A reader sent me this announcement of a talk given at Cornell University by a scientist from the California Academy of Science. I reproduce the announcement in full, complete with italicization and bolding, though I’ve removed Zoom links and email addresses. (I can’t find the talk online, though she does have a short talk on “Ecology as a Locus for Social Change.) I won’t belabor it at length, as I find its content simply flabbergasting, but I want to point out five things:
- It is “critical ecology” in that it infuses real science (ecology) with “critical theory”, itself containing a big dollop of postmodernism.
- It is written in the obscurantist style of postmodernism fused with modern wokeist strains (e.g., use of preferred pronouns)
- It is tendentious: there is no way that this style of science can be objective. Its aim, as suggested below, is simply to confirm preconceptions of the writer and to push her ideology into ecology. Note especially this sentence: “Pierre aims to offer systemically oppressed populations a praxis for redress beyond environmental justice.” This is social engineering, not science.
- This is also an example of the invasion of wokeism into science, as instantiated by Steve Pinker’s recent statement on climate change in the journal Science. But at least the Science stuff, however wrongheaded, was explicitly about policy. Here we have what purports to be a form of science that involves hypothesis testing, but the answers must only come out in a preferred direction.
- Note the criticism of “objectivity,” as in this sentence: “critical ecology also provides a space to address the tension present in defining what is ‘objective’, a practice that has neglected the phenomena experienced by racialized communities.” Note that “objective” is in scare quotes, and is opposed to the lived experience of those in racialized communities. It is this redefinition of “objectivity” as “the master’s (e.g. white supremacist’s) tools” that poses the biggest danger of science. Science then merely becomes a matter of one’s preferred opinion or “lived experience”: things not checkable by scientific methods.
The entire announcement is indented.
Critical ecology provides a framework for integrating social critiques of imperialism, enslavement, and modern racial capitalism into the quantitative analysis of human oppression as a process organizing the biophysical drivers of global environmental change.
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The Research Fellows group at Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability will host Dr. Suzanne Pierre of the Critical Ecology Lab for a visiting lecture at 4:00 pm on May 5th in Weill Hall 226. We hope you will attend; feel free to forward this invitation to colleagues.
Guest Lecture by Dr. Suzanne Pierre, California Academy of Sciences
Location: Weill Hall 226
Date: May 5
Time: 4:00-5:00 pm
[JAC: Zoom and email address redacted]
Critical Ecology: Testing Hypotheses in Service of Liberation
Dr. Suzanne Pierre (she; Cornell Ecology and Evolutionary Biology ’18), will introduce critical ecology as an emerging approach to global environmental change research. Pierre’s work in critical ecology provides a framework for integrating social critiques of imperialism, enslavement, and modern racial capitalism into the quantitative analysis of human oppression as a process organizing the biophysical drivers of global environmental change. Pierre’s goal is to couple theory from decolonial studies, Black feminist studies, and other schools of liberatory thought to inform testable ecological hypotheses. Her work aims to document patterns in relationships between societal oppression/extraction and resultant ecosystem perturbations, currently focusing on her expertise in soil microbial ecology and forest biogeochemistry.
As Audre Lorde said, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”. In keeping with this wisdom, critical ecology also provides a space to address the tension present in defining what is “objective”, a practice that has neglected the phenomena experienced by racialized communities. Through the practice of theory and basic research, Pierre aims to offer systemically oppressed populations a praxis for redress beyond environmental justice. Pierre will also introduce her nonprofit research organization, the Critical Ecology Lab, as a locus for reflexive critique, methods development, and liberation work by interdisciplinary scientists and students.
Dr. Suzanne Pierre is the founder and lead investigator of the Critical Ecology Lab, where transdisciplinary scholars seek to reframe the objectives and methods of academic research in support of equity and decolonial futures. The Critical Ecology Lab is a space to investigate and explain how the natural world, from soils to atmosphere, has been shaped by racial and cultural supremacy, natural resource exploitation, and social exclusion. Before building the CEL community, Dr. Pierre completed her doctoral research in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology here at Cornell University. Her experience within traditional academic structures encouraged her to act for greater inclusiveness in academic research spaces, so she co-founded and organized the first Diversity Preview Weekend. The impact of Dr. Pierre’s research and organizing is felt across Cornell today, and we are honored to host her as she continues to lead through intellectual contributions and direct action.
