Science And Storytelling: How I Accidentally Framed Carbon

by Eric Roston

I've observed with great interest the discussions about framing science, here, at Matt Nisbet's blog, and elsewhere. For two reasons, I've not weighed in on the topic directly. First, I defer to Matt, Chris, Sheril and others, as far as ownership and proper deployment of the phrase "framing science" go. On a logistical level, I was too buried in the manuscript of my new book, The Carbon Age, to duck out for even routine blogging. It's really only in the last couple of weeks that I've come back to life.

The other reason has something to do with this. At the heart of the framing discussion is how to communicate science. The Carbon Age, I would think, offers fodder for this discussion, but looking back now at my research, reporting, and writing, that's not what I thought I was doing. I wasn't trying to fix scientific communication, at least beyond the notion that I wanted to read a book like The Carbon Age, but nobody had written it.

The Carbon Age is a personal book, sort of in the way that "I" is a personal pronoun. It's the word we use to explain our most unique qualities and thoughts. But it's the word everybody uses to express his or her individuality (at least in English). The Carbon Age is similarly personal and universal. The questions I asked at the onset of the project (late 2003) were of great personal interest and utility -- and as such they were universal in nature.

What I discovered in answering these questions -- breaking news! -- is that non-scientists shouldn't think about science the way professionals do. Not only that, but the administrative and intellectual categories we divide the lay world into -- high school classes, congressional committees, newspaper sections -- are decades or in some cases hundreds of years old and in many cases no longer comport with how science understands the world to work.

So a goal of The Carbon Age, as a friend puts it, is "smashing boxes." I've turned at least a dozen different scientific disciplines -- the boxes -- into one story, my story, your story, the story of life and industry. I threw out all of the "-ologies." And having done that, I found myself staring into this one big box, which I decided to call just "carbon science." And what happens when you pull out all those stovepipe categories, you're left with a very dynamic picture, the story of carbon, what it is, how it does what it does, and how it gets around. Mark Lynas nailed it in a recent review in Nature Reports: Climate Change: "Although this remarkable element has recently become something of a media celebrity, few who write about it will have thought too deeply about its origins -- and its significance in the wider universe. Eric Roston is an exception, and his stimulating, detailed and thoroughly informative book provides a welcome slew of context for the humdrum daily dose of 'low-carbon this, high-carbon that' now peppering the newspapers."

My main concern had nothing to do with science meta-communication. It was that "carbon" is the most important word that I knew the least about. The book embeds industrialization and its climate crisis into evolutionary and geological history-by design an after-the-fact "prequel" to An Inconvenient Truth. Part I ("The Natural") looks at the evolution as a shaper and as shaped by the global carbon cycle. Part II ("The Unnatural") looks at technology as a shaper and as shaped by the global carbon cycle. Each chapter in Part II mirrors a chapter in Part I, as a way to tease out the similarities and differences between technology and evolution, and the former's role within the latter.

Implicitly I set my sights on U.S. scientific illiteracy, a close cousin to framing science. In February 2001, the Hart-Rudman Commission laid out national security threats to the United States over the next 25 years. Seven months later, the commission's first warning, a major terrorist attack, looked eerily prescient. Less frequently remembered is the second threatening trend: Decline in U.S. science and education. Tom Friedman picked up on this thread in The World Is Flat, sorting through the long-term effects of scientific decline on a national economy. The National Academy of Sciences gave the topic a rigorous treatment in its 2005 report, Rising Above the Gathering Storm. These three works raise but do not answer the question: What actual science is missing from public discourse that might make a dent in scientific illiteracy?

The Carbon Age is a rigorous attempt to complement these works, by unifying at least a dozen scientific disciplines into one singular story. Whether this means it frames or re-frames science is for others to decide. Whatever it is, I had the adventure of a lifetime producing it.