Late last year, I published (in collaboration with colleagues from RMIT and The University of Melbourne) an article in Conservation Letters, which we hope will open up a little more space for conservation scientists and ecologists to engage in public debates without the fear of being labelled an advocate and, by association, having their scientific credibility questioned.
We were motivated to write the paper by what we considered to be a general reluctance by conservation scientists to join public debates about conservation issues and policy. Without the voices of scientists, public conversations about conservation are dominated by vested interest groups – business and industry on the one hand, and NGOs and lobby groups on the other. As a result, public debate about these important issues is impoverished.
However, we believe that the reasons conservation scientists choose not to engage are in large part based on misconceptions about the relationship between scientific integrity and objectivity. In our paper, we set out to unpack this relationship a little bit. Our key point is that values have a role and a place in science. It is not possible nor advisable for an individual scientist to be value-free.
But thankfully, objectivity isn’t maintained by individuals. It is an emergent property of a collective. And greater diversity in the scientific community helps to ensure scrutiny and self-correction. So, in other words, objectivity is maintained by the whole community of scientists, not individual scientists or established statistical thresholds.
Once you accept this, many of the common arguments against advocacy by scientists (ie. that advocacy will damage your credibility, or that advocacy is outside the scope of science) simply don’t make sense.
Of course, it is not the case that ‘anything goes’ when it comes to advocacy by scientists. There are some value judgements (eg. what is a tolerable level of extinction risk?) that can and should be disentangled from judgements that are more factual in nature (eg. what is the probability of extinction?). And scientists should aim to avoid inadvertent advocacy (which occurs when a scientist presents personal preference as a scientific judgement) or advocacy by stealth (in which values are deliberately dressed up as facts).
Drawing on precedents in medicine and the social sciences, we provide some guidance for scientists and science in general for responsible advocacy in order to reclaim some space for scientists to engage in informed public debate about conservation issues, in a way that does not deny their value-system.
I will be presenting this work at the North American Congress for Conservation Biology next week in Madison, Wisconsin (Tuesday, 19th July, 8AM, Hall of Ideas Room E), please come along if you’re going to the conference.
Georgia Garrard 