Environmental Activism and Science: Stories Waiting to be Told

This week I encountered another interesting example of an environmental organization assembling and presenting scientific information.  (I also explored this phenomenon in an earlier post.)

Here, WWF Canada has gathered knowledge of ocean currents and other factors affecting oil spills in the Beaufort Sea, and combined this with information about bird and marine mammal distribution.  The results include animated maps of a variety of scenarios, such as a well blowout or a tanker accident, in which ugly black stains � oil, that is � spread across the region and into the habitats of birds and beluga and bowhead whales.

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It's a good example of how civil society organizations have taken on environmental roles once performed by governments.  Forty years ago, at a time of intense concern about Arctic oil spills, the Canadian federal government spent quite a few millions on research to understand the risks.  Now, with the government having withdrawn from many areas of environmental research, organizations like the WWF are playing a bigger role.

This is a significant development, relevant to both the history of environmental science and the history of environmental politics.  It is shaping what knowledge is gathered, how it's presented, and how it contributes to decisions.  It has even led to a new kind of environmental research, which I've referred to elsewhere as "advocacy science".  So it's interesting that this has not yet, as far as I can see, become a major theme in work by environmental historians on the history of environmental activism.  There's a good story here, waiting to be told.