When you join Saturday’s March for Science, in Washington, DC and in hundreds of other cities around the country and around the globe, consider that it is unique among demonstrations in this regard: instead of advocating one thing, or protesting another, participants will advocate an entire approach to life and society.

Yes, climate change is important. So is antibiotic resistance, Alzheimer’s disease research funding, epidemic preparedness – and all of the other reasons people are heading to the streets. But the point of this march is much more general: it is about defending the place evidence, method, rigor and empiricism has in our lives.

“There’s a growing anti-intellectual strain in this country, and it may be the beginning of the end of our informed democracy,” warned Neil deGrasse Tyson in early 2016. The 15 months since then have only buoyed that notion, and anti-science attitudes have now permeated the highest levels of government, with Cabinet members spewing falsehoods that were debunked nearly 200 years ago.



As a result, the science community is now facing an unprecedented attack, most urgently on its collective bank account. The new administration wants cuts to everything from Nasa’s earth science missions to the National Institutes of Health’s already-strained bottom line; it would eliminate ARPA-E and decimate the Environmental Protection Agency.

There is talk of pulling the US out of the Paris Agreement, the global effort to combat climate change. The administration may reverse regulations like the Waters of the United States rule, aimed at maintaining healthy water sources, and has ignored scientific advice on potentially dangerous pesticides. And more fundamentally, Trump has left the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which ostensibly provides advice and input into any policy involving science, dramatically understaffed.

It is not an exaggeration to say that if followed to their extremes, these ideas and policies would hamstring decades of potential progress, not to mention immediately endanger public health and safety.

The debate over exactly what and how to fund science is, at a certain level, a policy debate as much as a scientific debate, and there are reasonable disagreements to be had over where limited dollars and other resources should go. Some scientists and critics have suggested that marching means wading into that political morass instead of remaining objective – but that ignores the calculus of this moment.

By participating in this form of activism, you are not necessarily taking a political side, or somehow jumping the gun on what research and honest inquiry will reveal, but you are literally aligning with reason and truth and evidence over denial and magical thinking.

It is absurd to claim that politics and science can forever stand separately, staring at each other from across the room, but it is just as absurd to claim that by joining this movement any scientist or citizen is permanently sullied as partisan or lacking in objectivity.

So march. Pick your issue, or issues, and carry them with you to whatever streets you can manage. March for our climate and our health and our food and our oceans and everything else science plays a role in. But march for rationality, too. Advocating for reason is not politics; it is sanity.