Comfort zones vs scientific integrity: "They might say things you don't want to hear"
I was audience to a discussion about a rewilding project. There was a PhD student who wanted to talk to the communities impacted by the project, as a part of her thesis. This PhD student was encouraged with something along the lines of: "...Very brave, they [members of the impacted communities] might say things you don't want to hear."
...I'm sorry...???
there is the low-hanging fruit of: if the communities had been involved earlier, perhaps from the very start of the project, maybe they'd be more favorable to the project. but that's not the focus here.
the big thing here is the idea that the perspectives of impacted communities would be excluded since it is inconvenient for the particular narrative the researcher wants to construct. This is totally something that happens, a lot, and it is normal!!
Ecologists want something marketable and simple in a world of top-down, money-driven initiatives that have to be signed off by some government/bourgeois pencil-pusher who has no connection to the project location at all. true sustainability, which establishes the human and non-human in an ongoing relationship of mutual respect, requires adaptability and context-dependence. It requires catering to the specific, evolving needs of a specific place-community. so, uh, it requires actually taking into account the needs of the communities it impacts.
you're not going to create a sustainable project by evicting, ignoring, and antagonizing the people in the landscape surrounding it, or overlapping with it. You're creating an extractive/colonial thing which is going to create a lot of people opposed to "sustainability", and/or forced to work in harmful industries to make up for what they lost.
Ignoring the experiences of impacted communities is the ecology equivalent of a medicine trial ignoring side effects. This is a study design choice that specifically chooses to avoid taking data from a very relevant source, due to that source's likelihood of not supporting a particular hypothesis. This is a textbook way to publish a paper of very low integrity (and meaningfulness).
Though I suppose the difference is, it's totally normal to ignore the impacted communities!
...
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