Abstract
From 62 semi-structured interviews carried out with young people ages 14–25 who are engaged in the defense of the environment, we explored in this article how the circulation of scientific knowledge on the social media plays a role in engaging young people in defense of the environment to identify how internet can help to support them. As a result, despite respect for science and scientists, young people’s processing of scientific knowledge does not always seem to respect the standards of objectification advocated by the scientific approach. This can be problematic because they can appear to be contradictory for their detractors. Helping them to be more efficient in their active role for promoting environmental issues means to support them for a more scientific and reflexive use of social media. Thus, the many debates around environmental education can be enriched by an increasingly precise analysis of the expression of the commitment of young ecologists on the Internet.
Highlights
Science plays multiple roles in the public debate on defending the environment
Whether science is acting in the balance of power between political decision-makers and economic actors (Boehmer-Christiansen, 1994), in the effort to raise public awareness of environmental issues or in the education of the young people, its role is intimately linked to the methods of production and dissemination of scientific data and the different actors don’t pay attention in the same way at the results provided by scientific community
A copy of the list of the question was provided to them. Whether their contact with science occurred through scientific personalities involved in the ecological movement or through reading reports like those produced by the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the scientific data play a role in the decisions of our respondents to become involved and strengthened their commitment
Summary
Science plays multiple roles in the public debate on defending the environment. For political decisionmakers, scientific information is most often mobilized to assess the risks inherent in demands for the exploitation of natural resources (Chailleux, 2019). Whether science is acting in the balance of power between political decision-makers and economic actors (Boehmer-Christiansen, 1994), in the effort to raise public awareness of environmental issues or in the education of the young people, its role is intimately linked to the methods of production and dissemination of scientific data and the different actors don’t pay attention in the same way at the results provided by scientific community. To better understand how and why the scientific ideas and reasoning can overpassed their role to provide objective data to the institution and the individual to better take decision, this article explores in which ways the young people’s involved in environmental issue use scientific to argue in the context in which social media takes a significant place
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