ABSTRACT
We struggle as a culture to make informed choices about environmental issues. Scientific proofs and forms of scientific evidence will always be important means of persuasion for both global and local environmental contexts. Many scholars of popular science writing have criticized how the "lone genius" trope undermines the public's understanding of science because it conflicts with the collaborative, social process that most scientists would recognize as their daily work. Writers such as Jared Diamond and Elizabeth Kolbert and science communicators such as the authors of Science Blogs take a more traditional view of scientific communication. Arguably, many of the writers who rely on these commonplaces also seem to rely on a one-way model of communication. This commonplace, that science and scientific evidence meet a standard of objectivity and thus rise above politics, is, like many commonplaces or cliches, both true and far too simple.
