The best books on the “war” between politics and science

We are living in a time when ideology, myth, superstition, and ignorance seem to have more influence than ever in shaping our future.

This excellent and important book by Shawn Otto explains the forces (political and economic) at work that are aimed at undermining the role that knowledge and rational empirical evidence might play in making rational public policy decisions. This includes the effort to weaken the role that science might ideally play in helping us to address real-world challenges.

As one who studies and seeks to assess disaster preparedness, response, and mitigation, I have come to believe this “war” on science holds the potential to give birth to ever greater and more expensive (especially in terms of human costs) disasters.  

When I began to focus on and assess climate change as an emergency or disaster management issue, especially in the context of recurring natural disasters, this book by Andrew Guzman struck a nerve that helped me focus on what mattered most.

The human costs associated with what would be the catastrophic consequences of our failure to address what the author suggests is the greatest threat to human civilization are mind-blowing, to say the least.  This is an excellent, if somewhat scary, overview. 

The political “war” against science is nowhere more obvious than in the decades-old efforts to mislead the public and deny the well-established science about climate change.

This book is a story of obscuring the truth, creating doubt, and manipulating the policy process to slow efforts to address the problem, while energy producers are unimpeded on their way to the bank. It's an old but familiar story. Just like efforts to deny the linkage of smoking to lung cancer or coal smoke to acid rain, this is the response whenever scientific findings suggest things that corporate and political actors find threatening to their economic and political interests.

This landmark book once again emphasized for me the unacceptable but all too real impacts of science denial and its human costs.

Barry’s dramatic historical account of the 1918 influenza pandemic has been called “fascinating,” “brilliant,” “sobering,” and “terrifying” by numerous reviewers.

It is a piece of history, the worst public health disaster in the century before COVID-19, that should have helped succeeding generations to take pandemic preparedness more seriously. It should have enhanced our understanding that during such a crisis, science must lead the way. Despite all that we did learn from the great influenza of 1918, we were unable to avoid many of the mistakes made when our leaders too often shunned the advice of science and made the COVID-19 pandemic political.

This book informed and influenced me greatly. It inspired me to see the need for and the importance of recording and learning from our experiences a century later.

This classic book, published a quarter of a century ago, redefined the field of emergency management and has influenced my work and writing in this subject area for the past two decades.

Natural disasters are, in this landmark assessment, not events to be addressed in isolation. They are symptoms of broader problems. These broader problems require that emergency management be linked to broader concerns such as the management of natural resources, economic and social resilience, and public health and safety. This requires an orientation that emphasizes hazard mitigation to reduce the impact of disasters (natural and human-caused) and promotes the building of sustainable communities. This insight became the emphasis of the field in the decades that followed the publication of this book.

This book was certainly the most important influence on my work in the study of disaster management.