Today we made the long trek back to Iowa City to meet with Connie Mutel. She is a science writer, and her last book focused on climate change, and how it is affecting our world and how we can fight it. She is an Ecologist by training, and has a deep passion for writing. She combined the two and has become a prolific and successful science writer. She tries to bridge the gap between the general public and science, and hopes that her writings help people better understand different scientific concepts. I can really appreciate what she is trying to do because I also see the gap between science and the general public, but unlike many others she is trying a unique strategy to bridge the gap. She told us a little about her style, and told us more about her latest book.

Connie has written 12 books about different scientific concepts, but her latest is different from all the others. In the past she has just used pure fact to try and win over her audience, but she found that this just attracted the groups of people that already agreed with her position instead of reaching a broader audience. In her newest book she uses stories and experiences that people from all backgrounds would most likely share. She then relates these stories and experiences to scientific fact in a hope to show people that climate change is real and caused by humans. She focuses the book as a story to her youngest granddaughter, and its focused around the area she lives. Also in her presentation she talked about how humans have changed the land scape of Iowa. Connie has tried to fight this change by taking her 12 acre property and turning it back into the it would have been thousands of years ago. This is a rarity in Iowa because only 2% of the land is in its original form. The rest has been transformed to make way for farmlands and for cities. She tied this all together to show just how much humans are changing the world that we live it, and it is having some pretty negative effects. The last thing that she left us with is how to deal with the weight of the negative effects of climate change. She flat out told us that they are extremely depressing, and just dwelling on them can be bad. Instead she told us to focus on how we can work together to fix them, and more importantly how we can get more people on board to help.

Connie was a wonderful person to meet with. Not only did she invite us into her home, but gave up time on a beautiful Memorial Day. What she told us really resonated with me because climate science is one of the reasons why I really got into science, and then also trying to communicate that science to a broader audience is a reason why I got into political science. Her goals really resonated with me, and her approach is very interesting. I think the use of common stories that people can relate with is an excellent starting point. She definitely gave me some ideas of how to try and reach a broader and more diverse audience when trying to talk about science.