I’ll leave it to readers to tender comments.
Note also the phrase “racialized” communities, where “racialized” is a done-to-them word (cf “marginalized”). This comes from the idea that race is merely a social construction, the invention of white Europeans, who assigned “race” to non-whites as a weapon of “white supremacy”.
Before those bad, bad, wicked white Europeans came along, no-one had any conception of race and everyone lived in blissful harmony. There was no rape, no murder, no warfare, no private property, everyone just shared and helped each other. And if anyone, such as Napoleon Chagnon, says any different, then they must be denounced as a heretic and expelled from decent society.
Yes. The fad with using passive-verbs turned adjectives is by design and feeds into the so-called victimhood of identity groups and the intersectional grievance hierarchy. I will never use it personally.
Yes, “critical” is one of those adjectives, like revolutionary, that detracts from its object. One would think that any serious intellectual activity had critical built in, so clearly when they say this here, they mean something else.
‘Critical tasseography’ as a method for transdisciplinary scholars seeking to reframe the objectives and methods of academic research.
Sound so much more worthy than reading tea leaves.
I have no “tender” comments. Just outright disgust at this sort of thinking. It’s almost as if somewhere there was a decision made that we never got a chance to vote on. I’d love to know what makes academics like Dr. Pierre choose this path. Does she really think she’s doing her part to cure racism? Or is it simply her gravitating toward a discipline that will employ her?
It’s evolution in action. All the academic niches are already filled so you must find (or create) a new niche if you wish to flourish. One day the opportunities of the ‘Critical’ niche will be exhausted and a new niche will be found.
It is really hard to get a postdoc job in ecosystem ecology. Recent PhDs with 7 or 8 articles (and lots of other qualifications) have a hard time getting a postdoc. So how does this person get a UC Berkley President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship (worth almost $100k) in 2018 with only 2 published articles on the CV and no other obvious accomplishments after 5 years in the Cornell PhD program? I don’t wish this person ill, and I know that our host favors some affirmative action, but someone else (possibly some other Black person) with a lot more ability and potential is missing out on a great postdoc career so that this person can posture about oppression and marginalization.
Intersectionality, Mike. It drives everything in Canada, too. Even private businesses that hope to get their projects approved by regulators have to talk about the intersectionality of oppression in the DEI sections of their applications.
Random association : I saw John Oliver (Last Week Tonight) has a piece titled “Environmental Racism”. I haven’t watched it. Maybe it is related – I’ll have to find out later.
Mark’s comment below (#10) is what Oliver is talking about in that show- w/o the post-modern jargon. It’s not at all novel or eye-opening, but he did have a couple interesting examples; how the routes of some pipelines are decided, for example.
The John Oliver piece you refer to is most likely this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EICp1vGlh_U
and he does a pretty good job of explaining what CRT is all about, especially as it relates to school curricula.
She seems to have as many as four peer-reviewed publications, three of which have some connection to her avowed speciality of soil science: https://www.suzannepierre.com/peer-reviewed-papers.html
Maybe she finds that soil science doesn’t afford sufficient opportunity to showcase her preferred version of the English language. Most of the stuff highlighted above is certainly a good candidate for Private Eye’s ‘Pseuds Corner’.
“The Critical Ecology Lab is a space to investigate and explain how the natural world, from soils to atmosphere, has been shaped by racial and cultural supremacy, natural resource exploitation, and social exclusion” – WTAF?! This is science?
The effects of natural-resource exploitation on soils-to-atmosphere ecosystems are certainly worth studying. The rest seems quite a stretch.
Well, we already have Critical Biology, which is not only transdisciplinary but transgender and will soon be transspecies. An earlier screed in this genre—a Sci Am article on how white supremacy had always been embedded in the science of Human Genetics—called explicitly for reform of the subject with notions from Critical Gender Studies, Critical Race Theory, and so on. This new example of decolonialized liberatory thought sure puts Titania McGrath out of a job.
Two can play at this game.
Reproducibility is the people’s tool, for it puts the power of the master in every hand.
