Scientist-turned-filmmaker Randy Olson.
Ecomagination has published my interview with Randy Olson, a most unusual kind of filmmaker. If you prefer to read it as a feature, it’s available in that form here. (Note: both stories are currently offline because of some glitch. Check back for updates.)
For the first half of his career, Olson pursued the career that is the dream of many a geeky adolescent: marine biologist. By the young age of 38 he actually achieved it. He earned a tenured professorship in marine biology at the University of New Hampshire.
But upon reaching his dream he found it wasn’t quite a fit with his personality and aspirations. You see, Olson harbored another unrealistic fantasy, that of being a documentary filmmaker. He thought he could do both by working as a full-time academic and making movies on the side. But that’s before the scientific community met his plan with derision and scorn.
“Had they supported what I had in mind I would have been happy to stay as a professor, but I could see the writing on the wall and now it’s 20-some years later and they have not supported one goddamn thing that I’ve done,” he told me.
So, in a breathtaking gamble, Olson resigned his position at the University of New Hampshire and moved across the country to resettle in Los Angeles, where he enrolled in film school at the University of Southern California. The professor was again a student, starting from zero.
He worked hard — and he partied hard –in Hollywood, and amazingly enough he made it all the way in his second dream career. Twenty-one years after his fateful decision, he is a bona-fide documentary filmmaker. But that might not be his most lasting contribution.
He also travels the country running workshops for young and mid-career scientists to teach them how to turn their research into a stories that the larger community can understand. It’s hard to overstate how important this service is.
A large cross-section of American society has been bamboozled into dismissing scientific findings that it doesn’t agree with, particularly when it comes to climate change. While much of the responsibility rests with those who fund the deception, some must be placed with the scientists themselves.
Scientists are trained from the beginning to speak to each other, not the public. They express themselves in charts, tables and dense technical prose that efficiently distributes knowledge through the scientific community. Scientists hope and assume that regular people (and politicians) will somehow catch the drift and let them alone.
But in the case of climate change, the politicians have certainly not left them alone. The reaction to this among scientists remains one of puzzlement. The researchers at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has assembles a giant edifice of research that would lead any reasonable person to conclude that humanity’s burning of fossil fuels is warming the planet, and that this warming is causing our oceans to rise and our weather to freak out, with grave consequences for the future of civilization.
But they are expressing it in the language of science, and that is simply not a language that a normal person can understand.
Olson hopes that with his deep background as both a scientist and as a communicator, he can help scientists and their discoveries to be better understood by John Q. Public. However, he admits that getting scientists engaged in bettering their communication skills is a hard sell.
“One third loves it , one third thinks it’s OK, and one third just wants to lynch me they hate it so much,” he said.
Why is it that scientists have such a hard time telling their stories? I’d appreciate your theories in the comments.
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