This Unexpected Group Is Running for Office in Direct Response to Donald Trump’s Presidency
The first week of life under President Trump has been a doozy to say the least, seeing him sign orders that will directly affect women’s reproductive rights, build a wall at the US/Mexico border and investigate what he claims was massive voter fraud in the election. And that’s just the beginning!
From his first official day in office, which saw 500,000 women and men marching on Washington, the resistance to President Trump’s administration’s actions is snowballing. Continued action to fight for women’s rights is gaining momentum, pushing more than 500 women to train for office, and Facebook groups and websites helping people organize future marches have been popping up all over the place. Now, another group is finding inspiration to fight back, aiming to get more people with their particular set of skills elected. That group? Scientists.
314 Action — so named for the first three digits of Pi — is a committee created to support scientists to run for office. This move is in response to President Trump’s orders to go ahead with the Dakota Access and Keystone XL Pipelines, his freezing of Environmental Protection Agency grants and the gag order on Department of Agriculture research, as well as his administration’s skepticism toward climate change and vaccines.
“If you’d told me a year ago that I would consider running for office, I would have laughed,” the University of Maine’s Jacquelyn Gill tells The Atlantic. “I always fantasized about serving an administration in an advisory capacity, but we now have explicitly anti-science people in office and in the Cabinet. Waiting passively for people to tap me for my expertise won’t be enough.” Jacquelyn also co-hosts the climate change podcast Warm Regards; her Twitter feed is like a fun daily science lesson.
The costs of Trump's environmental and scientific policies will be felt everywhere: https://t.co/gyXH1a3moh by @highlyanne #USofScience
— Jacquelyn Gill (@JacquelynGill) January 25, 2017
She’s one of the more than 400 people who have signed up in just two weeks, and while the organization doesn’t think that science alone can address many of the world’s problems, it certainly doesn’t hurt to have that perspective and expertise at the table!
Do you think more scientific representation is needed in politics? Let us know over @BritandCo.
(h/t The Atlantic, photos via Shawn Thew, Phil Walter/Getty)