You know I’m a sucker for heresy

So you won’t be surprised that I really like that Erin Podolak has asked, Can We Stop Talking About Carl Sagan?

It feels like I’m committing an act of science communication sacrilege here, but I have a confession to make: Carl Sagan means absolutely nothing to me. No more than any other dude from my parents 1970′s yearbooks that could rock the turtle neck/blazer combo with the best of them. There, my secret is out.

I’m not saying I don’t like Sagan – I’m saying Sagan has zero influence on me or what I do. To me, Sagan is a stereotypical old white guy scientist who made some show that a lot of people really liked more than 30 years ago. That show – Cosmos: A Personal Voyage -was on air nearly a decade before I was even born. The reason I bring up my own age is because I’m as old, if not older, than the prime audience for science communication. I think anyone can learn to appreciate science at any age in life, but we stand the best chance at convincing people that science is something they can understand (and even do themselves) early in life when their beliefs are not so entrenched.

So then why, WHY as science communicators do we keep going around and around among ourselves about how Sagan – who is so far outside my life experience, let alone that of people younger than me – was the greatest science communicator of all time? We keep talking about who will (or won’t) be the next Carl Sagan but I promise you, no high school kid gives a f*&^ about Carl Sagan let alone whether or not science communicators think he was great. We spend so much time and energy talking about a guy that isn’t  relevant anymore. The topics of space, the natural world, and how to communicate wonder are totally relevant to the public and to the science writing community. But, this one guy? Nope.

Oh, good. Now I can confess that I too was not a Sagan fan boy. I liked him all right, I appreciated what he was doing for astronomy, and I’m not going to argue with you if he inspired you. He did great work! But his voice didn’t resonate with me.

To me, he was completely overshadowed by that other white guy with a documentary popularizing science at the same time, Jacob Bronowski. There was no comparison. I watched Cosmos and learned stuff, but the man who inspired me and made me think was Bronowski. You do appreciate that different people will respond to different messages, right?

My other big inspirations in the 70s, when I was getting fired up to go study science, were Edward Abbey, Rachel Carson, Stephen Jay Gould, EO Wilson (that those last two were feuding was so discouraging to me), and Jacques Cousteau. A bit later I was avidly reading Peter Kropotkin and Aldo Leopold. When I was acquiring a focus on developmental biology, it was D’Arcy Thompson, John Tyler Bonner, and Gould (again!) — and when I really was deeply into the field, the brains that blew me away with their work were those of Christiane Nusslein-Volhard, Mary Jane West-Eberhard, and Susan Oyama. Notice — they were biologists or biology-centered. It was nothing personal against Sagan, he just wasn’t writing about things that interested me as much.

Another important point, though, is “this one guy? Nope.” I worry that one of the problems we see in getting people focused on a movement is idolatry and hero worship — if you’ve got only one name in your roster of science heroes, you’ve got a serious deficiency: get out more. Read more. I don’t care how great Sagan might have been, Sagan is not enough. And if you want an example of a related problem, notice this complaint on Podolak’s blog: No more reading your blog for me, what a shame. Really, dude? If someone doesn’t share your same idols in all things, you won’t read them any more?

Then, of course, the other reality is that these people are all human beings, not saints. Feynman was a pickup artist of the worst sort; Einstein was a jerk to his wife; James Watson is a racist bigot. When we set up individuals as idols who must be respected, we’re simply setting ourselves up for disappointment. Appreciate the work they do with an appropriate perspective on their strengths and limitations.

So can we stop talking about Carl Sagan now? Yes, if you’d like; no, if you’d rather.

How about if we talk about Jacques Monod instead, or Rita Levi-Montalcini? It takes more than one voice to make a chorus.

If you can’t get rid of garbage, worship it

Every time you use a plastic bag at the grocery store or buy another bottle of water you are contributing to the deluge of one-use, throw-away plastic products that pile up in our landfills or float out to sea. One group in Baton Rouge is trying to raise consciousness with Sacred Waste, a performance art piece that illustrates the problem.

