A coalition of university professors and scientists around the United States have taken on a new role in recent weeks: Defenders of facts and truth against the impending antiscience Trump administration.
As we reported soon after the election, scientists and professors who rely on government climate science to do their research are frantically downloading terabytes of publicly available data based on the fear that much of it could become difficult to access under Trump's presidency.
Last we checked in with a handful of these researchers, they were rushing to organize archive-a-thons, identify potentially vulnerable sites, and were figuring out how to best work together to preserve as much data as possible before Trump's inauguration. Now, a week from the start of the administration, members of the movement are beginning to reckon with their new status as resistance members.
"It's something I've been asked about and thought about a lot lately," Bethany Wiggin, director of the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities, told me. "Man, if believing in facts is an act of resistance well then, so be it."
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