Science by the People

Participation, Power, and the Politics of Environmental Knowledge

Aya H. Kimura, Abby Kinchy

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780813595092
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Citizen science—research involving nonprofessionals in the research process—has attracted both strong enthusiasts and detractors. Many environmental professionals, activists, and scholars consider citizen science part of their toolkit for addressing environmental challenges. Critics, however, contend that it represents a corporate takeover of scientific priorities. In this timely book, two sociologists move beyond this binary debate by analyzing the tensions and dilemmas that citizen science projects commonly face. Key lessons are drawn from case studies where citizen scientists have investigated the impact of shale oil and gas, nuclear power, and genetically engineered crops. These studies show that diverse citizen science projects face shared dilemmas relating to austerity pressures, presumed boundaries between science and activism, and difficulties moving between scales of environmental problems. By unpacking the politics of citizen science, this book aims to help people negotiate a complex political landscape and choose paths moving toward social change and environmental sustainability.

1

Environmental Citizen Science

Virtues and Dilemmas

For decades, Chile has been the world’s top copper producer, making it the wealthiest country in Latin America. But with mineral wealth comes a tremendous amount of hazardous waste, including tailings, the ground-up materials that remain after copper is removed. Copper tailings can contain lead, arsenic, mercury, and other materials known to threaten human health. Until recently, Chile’s government paid little attention to the hundreds of millions of tons of tailings that piled up each year in the mining regions. In 2012, the Ministry of the Environment published procedures for identifying and remediating soils contaminated by mining waste, yet the agency has been slow to carry out the work. Furthermore, there has been little communication with the communities affected by mining waste, who may be exposed to harmful materials in the course of their daily activities.1

Sebastian Ureta, a sociologist in Santiago, Chile, has observed his government’s efforts to address soil contamination with growing concern. Now skeptical that the Ministry of the Environment has the funds or the will to protect people from copper tailings, Ureta is considering the possibility of an alternative approach—citizen science. He hopes that a low-cost tool or method can be developed for testing soil for contaminants like lead. In the hands of local residents, such tools could inform people of the dangers they face and enable them to reduce their exposures. Perhaps even soil remediation could be accomplished through grassroots research and do-it-yourself (DIY) technologies. More broadly, Ureta hopes that citizen science will empower ordinary people to take leadership in assessing the environmental challenges they face and the possible solutions.

Like Professor Ureta, many environmental professionals, activists, and scholars around the world today consider citizen science to be part of their tool kit for addressing environmental challenges. Getting ordinary people involved in making observations is widely held to be a good way to not only increase public understanding of the environment but also gather large amounts of data that can inform research and problem solving. There are numerous examples. In parts of the United States where “fracking” for oil and natural gas is changing the landscape, volunteers are monitoring acidity, dissolved solids, erosion, biodiversity, and other characteristics of their watersheds. In Japan, dozens of community organizations are analyzing foods for radioactivity resulting from the 2011 nuclear accident in Fukushima. Beyond such grassroots efforts, professional scientists have integrated crowd sourcing and participatory practices into many scientific projects. For instance, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology uses bird observations made by hundreds of thousands of individuals each year.2

Citizen science has also become an important public policy issue. Many governments—including the United States, European Union, and Singapore—have expressed desires to encourage and capitalize on citizen science.3 Some science policy experts have applauded citizen science for making science more participatory, showing the possibility of a scientifically literate society and more equitable engagement between experts and the lay public. Furthermore, many people today are asking whether their organization—a university, nonprofit, activist group, or government agency—should allocate time and resources to citizen science and, if so, how to do it in a way that is fair and beneficial to the volunteers. Weighing on these decisions are some serious critiques. There are those who discount the contributions of nonprofessional researchers, contending that volunteers can’t do “real science.” Others argue that citizen science exploits the free labor provided by volunteers, primarily to the benefit of big business and cost-cutting government agencies.4

This book shares neither the naive enthusiasm for citizen science nor the cynicism that permeates many critiques. As environmental sociologists, we aim to understand how citizen science affects people’s lives and environments. Our goal here is to provide a language for talking about the complexity and contradictions within environmental citizen science so we can move beyond generalizations to grapple with the specific dilemmas that participatory research projects commonly face.