This performance art show is a unique blend of art and science – it conveys some of its information in some unusual and compelling ways: the costumes, the set, and all the props are made of discarded plastic – each costume is made of 100-300 plastic bags, one costume is made of about 300 plastic bottle caps, there’s a dragon made of about 3000 bags, and a tree made of plastic – yet we’re reminded that all the plastic on stage during the show only represents the amount of plastic Americans discard about every 100 milliseconds. One scene in the show personifies the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in a whirling dance…one scene involves a shaman ecstatically scrawling the structures of polyethylene, polypropylene, and polystyrene on a plastic screen…one scene depicts the flow of plastic through a bird’s body. Each scene in the show explores a different aspect of our relationship with plastic and mixes science with mysticism, animal instincts with consumerism, creation myths with post-apocalyptic evolution and the “new nature”. If we taught more science this way (just a little more of it, certainly not all of it) – we might change a lot of people’s attitude toward science, in the way that this whole show hopefully also changes its audience’s attitudes toward plastic.

They have a kickstarter to play at the New Orleans Fringe Festival. They aren’t asking much, but a little donation would be very encouraging.

Oh, and try to stop buying stuff in disposable plastic packaging, too.

Do better. Please just do better.

It’s been a rough couple of weeks in the community of science bloggers, with the abrupt downfall of Bora Zivkovic, a very well liked (I consider him a friend) and influential leader. If you haven’t been following it, here’s a summary and timeline of recent events. The simple version of the whole story is that one of the major pioneers of science blogging and one of the people most instrumental in forging a community online has been found to have abused his privileges to sexually harass women members.

I’ve been processing how I feel about it all. As I say, Bora is a long-term friend; I remember when he joined us at Scienceblogs, and I also remember meeting him for the first time — he was a genuinely enthusiastic proponent of bringing people together and building a new platform for science communication. So this is a real tragedy that he has managed to undermine his own talents.

At the same time, though, here’s what I feel now: discouragement and despair and cynicism. We’ve been through this before in the skeptic/atheist communities. It was beginning to be my expectation that any grand attempt at building new organizations and improving communication was eventually going to collapse into the sewer of patriarchal sexual politics — that this pattern of sexual inequity was hardwired into the culture as a whole, and anything rising up out of it was going to be infected with the taint and eventually succumb to it. Same ol’, same ol’, I thought — the hard slog is never going to end.

But I was surprised: the science community’s response has been strong and appropriate. There’s no excusing his behavior, and rising up and demanding better is exactly what needed to be done, painful as it was. And they did it. There’s hope? Really? The struggle might actually lead to progress?

There has been a lot of writing on this topic in the last few weeks, but I thought Scicurious captured it particularly well.

Bora is not the man I thought he was. And the science communication community was not the place I thought it was.

The whole week has been full of downs. But toward the end. I started to see #ripples of hope. Not just the hashtag (though that alone is brilliant), but from other bloggers, saying, we can, in the future, be better. We want to be better. We WILL be better. People taking decisive action.

And I have been incredibly impressed with many of my colleagues. Yes, people fought, and jumped to conclusions, and etc. But there have been no death threats or rape threats, and compared to some communities I’ve seen…well I’m impressed. I always thought I wrote with and worked with some amazingly good people. Now, I KNOW it.

I contrast that with the atheist community. We also have some amazingly good people — as I travel around, I run into them all the time, at all levels of organization, and all doing good work — but we also have a substantial number of amazingly awful people…and as it turns out, it doesn’t take many sexist jerks clawing at the structure of your organization to distract and disrupt and impede progress. We have enough atheist asshats to provide shelter and support to exploiters — and too many of us are willing to overlook the content of our leaders’ characters, as long as they are willing to say the right words about the sacred atheist cause.

I’ve been astounded at how many people demand that we plaster over an atheist’s human flaws simply because, well, he’s The Man. We’ve been building up a body of revered saints, rather than recognizing that every one of us is human and needs to be held accountable. Face reality: if Bora had chosen to be a leader of the atheist community, rather than the online science community, right now there would be a huge battle going on, with loud voices shouting that “He only talked to these women; aren’t they strong enough to resist?” And the women who spoke out would be flooded with death threats and rape threats, and would be endlessly lampooned on our little hate nests scattered about the internet. Youtube would be full of videos expressing outrage that a Good Man should have been chastised by the Shrill Harpies of Feminism.

We’ve all seen it. Every atheist woman who dares to challenge the privileged status quo and ask for a little respect gets the treatment: just ask Rebecca Watson, or Jen McCreight, or Ophelia Benson. So I feel mixed: there is the despair at the failure of atheism to motivate real change, and hope that the science online community will set a model for everyone to follow.

