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Why Being Anti-Science Is Now Part Of Many Rural Americans’ Identity
Frankly, I think that the entire Covid "communications" effort has been a major fiasco, from day 1, at all governmental levels- federal right down to city/county.
It seems like it. What is interesting about this article is it shows how communication in rural areas could work better with an interesting environmental example in Arkansas:
Last September, Booth gave a brief speech that was streamed live on YouTube, outlining the problem. He announced a series of public meetings to begin in the following months. Booth told me that when he began to plan those meetings, he thought of all the government meetings and town halls he’d attended after years working in politics. “I wanted to ratchet down some of the intensity that happens when a government official stands up on a stage and talks down to people,” he said.
Instead, he decided the meetings would be dinners where the Game and Fish staff would eat alongside the people they sought to convince. “I just believe there’s a human component to sitting down and having a meal with someone,” he said. At those dinners, he’d give a brief introduction, then invite people to ask questions of the staff as they ate and mingled.
At the end of the dinners, Booth said he’d stand up again and ask, “Is there anyone that’s going to walk through that door tonight without their questions answered or comments taken for the record, or with their concerns ignored?” No one, he said, came forward. The four dinners were attended by between 50 and 100 people, according to Booth, but those attendees then spread the word, dampening criticism of the new management system.
What’s interesting about this dinner program is that it began during the COVID-19 pandemic, which also required effective science communication to convince the public to accept changes, major and minor, to their lives. Even before this pandemic, there’s been a long history of resistance to public health measures and new vaccines, and many researchers suspected that could likely be the case with COVID-19 as well. The social scientists who study these issues might have counseled an approach like that employed by the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, using local messengers who had relationships with the communities in question and who could communicate in less intimidating ways.
Yes- the comparison between the two communications situations is very interesting. Along those lines, with respect to audiences perhaps similar to the duck hunters, I thought that one of the better attempts at Covid outreach to these communities was to enlist the help of local preachers/ministers.
I'm not into religion myself, but in many under-educated rural communities those folks command a lot of respect.
A comprehensive and incisive article. My overly simplified view of Michigan, having resided in both southern urban and northern rural areas, would tend to support that view.
One of our classroom plays read / studied / discussed every year was Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawerence and Robert E. Lee, a fictional portrayal of the “Scopes Monkey Trial” in Tennessee in 1925. The anti-science zealots in the small rural community are in full array. I’d sometimes try to explain that antipathy towards new ideas as an outgrowth of the farming tradition in which productive agricultural practices (tilling, sowing, harvesting) are repetitious in nature and handed down from father to son generation after generation. So, there’s a value in doing things the same way your forbearers did over and over …
But - to be preemptive here - one might just as easily argue that the antipathy towards science is in the longer run harmful to the agricultural enterprise.
I just read this thing as an indictment of the American public----- particularly Republican Party stalwarts who refuse to be moderate and reasonable, just because they CAN be immoderate and unreasonable. "No expert's gonna tell ME I have to THINK!" And, as I've mentioned many times: these people VOTE. No wonder the country's broken.
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I'm not into religion myself, but in many under-educated rural communities those folks command a lot of respect.
One of our classroom plays read / studied / discussed every year was Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawerence and Robert E. Lee, a fictional portrayal of the “Scopes Monkey Trial” in Tennessee in 1925. The anti-science zealots in the small rural community are in full array. I’d sometimes try to explain that antipathy towards new ideas as an outgrowth of the farming tradition in which productive agricultural practices (tilling, sowing, harvesting) are repetitious in nature and handed down from father to son generation after generation. So, there’s a value in doing things the same way your forbearers did over and over …
But - to be preemptive here - one might just as easily argue that the antipathy towards science is in the longer run harmful to the agricultural enterprise.