There. SVck it, postmodernists. 🙂
Informing hypotheses is fine by me. As I’ve said before, hypothesis development is the wild west of science; you can get’em from any source you want. Dreams, indigestion, sitting in the bathtub… those sorts of stories are all aprocryphal, but they are told by scientists to young scientists to make a point: it doesn’t matter where or how you come up with your hypothesis. Just that after you do, you test it right.
So if she wants to develop new hypotheses by drawing on Black feminist studies, etc., I say have at it. The key between whether she does good science or bad science will be how she tests it. If a Black feminist study inspired hypothesis is supported by the data, keep working it. See what else you can learn using it. But if it is not supported by the data, reject it.
“The key between whether she does good science or bad science will be how she tests it.”
But that’s just the thing, now isn’t it? As we’ve seen time and again, moral posturing will rapidly ratchet any form of madness, now matter how disconnected from empirical truth, into the mainstream. All it needs is to fit the woke narrative, and that’s proof enough.
Word salad masquerading as science—or is it “science?”
Exactly, ‘wordsalad’ is the operative term.
You were ahead of me.
Puts me in mind of Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s “Brain Salad Surgery”: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RAAJpar4EB8
If the obscurantist jargon could be filtered out, what is left is phenomenon that does exist, although it is confusing to think of it as an area of ecology. Natural resources (and the ecosystems that hold them) are most definitely utilized according to differences in power and privilege. Valuable land that returns economic wealth to its owners tend to go to those who already have wealth, while less valuable land (and land that receives the most pollution) goes to those who have less wealth. Meanwhile differences in wealth most definitely fall into racialized patterns.
Sure but doesn’t that amount to the simple, and obvious, set of observations that (a) people that have money also have power, (b) those with money also have an easier time making more money, (c) money is not spread evenly across races, and (d) the white race has the most money. Is Critical Ecology just the study of how that plays out in the field of Ecology? Are the issues they study the result of racism or the cause? My guess is the latter.
The title of Dr. Pierre’s talk, “Ecology As a Locus for Social Change”, is just too meta to really tell us anything. I would not think of ecology as a locus for social change. I suspect that’s true for others. My guess is that she only wants to talk about social change rather than do much to actually change anything. I’ll grant she probably would like to be an agent for social change but just doesn’t really have anything substantial to contribute. Her concluding big point is that how scientists look (white) and act (white) doesn’t provide the right kind of role model for POC entering the field. Ok but how many times does this chicken-and-egg situation need to be observed?
Close the ecological circle. Land allowed to be occupied by non-productive and dangerous people not all impoverished—predators can thrive—declines in value and attracts only poor people.
I just checked out the Critical Ecology Lab website. It’s Woke Buzzword Bingo.
When was this lab built (or assigned room in existing facilities), and who signed off on it’s budget line?
How did that film put it? “Follow the money!”
It’s not a lab. It’s a Lab. A safe space for critical thinking about the hegemony of heteronormative colonialist patriarchy in ecology, where they center gender queer viewpoints and lift up diverse voices. Currently the Lab is just a spot on the couch in xyr living room. But after xe gets a faculty job, the Lab will become a Center, and with enough Ford Foundation money the Center will eventually move off campus to become an Institute.
“A safe space for critical thinking about the hegemony of heteronormative colonialist patriarchy in ecology, where they center gender queer viewpoints and lift up diverse voices”. Wow…you’re good at that. I assume you’ve had practice.
The language used by these folks seems like they want to sound the way that they imagine educated people speak and write, but while having never actually been around such people.
That in addition to their whole field being essentially valueless.
There is a potentially useful article on the historical development of critical race theory in the American Philosophical Assoc Journal (but one can substitute anything for “race” and apply the story given on differences between analytic philosophy and post modern or continental methodologies). The scientific investigative processes born in the enlightenment are indeed rejected. So critical ecology may be more comfortable in a dept of religion or philosophy…as i read this article with a high density of jargon that i tried to tease out definitions for. Url is. https://blog.apaonline.org/2019/08/20/philosophical-methodologies-of-critical-race-theory/?amp
Hmmmm…..we may see many new disciplines like this.
