It was this achievement—two Earthlings leaving their tiny white shuttle and making their first tentative lunar steps—that moderator Usha Lee McFarling, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist, evoked to begin a Zócalo/Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County event titled “Are Americans Turning Against Science?”

“You get the sense,” McFarling said before a standing-room only crowd at the Natural History Museum in Exposition Park, “that everyone loved Apollo, and everyone loved space, and everyone loved science in the ‘60s.” Did something change?

Caltech historian of science Erik Conway, co-author of Merchants of Doubt, cautioned that the Apollo landing is viewed through the “lens of nostalgia.” Public mistrust of science dogged even the celebrated effort to put Americans on the moon.

“During the actual Apollo years in the ‘60s, the general public opposed it” because of its enormous costs, he said. The mission didn’t reach a majority approval in polls until six months before the launch. It has since been “rebranded as a success,” Conway said.

Conway pointed to a 2012 study that used data from 1974 to 2012 to show how levels of suspicion of science have either increased or decreased along political lines over the decades. In 1974, the people who were most skeptical of science were political moderates, and the suspicion levels of liberals and conservatives were basically the same. But over the past four decades, liberals have maintained the same level of trust in science, even as conservatives’ trust in science has plummeted, Conway said.

The mistrust of science is not new, said UCLA sociologist Jeffrey Guhin. He said that the roots of today’s suspicion of science lie in the Second Great Awakening in the United States, during the early 19th century. The objections then were not to science; instead, some ministers became suspicious of so-called elite ministers who they felt were telling them how to read and interpret the Bible. So a backlash developed against the expertise not just of ministers, but also of lawyers, government officials, and medical doctors, Guhin said.

Guhin added that the American idea of equality can have a dangerous effect when it’s used to insist on an intellectual equality. The notion of expertise being suspicious, Guhin said, is “a very old American sensibility.”

Cary Funk, director of science and society research at Pew Research Center, said that today there is a “mixed pattern” among Americans when it comes to trust. When you ask most Americans about science, “they see positive benefits coming from science on the whole,” Funk said, and they express “continued optimism” regarding future scientific developments. Less than half the population has a strong distrust in science, and confidence in scientists and leaders of the scientific community has been more or less stable over time. However, we are living in an era with lower trust in institutions, particularly government, Funk said.

Political divides emerge when scientific issues become policy issues that would require significant government response, Funk said. For example, there is a wide political divide on climate change. Democrats and Republicans take “totally different positions,” on “pretty much any question that you ask related to climate, energy, and environmental issues.” However, issues like vaccines and GMOs are not subject to the same political divides, in large part because these issues are not associated with policy issues and thus don’t require the involvement of the government, she said.

Funk said that the ways in which we form attitudes and beliefs are complicated. “There’s often an assumption,” she said, “that if we inform you more, you will hold a particular belief, but it just doesn’t work that way.” When people feel that scientists and others are trying to tell them what to believe, people often rebel. This is true especially if this belief is tied to their identity, Guhin said. “If something is important for your identity, you don’t want to change your mind,” he said.

Does this skepticism about science affect how humans may react to new scientific discoveries, like gene editing, which promises to add to the power of humans? Funk replied that the purpose of the new discovery or technology matters as people grapple with new ethical dilemmas presented by science. If people can see and understand the human value for pursuing a particular new development—say “developing animal cells for human organs,” Funk said—they are more likely to support it.

People are not only divided along political lines, but also along religious ones. Guhin has conducted ethnographic research in both evangelical Christian and Muslim high schools where creationism—the belief that a god created the Earth and all living things that inhabit it from nothing—is taught. At these schools, he has found that “people are very comfortable talking about science and in fact they believed that ‘science proved evolution wrong.’”

Indeed, the students at the schools Guhin have studied used science to make their case when they could have just pointed to the Bible to defend their claims.

The post Distrust of Science Is as American as Apple Pie appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“I’m going to start out by saying a resounding ‘no,’” Haile said, opening the discussion at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, in Exposition Park. “We are all on occupied indigenous lands.”

And yet ethnicity and economics, power and privilege, do influence the way that we think about the natural world, and how that world is experienced and interpreted by different people. The fences and toll booths that set the boundaries of our national parks, like the hiking trails that wind through the Hollywood Hills, or the number of campsites at Joshua Tree, are the products of policies and political struggles that may end up favoring one group and excluding another.

