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^"permissions":^"read":ӶӺ,"update":ӶӺ,"delete":ӶӺ,"admin":ӶӺ°,"user":^"id":6,"name":"Sarah Oberbichler"°,"id":"Asg07bgelv","ranges":Ӷ^"start":"/divӶ3Ӻ/divӶ4Ӻ/divӶ1Ӻ/pӶ6Ӻ","startOffset":0,"end":"/divӶ3Ӻ/divӶ4Ӻ/divӶ1Ӻ/pӶ15Ӻ","endOffset":179°Ӻ,"quote":"To approach this point, I should like to tell a story. It’s a very simple little story. It reads like a fairy tale, but it is not. In fact, it is a rather serious story. I quote it from Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It appeared in the issue of June 26, 1987:\n\nIn 1959, a badger broke through the security lines here at the world’s first plutonium factory (the Department of Energy facility at Hanford, in the State of Washington). The badger ignored all the warnings and dug a hole in one of the waste pits. After he left, rabbits began to stop by for an occasional lick of salt, but it was no ordinary salt they found. Before long, they scattered 200 curies of radioactive droppings over 2500 acres of the Hanford Reserve. The rabbit mess ... created one of the largest contaminated areas, one that remains hot today with cesium-137 (half-life of 30 years) and strontium-90 (half-life 28 ys.).\nHanford also has trouble with ground squirrels, burrowing owls, pocket mice, insects, and plants like rabbit brush and tumbleweed. With roots that can grow 20 feet, tumbleweeds reach down into waste dumps and take up strontium-90, break off, and blow around the dry land. If the dry weeds build up and there is a brush fire, they may produce airborne contamination...Ӷ1Ӻ\nAirborne contamination spreads over very much wider areas than even the most energetic rabbits can spread their pellets. The problem, therefore, is not a trivial one.\nThat badgers and rabbits dig burrows, eat certain things, and drop little turds all over the place—these are observations that our ancestors could make, and probably did make, when they lived in their caves 40 or 50 thousand years ago.\nThat plants grow roots and absorb chemicals from soil and subsoil has also been known for quite a while. In fact, in Milan, where I lived part of my Italian life, legend has it that Leonardo da Vinci experimented with this idea and dug some sinister substances into the soil around a peach tree, in order to see whether one could grow poisoned peaches.\nHow strange, you might say, that the scientists who direct the Hanford Reserve did not think of what badgers, rabbits, and tumbleweed do, when they lead their normal and quite well-known lives.—I shall try to show that, given the logic of science, this is not surprising. But first, let me tell another story, a story I am sure you have heard before, but it illustrates a slight variation from the first.\nFor many thousands of years the river Nile flooded the Egyptian lowlands near the Mediterranean coast at least once a year. Vast amounts of fresh water seeped into the soil, fertilized it, and created a natural pressure against the water of the sea. The floods were a nuisance and, quite apart from this, using the Nile’s water to irrigate parts of the desert up-stream seemed eminently desirable. So the Assuan Dam was built to solve these two problems. The Nile no longer got out of hand and new land up- stream could be irrigated and cultivated. For a little while the dam seemed a wonderful success of science and engineering. Then it became clear that the salt of the Mediterranean was slowly but steadily seeping into and devastating the lowlands along the coast which had fed Egypt for millennia.\nI do not know whether, prior to this experience, hydrologists knew much about the balance of pressures on the level of the groundwater. They certainly had the theoretical equipment and the formulas to figure it out. Yet, they apparently did not do so before the Assuan Dam was built.\nWell, you may say, one can’t think of everything—the next time they’ll do better. I would agree with this. Scientists, engineers—even members of the medical profession— are capable of learning. But that is not the problem I have in mind.\nLearning is usually defined as “modifying a behavior or a way of thinking on the basis of experience,” and there is, of course, the implication that the modification is towards effectiveness, efficiency, or, at any rate, something that makes it easier to attain the chosen goal.\nI have no doubt that the next time a major dumping ground for radio-active waste is chosen and prepared, someone will think of the fauna and flora and of a way to keep them from spreading the poison. And when big dams were built after Assuan, someone, I’m sure, tried to work out how the water table in down-stream lands would be affected. Science and its professionals can, in fact, see more and further than the lay public—precisely because of the often uncommon experiences they have accumulated. The problem I have in mind is that they often do not look.\nI would like to submit that it is, indeed, the logic of science and the scientific method that frequently stops scientists from looking outside a specific domain of possibilities.","highlights":Ӷ^"jQuery321067115569029419282":^°°,^"jQuery321067115569029419282":^°°,^"jQuery321067115569029419282":^°°,^"jQuery321067115569029419282":^°°,^"jQuery321067115569029419282":^°°,^"jQuery321067115569029419282":^°°,^"jQuery321067115569029419282":^°°,^"jQuery321067115569029419282":^°°,^"jQuery321067115569029419282":^°°,^"jQuery321067115569029419282":^°°,^"jQuery321067115569029419282":^°°,^"jQuery321067115569029419282":^°°,^"jQuery321067115569029419282":^°°,^"jQuery321067115569029419282":^°°Ӻ,"text":"","order":"mw-content-text","category":"Argumentation2","data_creacio":1580302330403°
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