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March for Science \u2013 what began on Earth Day a year ago in the US capital Washington DC, soon became a worldwide movement which, now in its second year, has firmly established itself and evolved.
\nIn M\u00fcnster and Cologne, the two participating cities in NRW, about 1,000 people in all turned out to protest. The Cologne March was organised from Aachen, Bonn, D\u00fcsseldorf, Wuppertal und Cologne by a small group of volunteers. “We are twelve people who found each other via Twitter and Facebook \u2013 we didn’t know each other previously,” says the event organiser.<\/p>\n
Ranga Yogeshwar: “Fight fear with facts!”<\/strong> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On Saturday 14th April 2018, more than half a million people in five continents took to the streets […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":11890,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sei-dabei-en"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
\nThe speakers at the rally in Cologne \u2013 including NRW Minister of Science Isabel Pfeiffer-Poensgen, criminologist Mark Benecke and the science slammer Reinhard Remfort \u2013 expressed their deep concerns about the fact that scientists in many countries are being persecuted and suppressed. Further topics of the addresses were the rising scepticism towards science among the general public, the increasing influence of conspiracy theories and the threat to democratic discourse posed by populist oversimplification or straightforward denial of evident facts. The scientific journalist and RWTH alumnus Ranga Yogeshwar made a plea for rationality: “Fight fear with facts!”
\nAnother participant at the demo, Reinhold Ewald \u2013 former astronaut, today professor of astronautics \u2013 talked in an interview with the TV channel WDR about dangerous tendencies, for example in the USA, where President Trump is denying climate change and making political decisions based on his standpoint. “That is really dangerous,” said Ewald.
\nBut, according to the organisers, the same danger is present in Germany, too, where attempts are being made by “anti-democratic forces to discredit solid evidence by presenting mere opinions as having equal validity.”
\nAccording to the organisers, over 1.3 million people around the world took part in the March for Science last year \u2013 in Germany alone more than 37,000.<\/p>\n