The need for action, ethics and values in ecology: Examples from food systems and conservation

Background/Question/Methods

Conservation biology has been famously identified as a “mission driven” “crisis discipline”. Many ecologists openly acknowledge the fundamental importance they place on conservation of biodiversity, mitigation of climate change, and generation of sustainable human systems. Simultaneously, many of us appear to place ourselves in the category of practicing “value-neutral” or “objective” science. Yet, paraphrasing Herman Daly, true objectivity would mean having no preferences between justice and injustice, the interesting and the mundane, truth and falsehood, or indeed, life and death, diversity and monotony, or sustainability and unsustainability. Insofar as ecologists avoid explicit discussions of values, we ignore decades of research in anthropology, science and technology studies, political science and sociology that call into question the possibility, desirability, and efficacy of “objective science”. Arguably, we have benefitted from the fact that our common underlying values are so uncontroversial as to fade noiselessly into the ether.

Results/Conclusions

In the face of current crises, perceived conflicts between ecological sustainability and human welfare have taken center stage, especially around food and agriculture. The idea that conservation biology is uncontroversial may appear frivolous in view of the hotly contested debates around protected areas, land-use and food production, but this risks a misunderstanding: such debates are not about whether or not conservation or sustainability are important. Empirically, polities consistently show high levels of support for addressing each of these problems. Rather, debates pivot around possible trade-offs between ecological priorities and immediate and long-term human welfare (e.g., jobs, land claims, food security). Ecologists have sought to quantify these trade-offs, often in dollar terms, in the hope that more concrete, objective science will help resolve policy impasses. Yet democracy is inevitably and properly based on reconciling values, and trade-offs between different values are often not well-expressed in dollars.

Resolution of these quandaries and the implementation of effective policy depends on effective democratic processes where costs and benefits are measured on multiple axes. This requires increased civic conversation—dialogue between fields and between scientists and citizens, with scientists also acting as citizens. Political science has conclusively refuted a “linear policy process” where “good science in” leads to “good policy out”, but research around the possibilities of civic dialogue and engaged governance points out a wealth of other possibilities. In this presentation, I will illustrate these concepts using examples from my own research on food sovereignty and conservation.