Systemic Discrimination in Science

• Ecology, conservation, and other scientific fields have histories rooted in the oppression of marginalized groups and continue to exhibit modern-day discrimination.
• Dismantling these systems of oppression is seeing renewed interest.
• Reckoning with colonial histories is essential for achieving equity and inclusion in these fields.
• Incorporating different knowledge systems and reflecting on personal biases and privilege are important steps forward.
• Achieving just, diverse, and equitable sciences is necessary to protect the environment and address societal injustices.

Systemic Discrimination in Science

• Scientific institutions have seen increasing dialogue regarding sexism, racism, and other forms of systemic discrimination.
• There is a lack of representation of women, Black, Indigenous and people of color, people living with disabilities, LGBTQ2S folks, and other groups adversely affected by white supremacy and heteropatriarchy
• Conversations about dismantling discrimination in ecology and conservation sciences are often lacking and tend to focus primarily on increasing female representation.
• These conversations typically ignore the long-documented history of the natural sciences' complicity with colonialism and capitalist expansion.

"White Spaces" and Systemic Racism

• Black and Brown individuals face systemic barriers to connecting with the natural world, even outside academia.
• The weaponization of whiteness can be used to exclude people of color from spaces deemed "white spaces".
• "The outdoors" has been historically codified as "white spaces" due to legacies of colonialism.
• Systemic racism and colonial states disenfranchise Black and Indigenous peoples from their relationships within the natural world.
• Actions like taking a walk can be dangerous for Black, Indigenous, and other people of color due to potential interactions with law enforcement and racial profiling.
• The #Strike4BlackLives, #ShutdownSTEM, #BlackBirdersWeek, and other online actions have been used to draw attention to this violence and provide ways forward.
• Academic societies, universities, departments, and environmental organizations released statements that support the Black Lives Matter movement and commitments to dismantling systems of oppression within their institutions.

Contemporary Challenges and the Path Forward

• Understanding systems of oppression is sought after to increase equity and inclusion for students and colleagues.
• Conservationists need to confront their role in maintaining a system that rewards privilege and contains multiple barriers for marginalized communities.
• Developing mechanisms to root out white supremacy and colonial mindsets is essential.

Historical Context and Accountability

• Scientists must confront the association of Western science and Enlightenment movements with colonialism and racism.
• Failure to do so shields scientists from their own implicit assumptions that perpetuate inequity.
• Diversity and inclusion initiatives are insufficient to address the root problem of white supremacy.
• Ecologists and conservationists must expand their understanding based on the history of the discipline and how knowledge is produced to begin the process of rooting out white supremacy from epistemologies and methodologies.
• The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin was produced as a consequence of British imperialistic ambitions.
• Carl Linnaeus laid the groundwork for scientific racism by creating a pseudoscientific taxonomy of human races based on Eurocentric values.
• Pioneering ecologists Charles Darwin, Karl Vogt, and Ernst Haeckel contributed to evolutionary explanations of racial differences.
• This knowledge has been used by white nationalist and ethnocentric movements.
• Contemporary ecologists have a moral duty to speak out about the misapplication and misinterpretation of ecological theory and research.
• Recognition is needed for who benefits from unrecognized labor and how systemic bias is propagated.

Colonialism and Land Use

• Colonial worldviews proliferate within land use and wildlife management (e.g., forestry, fishery management, at-risk species protection).
• Colonial networks of scientific knowledge are of note in the development of professional forestry.
• Using European forestry techniques in colonial South and Southeast Asia were adapted to local ecologies and existing customs for optimum results in the establishment of political forests.
• Political forests acted as centers for resource extraction for colonial governments and enabled the exploitation of local traditional ecological knowledge for the services of empire.
• Ecology became a potent tool for geopolitical control for both colonial and postcolonial governments.
• Colonial networks enacted centuries ago are used to enact sociopolitical and intellectual dominance over many areas under the guises of bioprospecting, conservation, and others.