But I also fear that atheism’s problems are rooted too deeply. This community is full of people who are already convinced that they are better than everyone else. But to be a good person, you have to always want to be better than yourself right now.

Bigfoot!

I spent my first evening at the Paradigm Symposium last night. I’ve missed virtually all of the talks so far — I got to watch a panel about new media, podcasting and that sort of thing, and there wasn’t too much novelty to it, but it was fine…except for the bits where they mentioned how the skeptical outlook was distasteful.

There was also a final Q&A session of the evening where a few of us, me included, were put up front to introduce ourselves and take questions from the audience. I went bold and made it explicitly clear that I’m a skeptic, I don’t believe in little grey men or ghosts or the paranormal or any of that sort of thing, just so no one would be at all confused about my position. The responses of the other panelists were interesting: lots of mumbling about how we don’t know everything, and mysteries, and that sort of thing, and I got in one rejoinder about how science builds on what we know, not what we don’t know, and leaping into mysteries is a formula for failure.

It was an aggressive approach, but a good one, I think. At the bar session later a number of people collared me to argue, and several just wanted to know more. There’s a huge difference between this group and, for instance, the creationist events I’ve been to: paranormalists tend to be strongly anti-dogmatic, so so far I’ve only encountered one person who hit me with the “invite Jesus into your heart” line. They also tend to be curious, so they ask lots of questions, which is good. I think the main problem is a lack of criteria to judge the quality of evidence, so they tend to go lurching off indiscriminately into weird phenomena.

I met one nice fellow who was proudly showing off his cast of a Bigfoot print.

bigfoot

He was very friendly, and he’d carefully documented everything he could about it: who found it, when it was cast, all that sort of thing. Of course it’s totally useless as evidence for Bigfoot since prints are so easily faked, but that’ll be one of the subjects I talk about tomorrow: the quality of evidence and setting standards for your work.

Today I’m going to sit back and listen. I’ve browsed all their vendor tables, though: anyone need some healing crystals, or books about the Illuminati?

Sci Culture

Did you fall for this? Science published a paper which claimed that reading literary fiction, you know that stuff that gets taught as highbrow reading material in college literature classes, is objectively better than genre or popular fiction at improving your mind and making you better able to understand other people’s mental states. It was all over the popular news sites.

Language Log shreds the paper wonderfully. It’s a great example of stirring the muck and taking whatever odor wafts out of the mess as a great truth. You might be able to see some obvious flaws just from my brief description: what the heck is “literary fiction”? Isn’t that a contentious division already? How do you recognize it (mostly, I fear, it’s because they’re old books that you’d never pick up to read for pure pleasure)? How did the authors of the study choose it?

As it turns out, the authors hand-picked a few passages from books that they subjectively placed into their categories of literary vs. popular fiction, had subjects read them, gave them a couple of standard tests of theory of mind or empathy, and got a very weak statistical effect. You know, if you shovel garbage at a wall, you can probably find some seemingly non-random distribution of the pattern of banana peels, too.

But it got published in Science, which is dismaying. Unfortunately, here’s where Language Log fails — they infer nefarious commercial intent from it.

The real question here is why Science chose to publish a study with such obvious methodological flaws. And the answer, alas, is that Science is very good at guessing which papers are going to get lots of press; and that, along with concern for their advertising revenues from purveyors of biomedical research equipment and supplies, seems empirically to be the main motivation behind their editorial decisions.

Oh, nonsense. I’m sure that Science is quite careful to keep editorial/review and advertising decisions entirely separate, and if their main concern was peddling expensive biomedical gear, why would they waste space on a simple and flawed paper using cheap psychological techniques? There are trade journals that are much better sources for overpriced gadgetry and reagents.

I’ll also point out that they’ve reversed the situation: Science isn’t good at guessing what papers will appeal to the popular press, the popular press is accustomed to turning to a few journals, like Science and Nature, for finding what the scientific soup d’jour is.

This is not to say that Science or Nature are objective paragons at finding the most important science of the day. To the contrary, both are self-consciously elitist journals, jockeying for position as the premier sources of distilled scientific wisdom. Language Log completely missed the boat: paper decisions at Science are not made to satisfy either the popular press or the scientific supply houses; they are decisions to appeal to the tastes of other scientists, and the financial benefits flow secondarily from that.

