Science based conservation

Science-based wildlife management in the 1970’s was legitimized under the argument that such positivist Science was the only reliable source of knowledge- as well as the only rational base for managing hunting. Polar bear management in the Canadian Arctic was no exception to this (see Fisheries, 1966). ‘Scientific management’- coined as a term by Brunner and Lynch in 2010 refers to a processes of a top-down management paradigm, rooted in western modernization thinking that relies on administratively rational policies - in turn supported by predictive science (Brunner & Lynch, 2017). It’s an expert driven, hierarchical and bureaucratic doctrine that ends up re-producing the continued need for its own structures and knowledge systems, while potentially undermining Indigenous knowledge and governance systems (see also Clark et al., 2008). Indeed, scientists committed to the conservation of wildlife in the 1960s were so convinced of the authority of their science as objective and superior to other modes of knowing, that they were blinded to the assimilationist- (Kulchyski and Tester 2007), modernization- (Worster, 1994 ; Loo, 2006) and neo-colonialist ideologies (Campbell, 2004) that tainted their policy recommendations. The sense of urgency leading to signing the 1973 international agreement on the conservation of polar bears, was for example based on worries about presumed overhunting of polar bears by Inuit reported in the 1960s (Schweinsburg 1981 in Stirling, 1986), and the lack of overall knowledge on polar bear population dynamics which made it impossible for nation-states to manage harvesting in a way that would ensure ‘intelligent conservation of the resource’ (Fisheries, 1966 p.7). This historical narrative entails multiple cultural notions about conservation and research, that are overlooked when ‘’scientific data’’ as phrased in the 1973 agreement is considered to be a stretchable concept. Relevant here are the notions that the intervention of management-oriented research is ‘necessary’ for the species to survive (Jonkel, 1970), and the notion that ‘’intelligent’’ conservation requires representative data, in turn legitimizing the methodological approaches wildlife biologists took, like tranquilizing polar bears, to provide such ‘direct access to nature’ (Schreiber, 2013 p.159). This claim to nature; a ‘’truthful’’ account of population numbers, distribution, movement, and evolutionary history of polar bears, of course, presupposed the position of the transcendent researcher as an objective and rational observer. This positioning played, and continues to play, an important part in the coloniality of western sciences, when it comes to the self-legitimization of western-sciences within polar bear co-management and monitoring (See for example Vongraven et al., 2018).

Even if the positivist notions of absolute truth has nowadays in the western natural sciences mostly been replaced by post-positivism, it has retained the exceptionalist positioning of the human -as an outside observer rather than as part of nature. Under post-positivist realism the material world can, in theory, be fully knowable by humans through accurate scientific observation, measurement and prediction. The existence of an underlying objectively knowable material reality is not questioned in such a post-positivist research paradigm, it’s rather the accuracy of the scientific apparatus that is susceptible to subjective scrutiny. In other words the legitimacy of research within post-positivist disciplines like the natural sciences is determined by how accurately the particular choice and application of scientific methods can be deemed to capture and represent the underlying, material reality of the object under inquiry (Creswell, 2014). Within such a paradigm ‘data’ becomes the widely accepted epistemological unit through which material reality can be reduced to quantifiable bits of information that can be interpreted, described, and represented outside of the context in which it was collected.

Such reductionism stands in stark contrast with many Indigenous cosmologies who consider ‘knowing’ to be entangled with ‘doing’ and as an event that’s inseparable from the complex relations in which the knowledge was produced. Such cosmologies are, due to their lack of subject/object separation, what make Indigenous research paradigms non-representative. Non-representative sciences, which include, but are not limited to Indigenous sciences, are ways of knowing that do not provide for the transcendent perspectives of an external observer- and are therefore resistant to the reductionism of ‘data’, or the urge to claim insights beyond its particular relational context (Ostern et al., 2021). This difference is crucial. When these differences are not taken into account, they can lead to liberal interpretations of ‘data’ as an epistemologically neutral-, and categorically-inclusive term, that can be stretched to fit multiple knowledge systems. Where it, in fact, materializes critically as an ontologically exclusive category that requires the strict separation between man and nature. A separation which generally does not exist in non-representative Indigenous cosmologies.