I intended for my initial post here on the renewed blog to be something profound. However, I stumbled across an article on the EcoWatch website that resonated with me for two reasons.

First, the EcoWatch piece discusses a journal article published last month in Frontiers in Conservation Science. That article is a perspective article titled “Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future.”  Authored by 17 scientists from the United States, Mexico, and Australia, it is quite interesting. It renounces bad politics and inaction with respect to climate change.

Second, the independent newscenter Common Dreams interviewed several of the journal article co-authors. For that interview, co-author Daniel T. Blumstein stated in an e-mail that

“By scientists’ telling it like it is, we hope to empower politicians to work to represent their citizen, not corporate, constituents.”

Furthermore, the next to the last sentence in the published journal article states the following:

It is therefore incumbent on experts in any discipline that deals with the future of the biosphere and human well-being to eschew reticence, avoid sugar-coating the overwhelming challenges ahead and “tell it like it is.”

So why are those two quoted sentences significant to me? The title of my PhD dissertation was “Telling it like it is: A qualitative excavation of the factors that impel natural/physical scientists to serve as mass media news sources”.