scientists to come out and make statements like this. I know some of us are very reluctant to get political — and apparently this rally was not supposed to get political. But when you have a leader who is promoting the death of the planet through climate change, I think it’s time for people to stand up and say something about it.”