Experience Distributed in the Biodiversity Science-Base

Adrian Mackenzie

doi:10.23987/sts.100417

Abstract

Critics of biodiversity science and environmental governance point to exclusion and absence of diverse experience from science-based governance, sometimes effectively dividing domains of science and experience/values. This paper, following an alternate line of thought drawn from John Dewey’s Nature and Experience, analyses a series of scientific publications on biodiversity from 1989-2020. It argues that experience abundantly populates the biodiversity science-base, although in highly distributed forms. Dewey’s account suggests that knowledge of biodiversity derives from an unanalyzed continuum of experience. Reading the publications as traces of occurrences of encounters preceding, accompanying, and sometimes deriving from knowledge, the paper locates and characterises differentiated, sometimes impersonal gradients of experience, developing a figurative model of distributed biodiversity experience. It concludes that experiential diversity occurs widely in the science-base, but communication of and participation in this experience is frequently marginalised by the primacy of knowing.

Highlights

“Listen to the voices of experience” advise the social scientist and museum curator authors of a ‘Comment’ in Nature (Turnhout et al, 2012: 454) responding to the 2012 initial meeting of IPBES, the Intergovernmental Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services IPBES (2019), in Panama
I suggest that the practices of ecologists, conservation biologists, taxonomists, and others is a distributed form of biodiversity experience, a distribution of experiences that invites restoration or re-introduction more generally
Own, past The majority of conservation actions remain We found that many past Applies knowledge gained from The design of powerful interpretive Memories of their wildlife tourism Explores processes through which such Strengthen these dimensions of memorable Wildlife tourism ; Visitor Developed through daily life This article reviews these Strategies build upon valuable local While creating truly transformative Human-modified landscapes

Summary

Introduction

“Listen to the voices of experience” advise the social scientist and museum curator authors of a ‘Comment’ in Nature (Turnhout et al, 2012: 454) responding to the 2012 initial meeting of IPBES, the Intergovernmental Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services IPBES (2019), in Panama. The time-varying proportions of around 16,000 author-supplied unique keywords in the biodiversity science-base show something of the neighbourhoods of biodiversity knowing (Figure 3a).3 In the plot, the standing concern with diversity, species richness (the number of different species in a given location) and taxonomy come as no surprise.

Results

Conclusion