In essence, discipline that attempt to do a run-around science which requires rigor. Put differently, it’s the new version of creationism.
“Cis-hetero-white supremacy, colonialism, and modern capitalism are long-term ecological processes disproportionately harming Black and Brown bodies and the planet.”
Why/when did the ‘soul’ of black people cease to be a concern, only to be replaced by talk about ‘bodies’?
Because souls don’t exist and are a figment of religious imaginations?
Yeah, I doubt that that’s reason the woke started talking about ‘black bodies’ all the time, or why black activists stopped talking about the black soul.
My gradar (grift radar) tingled on this. Tender comments:
The Critical Ecology Lab is located at 877 Sonoma Ave. #23, Santa Rosa CA. From Streetview, this appears to be an suite or unit in a low-rise multi-unit complex in a residential neighbourhood The only signage is “877” with an arrow pointing down a long driveway. It is almost certainly a personal residence. (I was wondering if the address was going to be a private mailbox company but it does seem to be a place where someone actually lives.) It is certainly not a commercial, industrial, or academic laboratory.
So obviously the “lab” is not a physical place but a virtual space (or even just a couch, as Mike suggests) where like-minded queers (their word) can talk about their views. They do have a lab coordinator though.
Under “What We Do” only one of the “Research” links works: “Ecological Scars of Slave Plantations”, where the PI (Pierre) wants to piggy-back on an professional archeological dig being done on the island of St. Croix and invites you to contribute money to get her next-winter vac-, er, gig off the ground.
Under “Community Projects” the only link that works, “Museum Exhibit, Queer and Gender Minority Students of Color” leads to the “New Science” page of the California Academy of Sciences, which is a large natural history museum in San Francisco. It was founded as a professional scientific society shortly after California joined the Union but its website markets the museum today as a (pricey) public attraction and a repository of biological specimens for external researchers. All the New Scientists (and two surgeons, one a formidably successful academic with serious cred) prominently feature their queer (their word) intersectionality credentials but appear to have nothing to do with each other or with the CAS other than as queer honorees, or with Critical Ecology Lab.. Suzanne Pierre does not appear here as a New Scientist but is listed as being on the Advisory Board that led the museum to honour these 23 individuals. There is no trace of the Museum Exhibit promised in the link..
The CEL website lists the CAS as one of its “partners” but other than the advisory board credit I can’t find any other evidence that Suzanne Pierre is affiliated with the museum. On her personal website she fronts herself as “hold[ing] the position of Research Scientist, Critical Ecology” at CAS but the museum’s staff directory does not turn up her name, nor does it employ Research Scientists (only Associates and Assistants) or have a Dept. of Critical Ecology.
Finally, her organization is 501(c)(3)-compliant, which the IRS certifies as a tax-exempt non-profit. I note that the business address of CEL in Santa Rosa is actually, “c/o Inquiring Systems Inc.” and this entity is listed as the fiscal sponsor of Critical Ecology Lab itself. (I don’t know if this is usual practice for U.S. charities.) One can review the tax returns of all 501(c)(3)’s through the IRS and other third-party search sites.
Critical Ecology Lab is an Emperor’s New Clothes organization, version 2.0. Everyone must know this is a con but no one wants to be called racist or queer-violent, and addition no one wants their own grift to be exposed. What a pathetic unhappy way to spend your life.
I’m expecting her to turn up at some infrastructure blockade in Canada any day now.
Add: In 2021 Suzanne Pierre was an Osher Fellow at the California Academy of Sciences
https://www.calacademy.org/osher-fellows
where she was to be developing a DEIA-focused institutional strategy and participating in the museum’s Institute for Biodiversity Science & Sustainability seminar series. But to reiterate, she does not currently appear in the IBBS’s staff directory.
I’ve never understood why the master’s tools supposedly will never dismantle the master’s house. Does an ax care who’s swinging it or what it’s chopping?
Bloody typical reasoning.
I’ve always taken it more as a statement about the master, not his tools. If the master built the house, he/she presumably wouldn’t like to see their tools used to dismantle it. That said, it’s still too simplistic to really say much.
The master likely subscribes to the Second Amendment and guards his toolshed accordingly.