Scientists should speak up and share their views
Striving for objectivity does not mean researchers cannot take part in policy debates
When I moved from Germany to the Netherlands two years ago, one small detail about my new home country struck me as weird: peat-free potting soil was nearly absent. Frankly, this topic has never been a big part of my life, but ever since a friend told me years ago ‘do not buy peat, it´s awful for the environment’, I’ve followed the instruction. Still, after arriving in my new home country, my curiosity was triggered when I could not find a bag of peat-free soil anywhere. Why would that be so much more difficult than in neighbouring Germany? What I then found out was even weirder: research into peat alternatives is pretty active in the Netherlands, a country that is one of the biggest importers of peat in the world. Yet no one spoke about the issue. The most recent item I could find in the general press was a TV documentary from 2014. Seven years of silence had followed.