The Center for Health, Environment & Justice (CHEJ) regularly gets calls from community leaders seeking information that they think will convince their state or local officials to take action on environmental justice issues. Often, people believe that if they get the “right” information in the hands of their politicians or government officials, that these decision makers would do the right thing. If only that were true.
As the science director at CHEJ, I provide technical assistance to grassroots community-based organizations nationwide. People send me testing data to review, whether it’s the chemicals in their drinking water, the air at their children’s school or the soil in the park where their children play. They ask me to do this primarily because they want to know what the test results mean. But they also believe that understanding this information will provide answers to the many questions they have about the contamination in their community.
One of the first lessons I learned when I began this work is the importance of listening. It doesn’t matter what you know; what your credentials are or what your experiences have been because the goal is to work with people and help them. Before you can do this, you have to get to know the people you are trying to help and that is best done by being a good listener.
When we are first invited into a community, the most important role for the scientist is to listen and learn about the community. You cannot help a community if you don’t understand what they are facing, learn what they know and what they’ve already done to address the situation. Whether you’re a scientist or an organizer, listening is a critical early element. Civic Science trains scientists to be good listeners, so they are better able to think critically about how to use their expertise. Science and technical information are critically important, but alone, they are not enough to convince the decision-makers to take action. It’s not the information, but what you do with it that matters.
This is because the scientific knowledge of what happens to people exposed to toxic chemicals is incomplete and not understood well enough for politicians or governments to justify taking action. Despite these realities, most scientists are reluctant to acknowledge these uncertainties and admit that they don’t have the answers. A scientist saying I don’t know sometimes is the mark of expertise. But it’s also a way of giving up power that allows scientists and citizens to work together. When this happens, a comfort level develops that allows you to have a conversation and ushers the opportunity to listen. It also helps to build trust. With these ingredients, solutions can be derived from the sharing of knowledge and experience across values and beliefs that are different. This is Civic Science at work.
As a scientist, you bring a different knowledge base and understanding of technical issues including its limitations. Sharing this knowledge and understanding is critically important in educating local leaders. As is showing people how the knowledge you bring can be used strategically to advance the community towards its goals. This is a vital role for scientists working in community settings. This is where Civic Science has its greatest impact as a “bottom-up” process, where you have grassroots people collaborating with scientists to collectively decide how science is going to help them. Often, people don’t immediately know how you can help. But by listening, you quickly learn how what you know can contribute to addressing the local problem. Civic Science trains scientists to contribute that help. This is very distinct and a very different kind of role for scientists to play.
Training in Civic Science helps scientists hold their expertise “lightly” when needed and to “lead with listening,” so they can become less individualistic and more thoughtful of the greater good and when needed to address environmental harms.
In this way, Civic Science offers an approach to environmental problems that’s different. It offers a discipline in which people are trained that can be brought to a place where there are difficult questions and many uncertainties. Everybody is trained in a silo of their discipline. Yet the irony of this, in the real world, is that you have to be interdisciplinary to solve problems that address problems.
If I had to prioritize what Civic Science needs to do to have the biggest impact possible, I would say it would be training young people to learn that there is a future and a place for science work in a community setting. It involves engaging different and diverse people with different disciplines in the process of learning to apply science as a process of people making decisions about what’s going on in their communities. Training in Civic Science helps scientists hold their expertise “lightly” when needed and to “lead with listening”, so they can become less individualistic and more thoughtful of the greater good and when needed to address environmental harms.
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Stephen received his first Master’s of Science, in Toxicology, from Harvard University, and his second Master’s of Science, in Environmental Health, from New York University. He received his Bachelor’s of Science in Biology from American University. Stephen has served on numerous scientific advisory and peer review committees including those of the Natural Resource Council of the National Academy of Sciences, the National institutes of Environmental Health Sciences, and the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment.