Our interest in contradictions and dilemmas arises out of our research projects on the fracking and Fukushima controversies. In these examples, we saw that citizen science was a valuable tool for those concerned with protecting the health of their community and environment. However, we learned that participation in scientific knowledge making did not necessarily enable people to challenge powerful institutions (such as the nuclear industry) or achieve desired outcomes (such as preventing pollution of a valued watershed). Indeed, the impressive research efforts of citizen scientists in the cases we studied often went unnoticed, barely registering in public debates about how to address these environmental challenges.

What hindered these projects from having more transformative effects? Most analysts would probably point to problems in the design of the projects—perhaps they did not aggregate their data effectively or lacked sufficient participation in all stages of the research. But having an impact with citizen science is not just a matter of good project design; it also depends on the features of the broader social context that influence both how citizen science is practiced and how it will be received. The effects of citizen science can be hard to predict because the social landscape is complex and full of contradictions. The practices that are now called citizen science have arisen out of multiple areas of social life, including education, science, government, industry, and social movements. Citizen science projects are pressured from many directions—changes in environmental policy, reductions in funding for scientific research, shifting cultural attitudes toward science, and criticism from industrial opponents. Doing environmental citizen science requires understanding and navigating this multidimensional social and policy environment.

Even thoughtfully designed projects may stumble over dilemmas that arise from the historical moment we inhabit. Throughout this book, we will explore questions concerning four general areas where citizen science faces recurring challenges.

1. 1. Volunteering: Volunteering is always good for society, right? Maybe not. Social scientists are starting to recognize that some forms of volunteering are corrosive to important social values, such as inclusion, equity, and social justice. Reductions in public science funding have spurred the use of voluntary data gathering as a cost-cutting measure. Thus citizen science projects may inadvertently promote the idea that environmental problems can be adequately addressed on a voluntary basis—when, in many cases, law and policy are required. Furthermore, rates of volunteering vary widely across demographic groups and geographic regions, which can have problematic effects on the knowledge that citizen science generates. Citizen scientists who recognize the value and necessity of volunteerism must also grapple with these troubling patterns.
2. 2. Taking a stand: Environmental movements have brought about crucial changes in how societies use natural resources, deal with waste, and relate to nonhuman species. Activists in these social movements are among the most important innovators in citizen science. However, they face a problem: science is typically perceived as tainted or biased if it is associated with a political cause or social movement, and opponents accuse them of “politicizing” science. Thus a crucial dilemma for environmental citizen scientists is how to establish the credibility of their scientific claims while maintaining their commitment to bringing about change.
3. 3. Contextualizing data: Environmental citizen science expands scientific literacy and can lend scientific strength to environmental arguments. When environmental decision-making focuses on technical information—as in risk-benefit assessments—citizen science can provide a way for ordinary people to participate. However, environmental issues involve values, emotions, social inequality, history, and aesthetics, which are not easily reduced to simple, rational measurements. Focusing on collecting scientific data can diminish the transformative power of citizen science if it inhibits discussions of power relations in society and marginalizes social and ethical concerns. For this reason, citizen scientists must carefully consider how to contextualize the data they collect.
4. 4. Shifting scales: The phrase “Think globally, act locally” is widely applied to environmental issues, but it conceals a serious dilemma for citizen scientists. Community-based science can be effective at revealing localized impacts of polluting industries, providing fine-meshed and intimate data that experts often overlook. However, gathering local knowledge can sometimes imply personal responsibility for managing risks. When those responsible for the pollution are located in distant places and are governed by nonlocal authorities, scaling up is essential. For citizen science to have a role in solving environmental problems, participants must have a strategy for making change at the systemic level while remaining attentive to the local knowledge that otherwise would be ignored.

This book focuses on these dilemmas across several diverse examples of environmental citizen science. By unpacking the politics of citizen science, we aim to help people negotiate a complex political landscape and choose paths that bring about social change and environmental sustainability. We hope that by making the challenges and dilemmas explicit, we will help future citizen scientists make informed and thoughtful decisions about their strategies and methods.

What Is Environmental Citizen Science?

