We focus on several topics across ecology, evolution, and the environment to elaborate how colonial legacies are perpetuated, including incidences of racism and sexism, and in so doing, demonstrate why contextualising what we teach in these topics are necessary.
Agricultural science
Food is essential not just for bodily nourishment, but in many societies across the world, is a central element of their culture and heritage. Agricultural science has brought amazing innovation, but suffers when researchers fail to consider the needs and desires of the communities they seek to benefit. The requirements, desires and knowledge of stakeholders can become an afterthought in research pipelines driven by funding incentives and ‘impact’ requirements. Furthermore, by making assumptions based on our own Western perspectives and prioritising academic over local forms of knowledge, we are missing out on innovations that we are unable to reach from within the academic space.
Key examples:
Exploitation of genetic resources – until recently, western researchers could often collect and use local species as genetic resources for crop improvement. It was only in 2004 that the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture came into force to prevent this form of modern colonialism.
GMOs and reductionist approaches – using technologies like GMOs to fix complex societal issues relating to food can be overly simplistic and divisive. Particularly while such technologies are banned in Europe. Ironically discussions of these complex issues are often dominated, not by local voices, but by western anti-GMO campaigners imposing their own ideological views of the “right” way to grow food on farmers in the developing world.
Trends and one-size-fits-all agriculture – there is a strong movement in agricultural science to address the harmful outcomes of industrial farming practices, and a current trend toward ‘holistic’ approaches to these problems, such as agroecology. These approaches are promoted not only in Europe, but in countries still in the early stages of agricultural industrialisation. In many developing countries where their benefits are being extolled, these are practices that have already been used for generations, thus reinventing them fails to fix the problem. In addition, practices which work in northern temperate zones often fail when exported to the tropics for biological and socioeconomic reasons. Enthusiasm for such anti-industrial approaches are, in part, driven by political ideology, as much as by science, and can entail subtle forms of “colonial thinking” about how global south countries should develop. Embedding true collaboration into applied science from its inception has myriad benefits: gaining alternative perspectives on need, diversifying our knowledge by integrating non academic knowledge, and improving the relationship between scientists and stakeholders.
Colonial narratives continue to play important roles in shaping ecological systems (Dominguez and Luoma, 2020). For example, the designation of protected areas around the world (mostly in former colonies) perpetuates the concept of ‘wilderness’, shaping lands and how they are used in the Global South. In creating these protected areas, people have been forcibly displaced from their homelands, even up to this day. In 1872, the creation of the Yellowstone National Park in the USA dispossessed 26 Native American tribes of their ancestral homelands, but even as recently as 2017, Adivasis were forced to leave their ancestral territories for the creation of the Achanakmar Tiger Reserve, India.
The concepts of ‘wilderness’ and ‘wasteland’ created by Western colonialists originally implied land unsuited for civilised humans where (uncivilised) Indigenous peoples lived. This later shifted to represent areas untouched by human activity, disregarding the presence of Indigneous peoples. These ideas were reinforced by notions of unproductive lands needing to be improved and made productive (i.e. turning a profit for colonisers), and legitimised dispossession of Indigenous communities and colonisation. The continued use of the ‘wilderness’ concept negates the existence and contributions of Indigenous communities, and perpetuates notions of Western superiority and supremacy of science by reinforcing Western ways of seeing and knowing the world (Fletcher et al., 2021).
Furthermore, misclassification of biomes by colonisers has resulted in the mismanagement of ecosystems. Through this mechanism, the legacy of colonisation remains with us today. For example, in India, tropical grasslands are classified as degraded ecosystems, while woody savannas are misclassified as dry deciduous forests (Ratnam et al., 2011). This misclassification legitimises tree planting in ancient grasslands and fire suppression in savannas.
The history of evolutionary biology and genetics is entwined with European imperialism, racism, and white supremacy. Many prominent evolutionary biologists and geneticists who helped establish the field were racists and eugenists, including JBS Haldane, Francis Galton, James Watson and many more. Their theories served as justification for slavery and genocide, and are a painful lesson in how science is used to perpetuate oppression.
The curriculum we teach must confront these issues and acknowledge how colonialism has shaped the field of evolutionary biology and how evolutionary biologists think today. We recommend paying particular attention to the following areas:
History of population genetics and eugenics
Human genetics and race
Sex versus gender
Sociobiology and naturalising racism
It is important to frame global environmental problems in the context of climate justice, since people on Earth are not all equally culpable for ‘key environmental challenges’. Western powers have taken an unequal share of the carbon budget and resource extraction, and still own the majority of global extractive companies (petroleum corporations, cement, mining etc). Conversely, the impacts of climate change are felt most keenly in the Global South, such that those most badly affected did not cause the problems they experience.
Colonisation also played a central role at the beginning of the Anthropocene, since it enabled European imperial powers to exploit natural resources and people in the Global South (Davis & Todd, 2017). The wealth acquired was an important underpinning for the Industrial Revolution. This power imbalance is perpetuated today through globalised companies, economies and trade networks, which enable natural resources to be acquired from the Global South in order to supply consumption in the Global North.
This issue of justice comes to the fore in the neocolonial forest and landscape restoration agenda (Davis and Robbins, 2018). Here, sustainable development in the Global South is used as a mechanism to address “global problems” (especially climate change) for which the Global North is largely culpable (Banerjee, 2003). While deforested landscapes are normalised across Europe and North America, Western economies fund tree planting schemes across the Global South, under the term "carbon offsetting".
Science is not objective and apolitical. It is produced within society by individuals who are influenced by contemporary culture, society and politics. We should be upfront about these issues in our teaching and research. What's more we must avoid perpetuating the idea that individual ‘idols’ or ‘geniuses’ are solely responsible for major scientific advances, which typically serves to purge science history of the already limited diversity of minds who have shaped it . There are several ways we can begin to do this:
Value diversity in epistemology (ways of knowing), by realising that science stems from a Western positivist perspective which is just one of many equally valid ways of understanding the world and addressing contemporary problems.
Highlight the importance of social sciences for understanding the wider social, political, and cultural implications of biological science research.
Recognise the problematic aspects of history within our own fields. Many highly celebrated scientific figures held racist views (e.g. Fisher, Hardin, Watson, Malthus, Linnaeus, Fossey; see also below) which influenced the type of research they carried out and how they interpreted their data.
Acknowledge that science is not truly objective and that we cannot help but bring our societal influences, opinions and perspectives into our work. Upholding the comfortable myth of true objectivity in science prevents us from working to mitigate our own biases and question those of others.
Many museums have legacies rooted in colonialism. Their collections are largely the result of usually wealthy Western explorers going to colonised places and acquiring knowledge and specimens. When we use museum collections in our research, we benefit from their colonial past. Part of our work must therefore be to confront and explore the complex histories of the collections we use and acknowledge the colonial narratives underpinning them when we disseminate our research.
In the current day, the tendency for Western scientists to describe ‘newly discovered’ species, which have in fact been known to and used by Indigenous peoples for generations, amounts to misappropriation of knowledge (without credit). Species are typically named using European language, sometimes after the Western researchers who reported them (or other people who the researchers admire) (DuBay et al., preprint). Some (bioprospectors, pharmaceutical companies) even commodify and patent these species/knowledges with little benefit to the local community (known as biopiracy). These actions are a form of modern-day colonialism and should be critically reflected upon by the academic community.