Conversations

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WBR: In the book you draw an intriguing comparison between your own first impressions of New York City and Henry Adams's first impressions of industrialized Liverpool in 1858. Having grown up in Alaska, what was your initial reaction to the eastern United States?

CW: Still today, and even more when I was a child, the built environment of Alaska is overwhelmed by the natural environment. In Anchorage, which has 40 percent of the population, 3,000-foot mountains loom over a city where the tallest building is less than 300 feet. A half-hour drive puts you in the wilderness from anywhere in the city. Any big city airport on the east coast is a reverse-image: the built environment is everything and the natural environment is virtually invisible. I was overwhelmed, confused, and invigorated.

The small, egalitarian Alaska society created another shocking contrast. The racial and class walls in American society remain enormous and often insurmountable for an individual person. How do we learn to communicate across these barriers, much less bridge them? In Alaska, I was able to be welcomed into communities more different from my own than most foreign countries, and yet still feel an equal. When I went away to college on the East Coast, I realized that could never happen there with most of the people I met outside of my own social class.

WBR: In the book you debunk the popular myth that the Eskimos have 100 different words for snow, but you do give some great examples of words the Iñupiat use to describe their distinctive environment. What are some of the Iñupiat terms that have been incorporated into the language that the scientists in Alaska who study climate change use? 

CW: The miracle of Iñupiaq, the language of the Iñupiat people, lies in its structure even more than its words. The language is perfectly evolved for helping people cooperate in sharing information about a dynamic environment where there are virtually no landmarks: the sea ice and the flat, snowy tundra. They needed to be able quickly to express where they were and what they could see—ice and current conditions, winds, and so on—based on the relative positions of speakers, the sun or stars, and major rivers. Word endings provide this directional and spatial information with extraordinary efficiency. These linguistic qualities aren’t accessible to non-speakers, and with the advent of technology such as computers, maps and GPS, they aren’t as critical. Scientists have adopted some valuable terms, such as ivu, which means the collision of two sheets of ice that causes one to ride up on top of the other. The Iñupiat have adopted some scientific terms, too, such as active layer, which means the soil and vegetative matter above the permafrost that thaws in the summer.

WBR: At one point in the book you use the term "scientific culture."  I suppose the term "scientific community" might be used more often, but in the book you (either intentionally or inadvertently) illustrate pretty clearly why the former term might be more accurate than the latter. How is the scientific community a culture unto itself?

CW: I would define a community as a related group that shares some place, mutual benefit, or interest. A culture is a collection of skills, perceptions, and beliefs learned by its members that determines how they interact with each other and the world. A community could have a culture or exist within a culture. Most of us in the dominant society are members of more than one community; less frequently do we shift from one culture to another. The scientific community shares a culture that’s as clearly defined as any in our society, with a shared set of skills (mathematics, educational standards), perceptions (the scientific method) and beliefs (the value of striving for empirical truth).That’s the obvious part. Scientists also interact according to complex hierarchies and rules about when to compete and when to cooperate. Most interesting of all, how they perceive the validity of new empirical findings varies according to cultural norms that individual practitioners often cannot perceive, which can relate to hierarchies, group thinking, received beliefs about knowability, and many other factors. It’s a fascinating area to write about.

WBR: Obviously there are some very big problems for humanity to solve: wars, AIDS, environmental damage, poverty. Global warming is just one of them. It's easy to feel helpless in the face of what some people might call a pretty big mess of a world. If the message behind your book is that we need to do something to prevent global warming, what can one person do?

CW: Doing something about global warming is actually pretty easy. Every gallon of gas a person decides not to use keeps about 22 pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. An incandescent light bulb converts 2 percent of the energy is uses into light and 98 percent into waste heat; changing to compact incandescent lights conserves much of that energy. Enormous strides can be made by simply reducing waste, and save money at the same time. Princeton scientists writing in Science identified a dozen technologies we have in hand, the global adoption of any seven of which would put us on a track to tackle the problem. The technology solution to climate change is easily within our reach and well within our economic means.

The discouraging fact, however, is that we cannot prevent climate change, only prevent it from becoming unmanageable. Carbon added to nature stays there for a very long time. Actions now will keep the problem from being much worse for our grandchildren than it otherwise would be. In that sense, our response to climate change is primarily a moral test. Will we be willing to make minimal sacrifices in order to make life more viable after we are dead?

WBR: What's next for you?  Are you writing another book?

CW: I am currently developing a book proposal to delve deeper into the relationship of man to nature, exploring the similarity of our kind and other animals, and what we can learn from nature about living morally. I’m interested in the intersection of science, culture, and the lives of individual people—in this case, my own family—in marine science in Alaska. The book will be more personal, and attempt to take on even bigger questions about what it means to be a human being.

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