Silence Is Taking a Side: Why Scientists Belong on the Campaign Trail

Every scientist makes advocacy choices every day, whether they admit it or not. The questions you ask, the communities you engage, the issues you spend your time on, and the moments you stay quiet all push the world in one direction. Oceana's Chief Scientist, Dr. Katie Matthews, argues that staying silent on an issue you care about quietly props up the status quo, and in ocean conservation the status quo is usually the problem.

Recorded between meetings while Katie was in Panama, this conversation previews her plenary at IMCC8, the 8th International Marine Conservation Congress in Edinburgh. Katie explains how Oceana builds campaign teams across five disciplines (science, law, grassroots organizing, communications and media, and policy and lobbying) and what scientists trained in academia have to unlearn to work alongside lawyers and campaigners. She shares how Oceana's scientists published an estimate of Amazon's plastic packaging footprint when the company would not release its own, then invited Amazon to prove them wrong.

Andrew and Katie also tackle the question many scientists are asking after a turbulent election week in the United States: when is the right time to speak up? Katie's answer is to make it personal, because people forget facts and figures and remember stories. She closes with a reminder that some of the biggest names in conservation, including The Nature Conservancy and the Environmental Defense Fund, were founded by scientists who refused to stop at research.

Takeaways

• Neutrality is a myth: choosing your research questions, partners and issues is already a form of advocacy.
• Staying silent on an issue you care about supports the status quo.
• Scientists in campaign organizations work as one discipline among equals, alongside law, organizing, communications and policy.
• When data is hidden or missing, a transparent, assumption-labelled estimate can push companies and governments to disclose their own numbers.
• Personal stories persuade more effectively than statistics.
• Scientist-led advocacy has deep roots: The Nature Conservancy and EDF both started with scientists who wanted to act on what they knew.