Credit: Keren Cooper
Knowledge systems outside of those sanctioned by Western universities have often been marginalised or simply not engaged with in many science disciplines, but there are multiple examples where Western scientists have claimed discoveries for knowledge that resident experts already knew and shared. This demonstrates not a lack of knowledge itself but rather that, for many scientists raised in Western society, little education concerning histories of systemic oppression has been by design. Western scientific knowledge has also been used to justify social and environmental control, including dispossessing colonised people of their land and ways of life and discounting existing knowledge systems.
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Ecology, the field of biology devoted to the study of organisms and their natural environments, needs to account for the historical legacy of colonialism that has shaped people and the natural world, researchers argued in a new perspective in the journal
Nature Ecology & Evolution.
To make ecology more inclusive of the world s diverse people and cultures living in diverse ecosystems, researchers from University of Cape Town, North West University in South Africa and North Carolina State University proposed five strategies to untangle the impacts of colonialism on research and thinking in the field today. There are significant biases in our understanding of ecology and ecosystems because of this colonial framework of thinking, said perspective co-author Madhusudan Katti, associate professor for leadership in public science, and forestry and environmental resources at NC State. We are challenging ecologists to understand and address the legacies of colonialism, and to