Anchorage's March for Science draws large crowd of supporters

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Beth Terry holds a sign that says “I like science” at the March for Science on Earth Day, Saturday, April 22, 2017. (Loren Holmes / Alaska Dispatch News)

Rally organizers are usually eager to inflate crowd numbers, but Bryan Box, a planner for the Anchorage rally for the international March for Science, was hesitant when asked how many people turned out to demonstrate Saturday morning.

He estimated 2,000 people attended, "but I haven't been able to do the data analysis yet," Box said. "I'm a scientist. I like being more sure about things."

The march, with its nucleus in Washington, D.C., attracted tens of thousands of people in more than 600 cities around the world, and was billed as a response to observations in the scientific community that the administration of President Donald Trump is hostile to reasoned inquiry.

At least 10 marches were planned throughout the state in Anchorage, Fairbanks, Juneau and other communities.

Accurate crowd counts are notoriously hard to determine, but are crucial to gauging success. Trump got into a dispute with the National Park Service when the federal agency released photos showing his inaugural crowds were noticeably smaller than those of former President Barack Obama's first inauguration.

[Photos: March for Science winds through downtown Anchorage]

Box said national organizers used a program and drone to measure the size of the crowd on downtown's Delaney Park Strip.

Later in the day, another organizer wrote back to say a preliminary manual count using drone photos showed 1,535 people, with a margin of error of, plus or minus, 50 people. A final tally won't be available until Sunday or Monday.

Whether the crowd-counting system used at the March for Science is reliable enough for use at future presidential inaugurations is unknown.

Scientists are not renowned for demonstrating, but several actions taken by Trump have troubled them.

Among them: the appointment of Scott Pruitt, a climate-change denier, to head the Environmental Protection Agency; the possible withdrawal of the United States from the Paris climate agreement; and the prospect of budget cuts to federally funded scientific programs.

Scientists often have trouble translating the specialized language of their professions into words and ideas that make sense to the general public, but they seem to have wit to spare based on protest signs at the Anchorage march.

"This is a sine of protest." (alongside a picture of a sine wave)

"Think like a proton and stay positive."

"Let us now pause for a moment of science."

A particularly clever sign used the ideal gas law, an equation that uses pressure, volume, the amount of gas and temperature to describe the behavior of a gas.

"PV = nRT The average global temperature is rising; so must our volume. (Pun on the word "volume.")

Sioned Sitkiewicz, a fisheries biologist and graduate student at Alaska Pacific University, opted for messaging that could be understood by any nonscientist.

Hers read: "Ignorance Blows." And featured a drawing of a spouting whale.

Sitkiewicz wore a tutu she had made out of the inflated latex gloves she wears while sorting through fish carcasses to harvest their hearts for parasite sampling. She also sported earrings shaped like double helices.

"I think it's important to show collectively that many people stand for science," she said. "Fisheries policy relies on evidence-based science to figure out catch limits."

Other marchers held signs touting the contributions of science: the internet, polio vaccine, cellphones, life.

Chris Little stood with his 7-month-old daughter on his back and a sign attached to her carrier that read, "I am alive because of science."

She was a breach baby, born by cesarean section, explained her mother, Sarah Allan.

"Were it not for the science behind those medical procedures, neither she nor I would be alive," Allan said.

Many at the rally were protesting the politicization of science, including Democratic former Alaska Gov. Tony Knowles, who addressed the rally and partially quoted celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, also director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City.

"Politics is not a foundation on which you base your science," Knowles told the crowd. "Science is a foundation on which you base your politics."