Dr. Jacquelyn Gill Profile picture
Jun 10, 2020 6 tweets 2 min read Read on X
Today, I stand with #StrikeforBlackLives #ShutDownSTEM. I hope you join me in taking concrete actions for Black lives in our labs, our departments, our universities, and our communities beyond academia. Image
Things on my agenda today:

- research Black scientists to diversify my syllabi and invite for seminars

- solicit book donations from faculty to start an equity library

- ask uni and scientific societies to release demographic data as a first step in accountability
I’m also going to work with colleagues to start putting together resources about how to diversify our faculty in ways that don’t just end up perpetuating anti-Black racism. (What are the barriers, what would it take to get an opportunity hire approved, etc.).
These are projects that will take more than one day. That’s deliberate. We can’t just show up for Black lives one day of the year. If you’re devoting today to education and action, build in some long-term goals, too.
(Blocking and reporting the white supremacists replying to this thread.)
For my own accountability: one way that I have screwed up badly is seeing public education as a tool for equality, and not a tool of white supremacy. I failed to see past my own positive experiences as a white woman.

That’s why I’m focusing my actions at the university level.

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More from @JacquelynGill

Feb 14
Last December, a @DukeU Magazine article explored the "uncertain future" of the Duke Herbarium.

The scientific community is now learning that Duke has decided that this facility will be closed. This is bad, and here's why.dukemag.duke.edu/stories/nowher…
A herbarium is basically a collection of plant specimens that are preserved for research and teaching. They're a vital resource to help scientists identify species, understand changes in biodiversity patterns, or even changes in flowering time or other climate change impacts.
Herbaria require resources and space, as well as staff, who use the collections for research and outreach, and who assist visiting scientists to conduct research. Many collections are digitized, but the actual specimens have tons of value. Internet photos aren't enough.
Read 10 tweets
Jan 11
If you say humanity is doomed to extinction and that nothing we can do can prevent total climate breakdown and ecosystem collapse, I need you to know's just as unscientific as saying there's no climate crisis.

I don't platform disinformation. I don't care what kind it is.
Sadly, I've learned that just as there's no convincing the dismissives the climate crisis is real, there's no convicing defeatists that this isn't pass-fail, and that our work will always matter. I only have so much time and energy. It needs to go where it can be of the most use.
Most defeatists seem to come from demographics that haven't historically faced the loss of their bodily autonomy, rights, homelands, or cultures. I empathize with those experiencing their first-ever existential threats, but I really wish their first instinct wasn't to give up.
Read 5 tweets
Oct 26, 2023
I woke up this morning full of pain at so much violence, to each other and to the planet. I wrote a short message to my lab, and it helped me see a clearer path. I'm sharing it here in case it helps you, too.
Witnessing trauma is its own kind of trauma, especially in a society that wants us to suppress that trauma so we can continue to function as well-oiled cogs. We don't have a lot of good tools for how to bear witness without becoming numb. And we cannot become numb.
I wish I had the answers, but I'm fumbling through this, myself. What I can say is that when things are difficult, anything we can do to show up for each other and our communities makes a difference. The fabric of society is threadbare and torn; we must patch and weave.
Read 5 tweets
Jul 11, 2023
Since 2009, the Anthropocene Working Group has been trying to decide whether geologists should revise the geologic timeline to include a new epoch defined by human impacts, and if so, when. 🧵
If you're not familiar with this project or the debates about when the Anthropocene would start, here's a thread I did on exactly that:

Now that you're all caught up on golden spikes, here's an update:

Today, the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) announced their recommendation, which is that we should have a new geologic epoch, and it started in 1950, as recorded in lake sediments from Crawford Lake, Ontario.
Read 16 tweets
Jul 9, 2023
Milloy’s opinion gets an F in accuracy, but is a master-class in denialist propaganda. It employs the classic tactic of discrediting experts with what seem to be reasonable, obvious statements. They’re superficial and easy to discredit, but the point is to hijack the narrative.
He first tries to lay blame with the media's use of Climate Reanalyzer, a tool developed by my colleagues here at UMaine, claiming it exaggerates temperature anomalies (aka, warmer or colder than average) relative to a different website, temperature [dot] global.
Temperature [dot] global has little info about data sources or methods, and the "About" lists no names or orgs. They say their averages are calculated from a "30-year mean," but provide it. The only time interval mentioned is on in the one graph provided: Jan 2015-Jun 2023.
Read 25 tweets
Jun 1, 2023
Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid slammed into what is today the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. The impact was so forceful that it kicked a tremendous amount of debris out of the atmosphere, which then rained back down, blanketing the Earth's surface with a layer of dust.
All that debris re-entering the atmosphere created a pulse of heat so strong that it set the world on fire. As @Laelaps describes so vividly in her book, The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, this heat -- which only lasted a few hours--was lethal to most animals on the Earth's surface.
Most of those that survived were the ones that could hide in burrows or in the wet protection of lakes, swamps, or the oceans. And then they had to contend with a blasted, charred landscape where little plant life remained except as seeds or roots in the soil.
Read 19 tweets

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