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The Science of Repair - Gwen Ottinger ***

This is an odd one. Ignore the title that sounds like it describes what goes on in a household repair shop - Gwen Ottinger makes an important point about the way that the attempt to use science to support social justice - such as when a community is blighted by pollution from an oil well - can be both positive and negative. While it's true that science can be used to identify pollutants and risks, scientists' natural tendency to caution may make a risk seem less significant than it is - and there is a danger that only the science viewpoint prevails, where the experience of those living in bad conditions is important too. All too often, scientists can dismiss local knowledge. 

My old literary agent's first question when approached with a book idea was always 'is it a book or a magazine article?' I think this would be well applied here. Ottinger's point could have been well-made in a feature-length article, but there was an awful lot of repetition required to stretch out to a (short) book.

This is one of the reasons that I can't rate the book too highly, even though that central idea is a very important one. The inability of citizens to fight back against polluters seems particularly strong in the US (think Erin Brockowich) and they need all the help they can get. The other issue I had was the way the whole story is presented is through the painful lens of US academic obsession with identity politics and race. On the opening page we read 'Its authors, Jay Gunkelman and Marilyn Bardet, were white community activists' - it is totally irrelevant that they were white. 

There is also a lack of acknowledgement of a problem in recognising lived experience - humans are really terrible at distinguishing correlation from causality. Ottinger criticises scientists, for instance, for saying 'there is no evidence that X causes Y', but the alternative, which she seems to approve of, is on a par with witch finding. Historically, if there was a cluster of local illnesses or bad luck, it would be blamed on the local witch. Now it tends to be the phone mast or the power lines. It's natural for random events to cluster - but if we see a cluster of events we attribute causality to our local bugbear, whatever it may be. This doesn't mean there can't be a causal connection, but the reality is that without a rigorous scientific approach there will still be witches to blame. 

The reality is that many scientists are really bad at communicating with non-scientists, and I had hoped this book would give them guidance on how to get facts across to community activists in a way that's useful - but it doesn't. Ottinger is not providing an adequate solution to a very real problem. The subtitle is all about the way that believing in facts leads to better justice: but I'm not sure how this is addressed here.

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