Breaking down the barriers to diversity in ecology

Abstract

In 2004, the Ecological Society of America's (ESA's) Ecological Visions Project Committee recommended developing strategic, multicultural research and educational partnerships to help solve global environmental problems. Likewise, in 2005, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) Advisory Committee for Environmental Research and Education exhorted scientists to foster investigations that coupled human and natural systems and engaged diverse groups in environmental decision making. Both committees highlighted the need for targeted cultural changes within the discipline of ecology and its practitioners to ensure a sustainable integration of natural ecosystems and diverse human communities. However, despite these recommendations, over the past 10 years, while the number of women obtaining degrees in the life sciences has increased, less than 7% of professional degrees in the life sciences have been awarded to women from ethnic minorities and particularly to women of color. This trend toward a much lower diversity of science practitioners is also a global issue (http://bit.ly/1CAVnx2). In the US, the cumulative number of African American, Hispanic, Pacific Islander, and Native American women earning doctoral degrees in the environmental sciences each year has not changed significantly since 2000, despite concomitant increases in women of color within the engineering and chemistry disciplines (http://1.usa.gov/1Ny0sRc). To meet the need for a diverse ecological workforce to solve 21st-century environmental problems requires that ecologists change their approach to teaching, research, and networking. If ecological research is to provide data-based solutions to promote sustainability at an international scale, we must showcase the complexity of social and natural systems in our undergraduate ecology curricula and immerse students in active learning about both human and ecological communities. Increasing human diversity in ecology requires more than just improved opportunities for field research experiences for ethnic minority students. We must embrace the interdisciplinary nature and complexity of human communities in our ecology textbooks for introductory and upper-level courses and use that complexity to engage the next generation of diverse world leaders in sustainable environmental practices. To grow the multicultural workforce required to address environmental sustainability, ecologists have to expand their definition of communities and ecosystems to include multicultural human characteristics and the built environment. As the NSF and ESA advisory committees have suggested, environmental educators should engage their students in curricula that foster synthesis of environmental data across spatial, temporal, and societal scales so they will be ready to develop solutions to multifaceted environmental problems. Some ecologists – especially those working in human-dominated ecosystems (including urban landscapes) – are implementing a range of approaches for engaging human communities, thus facilitating place-based ecological research. Yet the voices of women of color are often excluded from these initiatives. ESA and NSF advisory committee reports have underscored the importance of defining ecology in a more inclusive way, integrating human impacts fully into the study of all ecosystems, expanding applied ecology research, and engaging citizens in place-based environmental problem solving. Establishing a personal connection to their study communities or using science to find adaptive solutions for emerging environmental challenges is often expressed by minority students as an important career goal. To increase the representation of women of color and those from ethnic minorities in ecology, we must help all students to explore the linkages between ecological knowledge and multicultural community values, and infuse these missing perspectives into community collaborations to solve environmental problems locally, regionally, and globally. In the past decade, the ESA has proactively engaged broader audiences, both through scientific collaborations with other professional societies and through student groups such as SEEDS (http://esa.org/seeds). Yet current demographic trends for minorities (and especially for women of color) entering ecological or other life science disciplines suggest that these approaches are not sufficient. Effectively engaging these audiences requires rethinking the cultural values within the broader discipline of ecology, where human community-focused research is often downgraded in relative importance as compared to “pure”, ecosystem-driven questions. The study of the intersection between human communities and ecosystems is the foundation of environmental sustainability around the world. As we celebrate ESA's 2015 centennial, we need to remember that the ecological topics and multicultural issues that we tend to avoid – those that are often relegated to the “ecological applications” section at the end of traditional academic courses and that are largely excluded from the “fundamentals” – are the ones we expect future generations of ecologists to use in preserving the Earth.

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