This new book, by the head of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, is a timely warning. "Its tone is set early on, with an epigraph from Heinrich Heine," writes reviewer Larman: “Wherever they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn human beings."
To return to the firehawks example, one way to look at this is that the scientists confirmed what the Indigenous peoples have long known about the birds’ use of fire. Or we can say that the Western scientists finally caught up with TK after several thousand years.
I would say that science plays many roles in society; it definitely plays many roles in a democratic society. It is impossible to be completely apolitical, but I think that science is nonpartisan. There really is a difference between being not partisan and being political.
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