Tree Farts, Cancer Cures, and Other CURIOSITIES:
How to Teach Students to avoid spectacle
in public-facing scientific discourse  

While I'm fascinated with science, I'm not sure anyone is more enthusiastic about it than my kids. On a recent Phoenix trip, we had the good fortune to visit the Arizona Science Center, a museum for children designed around hands-on science activities, including an outdoor bubble-making station and an augmented-reality display where my boys could kick around some cute robots. The museum had several informative exhibits, including a live dermis model and a game where children could compete by calming their brain activity. But my children were drawn to a giant walk-in stomach in the center of one of the floors, where kids could crawl around and even slide toward the intestines. Once the children passed through the end of the tube, the stomach let out a satisfyingly loud fart, which predictably caused a ton of laughter among the museum's visitors. My kindergartener was particularly enthralled and asked me to participate—and, not wanting to disappoint my children, I soon found myself traveling down the farty intestine slide. Of course, the stomach walls had displays with more detailed scientific information, but few museum visitors bothered to read them. The main draw, without question, was the farts.

This episode illustrates a key obstacle to scientific communication, which is that it sometimes leans too heavily on spectacle. Rhetorician Dana L. Cloud (2018) defined spectacle as a "special form of rhetorical mediation that involves a striking, often ritualistic, visual or performative display," which reduces "complex messages to dramatic contrasts" (p. 46). As she put it, spectacles "induce awe and the feeling of an encounter with a phenomenon that is larger than life" (pp. 46–47). A spectacle requires an audience whose particular social and material conditions draw them into the text. Not all museum visitors are going to be in awe of farting intestines. Audiences with more refined tastes might feel that farts are just a mundane biological process, while others might be grumpy from walking in the heat before visiting the museum.

Spectacle is a rhetorical craft, one that requires a complex understanding of a text's potential audiences. We are perhaps most familiar with spectacle in the form of the clickbait headlines that dominate scientific discussions on social media. We are constantly learning that a superfood is the cure for cancer, that a psychological trick will strengthen our relationships, or that a cute animal has a set of bizarre behaviors. The hype machine of many scientific organizations is often the main generator of such captivating headlines and produces much of the disinformation circulating through the media (Ritchie, 2020). And, of course, nothing is wrong with writers leaning into the spectacle—as Cloud (2018) argued. It can sometimes be a useful strategy, particularly in how it can push audiences toward a course of action. A person might be motivated to donate money to climate change research after encountering a striking image of environmental devastation. But if the goal is to develop an understanding of the underlying science, relying on spectacle risks grabbing the audience's attention without provoking any deeper reflection.

One way I teach students the dangers of spectacle is through an assignment called "Science in the News," which encourages upper-division STEM students to become more critical of how science is presented in the media. In small groups, students begin by looking for a study currently being discussed in the news, either by doing a Google News search or by searching through reports from a major news publication. Their goal is to find a study that has gathered considerable attention from multiple sources, including partisan blogs, credible news agencies, and popular culture websites—I explicitly encourage them, for example, to discuss the New York Times alongside the Daily Mail. Once they choose a topic, their job is to track down the original study and deliver a short, 10-minute presentation on its representation in the media. While problems sometimes originate with the journalists, students quickly discover that scientists are frequently the source of misunderstandings, perhaps because of a clickbait headline used to frame their research in a press release. Essentially, the project invites students to trace the life of a study as it moves through the news ecosystem and look at what distortions arise during the process.

One memorable student project discussed a study that examined the greenhouse gas emissions produced by ghost forests, which are becoming increasingly common along the coast because of rising sea levels. Researchers discovered that dead trees were indeed a concern, to the extent that they increased carbon dioxide emissions by almost 25% (Martinez & Ardón, 2021). The study doesn't initially seem of much interest to the public, especially considering that it appeared in a specialized journal, involved an arcane topic, and focused on a small sample of North Carolina forests. However, the lead researcher cleverly dubbed the gas emissions as tree farts in the press release, memorably quipping that while "standing trees are not emitting as much as the soils . . . even the smallest fart counts" (Oleniacz, 2021). Predictably, the result was many news outlets picking up stories about tree farts, with journalists rushing to produce the most humorous take in their headlines. Fast Company perhaps achieved the crown, announcing that "polluting tree farts are giving new meaning to greenhouse gas" (Touissaint, 2021). Mission Unstoppable host Miranda Cosgrove deserves an honorary mention in her YouTube video, which she launched with the rhetorical question: "If a tree farts in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?" (Mission, 2022). Later, she paces around one of the set's household plants, sniffing to see if she can locate the aroma, and even includes a graphic of an embarrassed tree letting out a little puff of steam. As my students observed, the problem is the metaphor trivializes climate change, turning the destruction of forests into a question of whether they pass gas.

The endless parade of scientific spectacle produces a false impression of science. As metascientist Stuart Ritchie (2020) put it, "Letting the facts slide in favour of a good story risks a race to the bottom, with science books getting published that are ever more inaccurate and ever more divorced from the data" (p. 156). The "race to the bottom" can cause considerable damage, which is demonstrated well by high-dosage chemotherapy for treating metastatic breast cancer in the late twentieth century. All chemotherapy is brutal, but high-dose chemotherapy was particularly torturous, requiring several rounds of bone marrow extraction and a dosage high enough to require extended hospital visits. Although insurance companies initially refused to cover the treatment, they eventually had no choice after several rounds of litigation backed by women's health organizations and cancer researchers. By the time clinical trials had disproven its effectiveness, an estimated 23,000–40,000 women went through the procedure, needlessly increasing the suffering of many terminally ill patients. While journalists weren't to blame for the crisis, they didn't adequately play their role as watchdogs, mostly turning a blind eye to the lack of evidence and the millions being made by hospitals. Instead, they reported on the human interest story: women with terminal cancer being denied cutting-edge treatments by insurance companies, ignoring the good reasons to be skeptical of the procedure (Rettig et al., 2007).

At best, spectacle might serve as a portal into the science, operating almost like an introduction to more substantive content. Maria E. Gigante (2018) argued that many public-facing scientific images are intended to function as a portal but often end up doing the opposite—they work to mystify science, shrouding a topic in mystery rather than providing a deeper understanding of it. One of her examples is the photograph of the scientist, who is often surrounded by esoteric tools and divorced from everyday experience. To combat the tendency to mystify, I encourage students to view science communication as a pedagogical exercise. Our goal should be to take readers on a journey toward a more complete grasp of a topic. For the public to trust science as an institution—and vaccinate their children, purchase GMO products, and encourage more research funding—they need to be able to see beyond the spectacle.