There is a Sci Culture, just like there is Pop Culture and High Brow Culture and Redneck Culture. And all of these fragments of a greater whole have their various organs of communication and modes and expectations of behavior, which are all much more complicated than being simply driven by the invisible hand of the market.

A hopeless muddle

James May, one of the presenters on Top Gear, is trying his hand at providing a little science education. I want to say…please stop. Here he is trying to answer the question, “Are humans still evolving?” In the end he says the right answer — yes they are! — but the path he takes to get there is terrible.

It’s little things that make me wonder if anyone is actually editing his copy. For instance, he helpfully explains that you, the viewer, were produced by your parents having sex. Then he says:

That’s how evolution is driven: by reproduction. But is that still true?

Uh, yes? We haven’t stopped reproducing, so we should be able to stop right there then.

But no, he continues on. He tries to explain evolution, and does manage to verbally describe natural selection correctly as differential survival and reproduction, but it’s illustrated with a pair of goats with telescoping necks. That doesn’t help. He’s describing Darwinian selection and showing it as Lamarckian — it’s a very mixed signal. And as we’ll see, he still seems to be thinking like will and experience drive evolutionary changes.

And do I need to mention that he doesn’t seem aware of processes other than selection in evolution? You need to realize the importance of drift to answer the question of whether evolution is continuing in humans, especially when you’re prone to say glib nonsense like “humans have turned the process of natural selection on its head,” whatever that means.

He also claims along the way that Darwin “tracing this evolutionary process backwards proved that all life came from a common source.” No, he didn’t. A hypothesis is not proof. He found morphological evidence for the relatedness of some groups, but the evidence for common ancestry of all forms wouldn’t really become overwhelming until the molecular evidence linked animals and plants and mushrooms and bacteria together.

By the time he gets around to talking the details of human evolution, we’re mired in a hopeless mess. Apparently, one reason we’re still evolving is that “certain characteristics will improve your chances of breeding” but then he helpfully explains that “its not as if ugly and stupid people don’t get to have children”. So which is it? Is natural selection selecting away for chiseled abs, or whatever he regards as a significant advantage, or isn’t it? And if people he judges as unattractive are having children, that driving force of evolution, then isn’t that undermining his understanding of the process?

And please, if you can’t even get selection straight in your head, please don’t try to explain population structure. He has a weird discursion in which he explains that “the genetic mutations that drive evolution can be most commonly found in a small gene pool” and then somehow tries to argue that we’re “too cosmopolitan,” that the fact that people from all over the world can now intermarry somehow “cuts down on those mutations.” I have no idea what he’s talking about. I suspect he doesn’t either.

Then, as evidence that we have been evolving, he points to big screen TVs as proof that we’re smarter than Stone Age people. Great — we now have a new IQ test. Just measure the dimensions of the individual’s TV. It’ll probably work about as well as regular IQ tests.

He tries to get to specific traits: lack of wisdom teeth is evidence of human evolution, apparently. Never mind that the changes are recent and mixed, and that it’s more likely a plastic response to changes in our diet than a trait that’s been selected for specifically. It’s a very bad example, unless he’s going to argue for selection for people with fewer teeth in their jaws. Do you typically count your date’s molars?

His ultimate proof that humans are evolving is the appearance of lactose tolerance in adults. That is pretty good evidence, I’ll agree…but he messes it up completely.

10,000 years ago, before anybody had had the bright idea of milking a cow, no human could digest the lactose in milk beyond childhood. But now, after a hundred years of drinking cream and milk and squeezy cheese in a can, 99% of people can.

He doesn’t even get the numbers right. North Europeans have a frequency of lactose tolerance of about 90%; in South Europeans it is about 30%, and less than 10% in people of Southeast Asian descent. This is not a largely lactose tolerant world.

And of course, his explanation is screaming nonsense. We are not lactose tolerant because we’ve been drinking milk; we’ve been drinking milk because we’re lactose tolerant. It is not a trait that appeared in the last century.

Why is this guy babbling badly about evolution? Did he have any informed, educated scientists to consult who could tell him not to make such a ghastly botch of it all?

There’s a reason we need good science journalists

It’s because the bad ones are appalling hacks. Here’s an ad for The Sun looking for a scientist to give them the answer they want.

