Thanks, Science!
Roy Haggerty
Executive Vice President and Provost at Louisiana State University / Rector académico y vicepresidente ejecutivo de la Universidad Estatal de Luisiana
As I've written before, the development of better explanations is responsible for most advances in human history. Steven Pinker has a great new book, "Enlightenment Now" that makes a similar case. The enlightenment is reason and its two children, science and humanism, applied to generate better explanations about how things work and understand our place in the universe. Together, reason, science, and humanism are responsible for an incredible improvement of human wellbeing over the past two or three centuries, and that improvement now has global reach. Of course, engineering, law, business, and other fields have played indispensable roles, but reason, science, and humanism form the foundation.
At the launch of a new year, I thought I would begin posting brief writings expressing how science has transformed our world for the better. Here is my first post.
Hungry? Me either. Thanks, Science!
Everyone from Thomas Malthus to Paul Erlich has incorrectly predicted increasing hunger as a result of increasing population. For the most part, hunger has decreased even while population has increased. Thanks to nitrogen fertilizer developed more than a century ago by Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, and subsequent science advances in agriculture, we have been able to provide increasing quantities of food for the world, with less effort. According to one estimate, synthetic fertilizer is responsible for saving more than 2 billion lives. Thanks, Science!
Great project Roy! Many thanks! You may also be interested in Let Science Speak https://letsciencespeak.com, a series of beautiful 5-minute films with several hundred million social media impressions to date. These films, one of which includes yours truly,?call attention to the importance of science in one’s daily life, as well as to the damaging effects of censorship, and the suppression of important scientific data. It seeks to rally public support for scientists and the vital work they do every day. The series?premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City on September 20th and has been briefly featured in the New York Times, Forbes, and the Weather Channel, as well as Rolling Stone and Rock Sound (given that Fallout Boy’s Patrick Stump wrote the beautiful score).
Assistant Vice Provost of Enrollment Management and Director of Undergraduate Admissions at Oregon State University
6 年Thanks Roy. Looking forward to more of these!
Interdisciplinary research, writing, and analysis at the cutting edge of environmental science and policy
6 年What a wonderful endeavour!