EXCERPT, Internet Interview with Carl Zimring, author of Clean and White, on environmental issues...................... Garrett: What can be done to broaden and deepen public education, access to knowledge, and to bridge gaps between different forms and levels of personal knowledge? .......................... Zimring: Fighting the forces of disinformation that devalue evidence-based knowledge is crucial. Journalists who build their reporting upon empirical research play a vital role in this work. Their work rests on the work done to develop evidence-based knowledge, so providing access to the means of developing critical thinking skills and information literacy is important. Schools and libraries have been effective institutions for this work; “disruptors” such as Peter Thiel who dismantle these institutions do not make for a free and prosperous society. Schools and libraries are both incubators of critical thought and engines for economic development. Those are intertwined goals, and I have seen the power of good schools transform a region. I was a graduate student in Pittsburgh in the 1990s, when deindustrialization meant population streamed away from the city to find work elsewhere. Western Pennsylvania was reeling from a decade of deindustrialization that closed factories, homes, and churches. One church on Liberty Avenue became a microbrewery. Discussions to turn another into an American Gladiators arena fell apart. Many buildings lay vacant. Soot covered buildings everywhere, remnants of over a century of coal use so prevalent that Anthony Trollope declared the city in 1860 “without exception the blackest place which I ever saw.” I paid $200 per month in rent because of the surplus of available housing. There are benefits to living in a moribund economy. Graduate students in the region today do not have access to the cheap housing I enjoyed twenty years ago because the schools triggered economic growth. Pittsburgh now attracts highly educated workers in fields such as medicine and computer science; the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and Google benefit from the work Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh do to produce knowledge, and the local population is growing in response to the jobs produced by these institutions’ research. Partnerships between universities and their cities can have such effects; and, if I were governor of the state of Michigan, I would direct resources to the University of Michigan’s Flint campus and Wayne State University to increase enrollments and develop curriculum and research centers that will provide long-term benefits, including developing relationships between businesses, the community, and the state that will ensure the decision-making that led to the Flint Water Crisis can never happen again. Funding higher education is a vital use of taxpayer dollars, as is ensuring the buildings where K-12 students learn are safe. A society that does not commit to educating its people will fall behind as it leaves members of its community behind. It is no accident that standards of living in the United States grew after World War II as states such as California, Wisconsin, and, yes, Michigan developed large public university systems to make higher education attainable to most of their citizens. Retreating from that goal damages our society and our economy. The tech boom reflects this history. Peter Thiel’s billions were made off the labor of workers trained by universities; sabotaging them is an act of hubris that resembles Icarus’s use of wax to fix his wings for his flight close to the sun. I use Thiel as an example because his actions reveal the perils of developing science and engineering skills without contextualizing them in a good liberal arts education. At Pratt Institute, our mission is “to educate artists and creative professionals to be responsible contributors to society. Pratt seeks to instill in all graduates aesthetic judgment, professional knowledge, collaborative skills, and technical expertise.” That cannot be achieved without the perspectives of the humanities and social sciences; and Stanford clearly failed Thiel regarding those aspects of his education.......... From: http://www.compulsivereader.com/2017/09/22/environmental-justice-nature-and-nation-wealth-and-waste-in-carl-a-zimrings-scholarship-clean-and-white/