At the museum, a panel of three experts joined Haile in unpacking these issues before a packed and appreciative audience. They were Myrian Solis Coronel, an REI marketing executive; Myron Floyd, a North Carolina State University environmental sociologist; and José González, founder of Latino Outdoors. Their lively exchange unfolded in a long, wood-paneled gallery lined with elaborately painted habitat dioramas displaying mounted North American mammals.

The panelists quickly agreed that new narratives are needed for how we experience nature today, along with fresh analytical tools that can help us find (or rediscover) the neglected voices and overlooked presence in nature of black, Latino, LGBTQ people, and those with different physical abilities.

One way to look at nature, Floyd pointed out, is as a social construction that can be dominated by one or another ethnic or social group. “Nature has been solely the territory of white America,” Floyd said. “But we have more diverse users of our public spaces who are defining it in their own terms.” Often, the burden for getting more people of different backgrounds to use recreational areas has been placed on those people themselves, Floyd said, but some of the burden of recruiting users could be shifted to federal, state, and local agencies in charge of public sites. “This is a central issue that, if we don’t deal with it, it will not be good for our country and not be good for our environment,” he said.

González picked up on that theme, noting that as the United States continues to evolve demographically, the users of America’s parks and outdoor areas will change, and the physical infrastructure around those areas will change, too.

“You’ll hear people say that nature embraces and treats everybody the same,” González observed. But when humans interact with nature, that truism can fall apart. Some people, seeking to get away from the trauma and stress of urban life by going camping or fishing, may wind up triggering even more stress, González said. That could be especially true for a person who, for example, has an unpleasant encounter with a park ranger that echoes a previous brush with a police officer back home. “You have to recognize that people are coming to the same experience [of nature] from a different background, a different lived experience,” González said.

Most Americans’ perceptions of nature, and who belongs in it (or doesn’t), are heavily influenced by advertising and popular culture representations. Solis Coronel said that REI has invested heavily in research about how white and non-white millennials are experiencing nature, and in reflecting diversity and inclusiveness in the company’s policies, content, and marketing campaigns.

Solis Coronel, who also serves on the California State Park and Recreation Commission, talked about new approaches, like recruiting state-park ranger teams that reflect California’s ethnic makeup. One way to do this is, she said, is simply by making the application process shorter and easier, so that job-hungry applicants can find out more quickly whether they’re even being considered for employment. REI also doesn’t hire professional models to appear in its advertisements; the company uses real people who convey the diversity of its customers.

“It’s about having a balance and being relevant and being truly reflective of your members, and our members continue to change,” Solis Coronel said.

Haile pointed out that nature is a political space, not a pristine realm beyond human affairs. Different people want different things from nature, but there are some common desires that span our divisions.

Nature areas and historic sites are places where people can “seek out their heritage, seek out their common history,” Floyd observed, while also enjoying the outdoors at the same time. His own research has shown that non-whites were camping in national parks at the turn of the previous century, Floyd said, and thus “do have a part in this history, as recreationists—not as laborers, not as servants.”

With all due respect to Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, communing with nature needn’t entail escaping into a solitary wilderness for weeks or months at a stretch. Haile said that we need to better frame the range of activities that can be seen as outdoor recreation. We tend to construe nature as something harsh and grueling: “It’s very rarely said, ‘I’m going to grill in the park with my family,’ or ‘I’m going to go fish in a river,’” Haile said. “When I tell people in my social circle that I’m going hiking, they think I’m going to climb Kilimanjaro!”

What will the future hold for the interaction of nature and humans? Global warming is unbalancing that entire equation, Haile pointed out, and the time to correct it is slipping away fast. Humanity is tending to disconnect from nature, said Solis Coronel, as we hunker down in our cars and barricade ourselves in artificial environments.

“If we don’t have a connection to nature, that means we won’t have an appreciation of nature,” she lamented. Indeed, González added, there’s a term to describe our contemporary affliction: “nature deficit disorder.”

But what sustains nature is also what may save humanity, he suggested: diversity.

“We value diversity in the natural world,” González said. “Few people say, ‘That’s a beautiful mono-cultural forest.’ Unless they want to cut it down.”

The post Nature Needs Greater Diversity—In Its Human Visitors appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.