Media outlet: The Sun Freelance journalist: Matthew Barbour Query: Further to my last request, I also now urgently need an expert who will say tattoos can give you cancer. We can plug any relevant organisation, give copy approval, and pay a fee. Please get back to me asap if you can help.

Media outlet: The Sun

Freelance journalist: Matthew Barbour

Query: Further to my last request, I also now urgently need an expert who will say tattoos can give you cancer. We can plug any relevant organisation, give copy approval, and pay a fee. Please get back to me asap if you can help.

May I suggest that Matthew Barbour ought to be drummed out of journalism, and that any “expert” who is cited in his article promoting lies for cash ought to be similarly ridiculed?

If anyone sees this article appear, let me know.

Stones, glass houses, etc.

John Bohannon of Science magazine has developed a fake science paper generator. He wrote a little, simple program, pushes a button, and gets hundreds of phony papers, each unique with different authors and different molecules and different cancers, in a format that’s painfully familiar to anyone who has read any cancer journals recently.

The goal was to create a credible but mundane scientific paper, one with such grave errors that a competent peer reviewer should easily identify it as flawed and unpublishable. Submitting identical papers to hundreds of journals would be asking for trouble. But the papers had to be similar enough that the outcomes between journals could be comparable. So I created a scientific version of Mad Libs.

The paper took this form: Molecule X from lichen species Y inhibits the growth of cancer cell Z. To substitute for those variables, I created a database of molecules, lichens, and cancer cell lines and wrote a computer program to generate hundreds of unique papers. Other than those differences, the scientific content of each paper is identical.

The fictitious authors are affiliated with fictitious African institutions. I generated the authors, such as Ocorrafoo M. L. Cobange, by randomly permuting African first and last names harvested from online databases, and then randomly adding middle initials. For the affiliations, such as the Wassee Institute of Medicine, I randomly combined Swahili words and African names with generic institutional words and African capital cities. My hope was that using developing world authors and institutions would arouse less suspicion if a curious editor were to find nothing about them on the Internet.

The data is totally fake, and the fakery is easy to spot — all you have to do is read the paper and think a teeny-tiny bit. The only way they’d get through a review process is if there was negligible review and the papers were basically rubber-stamped.

The papers describe a simple test of whether cancer cells grow more slowly in a test tube when treated with increasing concentrations of a molecule. In a second experiment, the cells were also treated with increasing doses of radiation to simulate cancer radiotherapy. The data are the same across papers, and so are the conclusions: The molecule is a powerful inhibitor of cancer cell growth, and it increases the sensitivity of cancer cells to radiotherapy.

There are numerous red flags in the papers, with the most obvious in the first data plot. The graph’s caption claims that it shows a "dose-dependent" effect on cell growth—the paper’s linchpin result—but the data clearly show the opposite. The molecule is tested across a staggering five orders of magnitude of concentrations, all the way down to picomolar levels. And yet, the effect on the cells is modest and identical at every concentration.

One glance at the paper’s Materials & Methods section reveals the obvious explanation for this outlandish result. The molecule was dissolved in a buffer containing an unusually large amount of ethanol. The control group of cells should have been treated with the same buffer, but they were not. Thus, the molecule’s observed “effect” on cell growth is nothing more than the well-known cytotoxic effect of alcohol.

The second experiment is more outrageous. The control cells were not exposed to any radiation at all. So the observed “interactive effect” is nothing more than the standard inhibition of cell growth by radiation. Indeed, it would be impossible to conclude anything from this experiment.

This procedure should all sound familiar: remember Alan Sokal? He carefully hand-crafted a fake paper full of po-mo gobbledy-gook and buzzwords, and got it published in Social Text — a fact that has been used to ridicule post-modernist theory ever since. This is exactly the same thing, enhanced by a little computer work and mass produced. And then Bohannon sent out these subtly different papers to not one, but 304 journals.

And not literary theory journals, either. 304 science journals.

It was accepted by 157 journals, and rejected by 98.

So when do we start sneering at science, as skeptics do at literary theory?

Most of the publishers were Indian — that country is developing a bit of an unfortunate reputation for hosting fly-by-night journals. Some were flaky personal obsessive “journals” that were little more than a few guys with a computer and a website (think Journal of Cosmology, as an example). But some were journals run by well-known science publishers.