The idea of “citizen science” rapidly gained credibility and visibility among professional and academic scientists in the 2000s, and it is an increasingly global phenomenon. U.S. policy makers, for instance, started to use the idea of citizen science in the 2010s, arguing that science “Of the People, by the People, for the People” would enhance “data democracy.”5 Explaining the policy importance of citizen science, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy observed that “only a small fraction of Americans are formally trained as ‘scientists.’ But that doesn’t mean that only a small fraction of Americans can participate in scientific discovery and innovation. Citizen science and crowdsourcing are approaches that educate, engage, and empower the public to apply their curiosity and talents to a wide range of real-world problems.”6

Under the Obama administration, the U.S. government took a number of actions that increased awareness of the concept, such as creating the website citizenscience.gov, which was “designed to accelerate the use of crowdsourcing and citizen science across the U.S. government.” Congress passed several pieces of legislation that encouraged federal agencies’ use of citizen science, including the 2013 America COMPETES Act and the 2017 American Innovation and Competitiveness Act. The vision of citizen science in these policies emphasized both innovation and transparency. For example, the Open Government National Action Plan of 2013 claimed that citizen science and crowdsourcing were “open innovation methods” that could “harness the ingenuity of the public.”7

Similar actions to promote citizen science were taken in Europe. The European Union launched the Global Citizens’ Observatory for Environmental Change in 2008, and in 2012, the European Commission launched SOCIENTIZE, a project to explore the potential of citizen science in Europe.8 Horizon 2020, a large research funding scheme worth €80 billion (about $90 billion) over seven years (2014–2020) highlighted the importance of participation by citizens in science. It funded the ambitious “Doing It Together Science” program, which supports participatory projects in biodesign and environmental monitoring across Europe.9

Citizen science has been institutionalized with the establishment of the Citizen Science Association in the United States (2012), the European Citizen Science Association (2013), and the Citizen Science Network Australia (2014). There is now an open-access scientific journal dedicated to citizen science, a Citizen Science Day that raises awareness about citizen science, and an online clearinghouse of citizen science opportunities called SciStarter.

Citizen science has gained traction in policy and research fields, but its definition has not been clear-cut, and the idea can be hard to define. In the natural sciences, the phrase was first used in the 1990s by Rick Bonney at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, initially to describe the contributions of bird-watchers to the science of ornithology and later in several influential articles and books with collaborators in other natural sciences.10 Bonney and his colleagues have used the term “to describe projects for which volunteers collect data for use in organized scientific research.”11 Following this tradition, natural scientists tend to conceptualize citizen science as research that employs volunteers as assistants or engages in crowd sourcing to acquire data.12 But there are other uses of the term as well. In a 1995 book titled Citizen Science, sociologist Alan Irwin described how environmental contamination was forcing regular people to learn about scientific issues and how, in turn, they came to contribute to scientific debates.13 Social scientists, following this line of analysis, have often used the term citizen science to describe the practice of science by social movement activists or to discuss efforts to democratize scientific inquiry. For example, activists may do citizen science for the improvement of health and the environment—often in cases of environmental racism or other forms of injustice.14

In 2014, the term was added to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), defined as “scientific work undertaken by members of the general public, often in collaboration with or under the direction of professional scientists and scientific institutions.” By this definition, citizen science is actually nothing new. Popular engagement in environmental science has a long history. Amateur naturalists and experimenters were considered respectable members of the scientific community until the nineteenth century. The subsequent professionalization of the sciences and the growth of formal academic institutions marginalized the amateurs, creating a gap between scientists and “lay people.”15

Despite the professionalization of science, throughout the twentieth century, people without advanced science degrees participated in the process of scientific inquiry through “volunteer monitoring” or “citizen’s watch” projects. The U.S. National Weather Service created the Cooperative Observer Program (COOP) in 1890, which recruited volunteers to take daily meteorological data.16 The National Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Survey in the United States and Canada is also more than one hundred years old. Other initiatives, such as the North American Breeding Bird Survey or the Butterfly Monitoring Scheme based in the United Kingdom, began in the 1960s and 1970s. The U.S. lilacs and honeysuckles phenology observation was initially started by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the 1970s and since has been revitalized and maintained by other institutions.17 In Japan in the 1960s, citizens worked with scientists to observe mutations of spiderworts near nuclear reactors; in later decades, Japanese citizens helped monitor dioxin...