Intersectionality and Inclusivity

• When discrimination is highlighted in academia, the focus is usually sexism and it is almost always considered without historical context.
• Racism is occasionally mentioned, but classism, ableism, queerphobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and other forms of discrimination are even more rarely acknowledged.
• Actions must be intersectional at their core to fully create an inclusive culture in these fields.
• Intersectionality considers socially constructed traits (e.g., race, gender, sexuality, class, education) that are interconnected and influence each other.
• Affirmative action often disproportionately benefits white women because current interpretations do not take into account intersectionality or critical race theory.
• All different aspects of an individual's identity must be considered to fully understand the historical systems of discrimination in place.
• Considering intersectionality could facilitate objectivity by supporting a polyphony of voices in the field.

Examples of Entrenched Oppression

• Examples published in Nature in 2017, highlight how entrenched oppression is in the life sciences.
• The journal downplayed the horrific crimes committed by J. Marion Sims' to enslaved Black women and overlooked their diminished capacity to consent to experimentation, and thereby reinforced the notion that marginalized people are of lower value in scientific disciplines, and that they are often the ones whose well-being must be sacrificed for scientific progress.
• The journal selected a non-representative group of editors to compile a list of 100 important papers in ecology that young ecologists were encouraged to read and the list was highly skewed towards publications written or lead by White, male authors.
• The problematic content of the articles was only recognized after the papers were published and available for review by a wider audience.
• The biases became more obvious through the significant labor invested in the submitted responses and subsequent discussions but by then the damage had been done.

Addressing Discrimination

• The inability of scientific institutions to recognize these issues early on is the result of ignorance and inertia in place that enable them to continue to do their work uninterrupted while replicating old colonial models of scientific practice as usual both within academia and where fieldwork is conducted.
• Privilege plays into discrimination in scientific disciplines but is not often examined in the life sciences.
• Ecologists and conservationists need to become familiar with anti-oppression language and consider the role language has perpetuating discrimination.
• The use of English as the primary language limits the ability of non-English speakers to communicate information and get credit via publishing and citations.
• There is often a lack of ethics approvals for ecological research involving human participants, including vulnerable communities.
• Words like “tolerance”, “unconscious bias,” and “civilized” uphold white supremacy in implicit ways.
• Anti-oppression training taught by qualified individuals can help researchers address these multiple factors to help work more equitably with local environments and populations in a field site.
• Reflexivity or positionality statements can also help scientists recognize privilege and reflect on individual work needed to be done.
• Incorporating these into job applications, elections for society board positions and other positions of power within the field could help instill a culture of reflection critical to dismantling systems of oppression.

Structural Barriers and Solutions

• Field research is difficult to access for people living with disabilities or those of marginalized socio-economic status.
• Students of lower socio-economic status have less ability to volunteer to gain experience.
• Sexual harassment and racism in fieldwork make fieldwork difficult to continue without appropriate support.
• Universities use student evaluations in tenure and promotion policies, despite evidence showing bias against women and people of color.
• Codes of conduct, diversity committees, and equity initiatives require clear actionable items with set targets and allocated resources.

Tokenizing and Mental Health

• Evidence of discrimination and bias in academia has been well documented, but recognizing and naming bias is not enough to remove it.
• The constant onslaught of examples of discrimination without movement towards solutions may lead to impacts on mental health and additional losses of diverse researchers with high potential.
• Tokenizing can add to the administrative burden or service requirements of marginalized groups and can result in the overall decrease in diversity.

Dismantling Oppression

• Dismantling oppression in conservation requires acknowledgment of complicity and reflection on barriers in place in all current metrics of success.
• Examination is needed on the compositions of research teams, symposia, panel speakers, committees, conference attendees, editorial boards, co-authors, and so forth to determine where representation is lacking.
• Increasing diversity without dismantling the active structures in white supremacy is not a sustainable solution.
• Establishing equity and reducing bias will require a transfer of resources and support to marginalized individuals.
• Voices from equity-seeking groups must be amplified, heard, and properly credited for their ideas and work.
• There must be value placed on different types of contributions, including those of Indigenous knowledge holders.
• One must center voices which are not their own, speak up instead of placing more burden on vulnerable groups and transfer over power and resources.
• We must acknowledge the impact of our actions, sit with the discomfort, apologize, and resolve to do better.
• Robust structural reforms targeting the root of white supremacy in knowledge production practices are necessary.