In contrast, Western ecological sciences - when not explicitly about conservation - tend to embrace the "value-neutral" ideal. Even when scientists publicly engage for the protection of severely threatened ecosystems, they still mainly see their political engagement and their research practice as two separate things. As a result, few ecologists acknowledge the role of social values in how they do research. Hence, it is often on researchers from marginalized groups or non-Western countries to show how legitimate or problematic this role might be. This session contributes to this effort from three diverse positions and perspectives, with varying relations to conservation and ecological sciences.
Many people have been critical of the concept of 'ecosystem health'. Others have uncritically adopted it. Here I present a view of ecosystem health which neither reduces it to human preferences (making it purely evaluative) nor reduces it to facts about an ecosystem. I argue that ecosystem health can be understood as relative to a set of organisms – including humans – and the ways in which the ecosystem is valuable for them. As a result, there are multiple ways an ecosystem can be healthy, depending on the organisms and relations being considered. I suggest this kind of indexing of concepts to a specific organism or group of organisms is common in ecology, including for concepts which are less obviously evaluative than 'health', and that this organism-relativity improves, rather than undermines, the reliability and usefulness of such concepts (and the practices related to them).
The discipline of conservation biology, from the time of its founding, has been explicitly value-laden, mission-driven and guided by a set of normative postulates (e.g., “biodiversity is good”, “ecological complexity is good”, “evolution is good” [Soulé, M. E. (1985) BioScience, 35(11), 727-734]). At the same time, conservation biologists, while accepting that the goals of conservation biology are value-laden, tend to believe that their research in service of these goals is value-free [Baumgaertner, B., & Holthuijzen, W. (2017) Conservation Biology, 31(1), 48-55; Bocchi, F. (2024) Synthese, 203(5), 145; Stuart, D., & Rizzolo, J. B. (2019) Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 32, 219-238]. In my talk, I will argue that conservation biologists’ non-epistemic values influence the scientific knowledge they create, which in turn could impact conservation outcomes. While it has been argued that that non-epistemic values shape all steps of the research process, from the choice of research questions, through the employment of methods, as well as the evaluation and interpretation of scientific hypotheses, only the latter is believed to be epistemically significant and has therefore attracted significant attention from philosophers [Elliott, K. C., & McKaughan, D. J. (2009) Philosophy of Science, 76(5), 598-611]. Here, drawing upon an oral history of conservation biology in India, I will first show that what conservation biologists choose to study, in relation to a conservation problem, is influenced by their non-epistemic values. I will then argue that this selective focus precludes the creation of scientific knowledge that runs counter to the scientists’ pre-existing values. Finally, based on what we know about the sociology of conservation biology of India, I will discuss how non-epistemic values, through research topic choices, can have epistemic consequences beyond the scientists’ individual research programmes and influence conservation outcomes.