Resolution: To Know & Do in 2009

Science can tell us so many things. How strange and macabre it is, therefore, that so much sophisticated data and analysis produces so little action and will in complex societies. How morbidly odd that we can study a thing unto its death and learn so little from its destruction and demise.

The Puget Sound’s own mobius strip of self-assessing brilliance neutered by the lassitude of political economy was wonderfully illustrated for me this November at the COSEE workshop at the University of Washington. That wonderful event (among many other eye-opening things) introduced me to the Keil Lab’s Aquatic Organic Geochemistry spice analysis efforts: http://depts.washington.edu/aog/spices. Aquatic Organic Geochemistry has the potential to tell us just about anything we want to know about a society based entirely on the remnant compounds found in its water supply.

Keil Lab shows off both the grand scientific magic at our disposal as well as the grave irony of our sociopolitical ineptitudes by telling Puget Sounders more than we could ever want to know about—specifically—our localized addiction to artificial vanilla. (Who knew? Puget Sound really is just one big Starbucks vanilla latte.). This was told to the COSEE audience with a wry and knowing smile from Lab Director, Rick Keil. A smile that invariably brooks the question—“What about those other things? You know… those bad things? What can you tell me about those?”

And, Keil’s wry and knowing response? “Nothing.” He can not tell us more because, if he were to reveal evil, local governments might become obliged to regularly monitor for or—even worse—do something to combat that evil. A financial burden they can not bare. And, apparently, there have been regulations put in place to dissuade too much law-abiding “citizen science” in that particular arena of waste water treatment and analysis.

And, with that knowledge, I despair. There is so much we do not know. So much we can not do. I wonder how much destruction promised by those two truths will be born out of having had the opportunity to KNOW something and simply looking away.