Journals published by Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, and Sage all accepted my bogus paper. Wolters Kluwer Health, the division responsible for the Medknow journals, "is committed to rigorous adherence to the peer-review processes and policies that comply with the latest recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors and the World Association of Medical Editors," a Wolters Kluwer representative states in an e-mail. "We have taken immediate action and closed down the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals."

Unfortunately, this sting had a major flaw. It was cited as a test of open-access publishing, and it’s true, there are a great many exploitive open-access journals. These are journals where the author pays a fee — sometimes a rather large fee of thousands of dollars — to publish papers that readers can view for free. You can see where the potential problems arise: the journal editors profit by accepting any papers, the more the better, so there’s pressure to reduce quality control. It’s also a situation in which con artists can easily set up a fake journal with an authoritative title, rake in submissions, and then, perfectly legally, publish them. It’s a nice scam. You can also see where Elsevier would love it.

But it’s unfair to blame open access journals for this problem. They even note that one open-access journal was exemplary in its treatment of the paper.

Some open-access journals that have been criticized for poor quality control provided the most rigorous peer review of all. For example, the flagship journal of the Public Library of Science, PLOS ONE, was the only journal that called attention to the paper’s potential ethical problems, such as its lack of documentation about the treatment of animals used to generate cells for the experiment. The journal meticulously checked with the fictional authors that this and other prerequisites of a proper scientific study were met before sending it out for review. PLOS ONE rejected the paper 2 weeks later on the basis of its scientific quality.

The other problem: NO CONTROLS. The fake papers were sent off to 304 open-access journals (or, more properly, pay-to-publish journals), but not to any traditional journals. What a curious omission — that’s such an obvious aspect of the experiment. The results would be a comparison of the proportion of traditional journals that accepted it vs. the proportion of open-access journals that accepted it… but as it stands, I have no idea if the proportion of bad acceptances within the pay-to-publish community is unusual or not. How can you publish something without a control group in a reputable science journal? Who reviewed this thing? Was it reviewed at all?

Oh. It’s a news article, so it gets a pass on that. It’s also published in a prestigious science journal, the same journal that printed this:

This week, 30 research papers, including six in Nature and additional papers published online by Science, sound the death knell for the idea that our DNA is mostly littered with useless bases. A decade-long project, the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE), has found that 80% of the human genome serves some purpose, biochemically speaking. Beyond defining proteins, the DNA bases highlighted by ENCODE specify landing spots for proteins that influence gene activity, strands of RNA with myriad roles, or simply places where chemical modifications serve to silence stretches of our chromosomes.

And this:

Life is mostly composed of the elements carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur, and phosphorus. Although these six elements make up nucleic acids, proteins, and lipids and thus the bulk of living matter, it is theoretically possible that some other elements in the periodic table could serve the same functions. Here, we describe a bacterium, strain GFAJ-1 of the Halomonadaceae, isolated from Mono Lake, California, that is able to substitute arsenic for phosphorus to sustain its growth. Our data show evidence for arsenate in macromolecules that normally contain phosphate, most notably nucleic acids and proteins. Exchange of one of the major bio-elements may have profound evolutionary and geochemical importance.

I agree that there is a serious problem in science publishing. But the problem isn’t open-access: it’s an overproliferation of science journals, a too-frequent lack of rigor in review, and a science community that generates least-publishable-units by the machine-like application of routine protocols in boring experiments.

Cafe Scientifique resumes!

I’m giving you plenty of advanced warning, because I know it’ll take you a bit to arrange air flights and all that. Our first Cafe Scientifique of the new school year will be on 24 September, at the Common Cup Coffeehouse in downtown Morris. Biologist Pete Wyckoff will be telling us about

The Impact of CLIMATE, DEER, EARTHWORMS, and the INVASIVE EUROPEAN BUCKTHORN TREE on the FORESTS of WESTERN MINNESOTA

Wait, what forests of Western Minnesota? I guess we’ll find out what happened to them.

As a special inducement, we have charismatic and cheerful students doing all the introductions — no more bearded old guy being boring. And also…door prizes! And a trivia contest! With prizes! Brush up on your tree lore before coming around, because you’ll be getting quizzed on trees and forests.

Wait, this is Western Minnesota. These will have to be really simple questions, like “what is a tree?” and “is it a plant or an animal?” and “what do you call a herd of trees?” Maybe Pete will show photographs of forests so the locals will learn to recognize them.