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| View of the St Elias Mountains from the Kluane Red Squirrel Project field site. Image: Jack Robertson |
From Rapid Ecology, a science community blog
by Matt Sehrsweeney, a 2017 University of Michigan alumnus (ecology and history) and Jack Robertson, an MSc candidate at University of Guelph
Though we generally fail to acknowledge it, ecological research has extractive tendencies. You might be familiar with the term “parachute researcher1,” used to describe the scientist that drops out of their ivory tower into their field site—often in a less developed region of the world—extracts data, and zips back to their institution to analyze and communicate their results to their fellow academics, without engaging the people living in the region in any meaningful way. This paradigm is far more widespread than most of us would like to admit, and it’s a paradigm that needs to be challenged.
Traditional ecological knowledge, with its own rigorous systems of discerning truths, should be more deeply integrated into academic ecological research, and the community based participatory research model is useful toward this end2,3,4. But this is not what I wish to (or am qualified to) discuss here. As ecologists, we have a moral obligation to cultivate generative and mutually respectful relationships with the often rural and isolated communities residing on the land we study. This is particularly true in the context of settler scientists working on Indigenous lands: meaningful engagement with the communities around our field sites is imperative if we seek to decolonize our research practices, independent of the benefits traditional ecological knowledge can provide us.
For two summers I worked for Ben Dantzer at the University of Michigan as a technician at the Kluane Red Squirrel Project (KRSP), a nearly three-decade long study of North American red squirrels in the boreal forest of the Yukon. I joined the project curious about both the ecological work and also how the field site figured in the context of northern life, a land with a deep Indigenous history, and a shorter—but consequential—history of white colonization and exploitation.