My name is Stu Shepherd, and this was my science blog.
I started The Bug Count in October of 2012. It wasn’t a great blog. It was mostly silly and mostly poorly written.
I wrote about how nuclear fuel rod pools work, and the flashes of light that appear when you rub your eyes too hard. I wrote about why raccoons are technically chemical compounds, like baking soda. I wrote a single-post ‘series’ called Eye on Science where I stage-set my artificial eye next to a bag of stale nutritional yeast.
I would roast each of them here but for the fact that you can just go read them yourself.
In 2016, two things happened that changed my relationship with writing about science for fun.
The first was joining the communications team at TRIUMF, Canada’s particle accelerator centre and de facto national physics lab. I’ve been there for four years, and I work everyday to make good on a promise that I made to the young-Stu who endured 16 weeks of ‘Introduction to Algae’ at Simon Fraser University while dreaming of one day becoming a real agent of change for science communications. I don’t know if I’ve succeeded, but it keeps me VERY busy.
The second was Donald Trump’s election.
Because, and I say this loudly for several people I follow on Facebook in the back, if you do not acknowledge that Trump’s election enabled a global uptick in the empowerment of white supremacist, xenophobic, homophobic and anti-queer sentiment, you are either delusional or an intentionally ignorant white man or both.
Further, Trump’s election spurred a torqued departure from thoughtful, data-informed decision-making, with real-world ramifications that have been both broad and sweeping (like an increasing incidence of police-reported hate crime in the US and Canada) or at times harrowing and specific (like the roll-back of healthcare rights for trans people that was announced on the anniversary of the Pulse nightclub massacre).
This has been deeply painful for me, as it should be for most humans. And, at the risk of trivializing this anguish, it has also been also uniquely weird for me as someone who was trying to build a career centred around communicating the merits of making thoughtful, empathetic, human-centred and data-informed decisions (plot twist: none of us wants to make thoughtful, data-informed decisions. Especially ignorant white men.)
For all they represent, the last four years have hamstrung me as a creative person. I have felt a deep and all-encompassing paralysis that is at least partly due to my personal failure to even passably process stress and instability.
I have grappled with the unnerving feeling that we the unconsenting public have entered the cavernous dialogical suckhole of ‘post-truth’, a reality in which alt-tech internet and Panopticon governments of all stripes leverage the brutal potency of ignorance and misinformation to enable backwards, hate-saturated ideologies that assault the identities and bodies of people that we love.
However, and for better or for worse and certainly beyond this crappy science blog, it has been against this post-truth backdrop that we have begun to have real dialogues about the systems of oppression that persist despite the advances of critical thinking: our racism, our classism, our supremacies, and our colonialism.
Like most, I have needed a lot of time to simply think through all of this. I am still processing how to act best within these systems. I try to contend with the connection between my ego and my role in these conflicts. I work to focus my eye inward and unlearn the scripts that support patriarchy, white supremacy and colonialism, classism, and the other daily, exploitative dynamics that disenfranchise and brutalize people who are not thirty-one year-old white men.
..all of which is a lot for an amateur science blog author to process (especially one who cannot even passably process stress and instability).
Probably rightfully, the agency that I enjoy as a white cishet male science writer who thinks you might be interested in the chemical makeup of raccoons has felt very, very far away.
And, again at the risk of sounding frivolous: I would like to share that it all of this has FUCKED. ME. UP. I just wanted to write about raccoons and baking soda and how exactly skin heals, but now I feel a real and pressing need to focus all of my mental capacity on buttressing ‘capital T’ truth against a self-righteous minority with a death-grip on ignorance, with the lives of my global siblings hanging all the while precariously in the balance, because I feel that without that Truth in hand, open and accessible and on a pedestal for all, we cannot begin the work of redressing the systems that make up our broken world.
Which is A LOT for an amateur science blogger to process.
However.
I know I am not alone in my feelings of paralysis.
And I know that that world desperately needs good voices.
The world needs voices that can speak with empathy and goodwill. It needs voices that can stand up for critical thinking but also thoughtfulness and consideration.
Surely the world needs voices that acknowledge that the people who shot Breonna Taylor six times while she slept in her own bed and ended her life with a mistake. It needs voices that acknowledge that the police officer who knelt his 160 lb bodyweight on George Floyd’s neck for almost eight minutes while George cried for help was responsible for murder.
The world needs womens’ voices. It needs the voices of people of colour. It needs trans voices and differently abled voices and neurodivergent voices. It needs voices from all communities, and all equally.
And, while the world probably don’t need voices for cancelling or the gleeful hunting of opinions for sport, it definitely needs strong, caring voices that are willing to be wrong but also listen and course-correct towards doing even more good.
I want to be one of those voices, even if it’s blasted out from an obsolete science blog. Because even though I’m not great writer, the world always needs more writers, just like it needs more artists and musicians and designers.
The world needs more people working loudly towards good.
And, if you want to join in, I think it’s actually pretty simple:
Please continue.
Please continue to be thoughtful. Please continue to be empathetic and kind and generous with yourself. Once you have that down, please continue being kind and generous with others.
Please continue thinking openly about new ideas and how we can all help each other continue. Please continue crying out for what you value.
Share your vision of beauty. Ship your art. Bring to the fore what you want to see for the world.
Please continue. I have been trying to.
And I have had help. If you need some help trying to continue, please read on:
If you need clear and sane political commentary, I can’t recommend Jamelle Bouie enough. He writes often for the New York Times, and his Instagram is filled with beautiful photos of Charlottesville and tasteful recommendations for men’s sweaters. If you’re glued to social: internet sleuth and academia-buster Science Drama Queen serves plenty of hot tea on the academic Twitter community and is a staunch voice for good in what is often otherwise a terrible environment. For heart help, The Kitten Lady (she also helps pigs).
@Scottloudonofficial on Instagram.
Hannah Gadsby and Tiffany Hadish and Wanda Sykes on Netflix. We’re Here on Netflix.
Our Shared Unsharing by Stella Bugbee, which took only 10 minutes to read but which threw cold water on my face and helped me feel sane.
There’s more. There is always more. I’ll share it here, as it comes, along with updates on raccoons and nuclear fuel rod pools and the rest.
-Stu