In the 1990s, the Tupinambá people of Olivença, in southern Bahia, filed a claim for ethnic recognition that was officially recognized in 2001. However, the process of demarcating their territory never materialized.
Simultaneously, a group of scientists and NGOs began to pressure the government to expand protected areas in the same region due to deforestation. In 2007, conservationists managed to establish a Wildlife Refuge over part of indigenous lands that, without approval from the Ministry of Justice, lacked legal certainty.
And so, the lands of the Tupinambás, adjacent to the biological reserve, became a refuge, especially for the golden lion tamarin, a species of primate, while the ancestral practices of cultivation through slash and burn began to be fined by the authorities. Meanwhile, just a few kilometers away, large companies continued to dig huge craters in the jungle to extract sand.
Most of the data used to support decisions such as creating a wildlife refuge come from the use of satellite images and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). These new technologies have provided detailed images of changes in land use, which have allowed humanity to be more aware of deforestation processes.
In the Amazon, while the climate emergency requires increased conservation efforts, the forest is being devastated. The Xingu+ network has demonstrated an increase in deforestation of 1,857% between 2020 and 2021 in the Ituna-Itatá indigenous lands in the northern state of Pará.
Along these lines, the Mapbiomas initiative, a group of scientific institutes, technology companies and civil society organizations that analyzes data on land cover in Brazil, shows that the Amazon has lost almost 200,000 square kilometers of forest in the last 34 years, a area greater than that of Uruguay.
It is evident that the degree and pace of destruction of ecosystems like the Amazon is accelerating, despite numerous warnings from the academic community about the catastrophic effects of deforestation on the economy, livelihoods and climate. The problem is that these data have been used to recommend and apply policies unfairly, as the case of Tupinambá lands clearly demonstrates.
But this is not an isolated case. In the Colombian municipality of Guasca, about 60 km from Bogotá, decision-making on conservation policies influenced by private foundations, NGOs and scientists based on ecological data has been translated into legal proceedings and economic punishment for peasants for carrying out activities of traditional agriculture and livestock.
Distance between machines and humans
The incredible distance between the machines that fly over hundreds of thousands of kilometers to take photographs and the territory that people inhabit creates a huge disconnect, which occasionally materializes in dehumanized politics. This has created enormous distrust in broad sectors of society towards science.
To this must be added that, in this “post-truth” era, the scientific interpretation of reality is being so questioned that obvious facts such as the high-speed deforestation that is occurring in all Brazilian forests are questioned.
From academia, the tendency is to point to those who actively seek to delegitimize science through the spread of fake news, the creation of conspiracy theories, disinformation and misleading information. But would it be correct to point out those on the “other side” of the barricades of truth as solely responsible for the mess we’ve gotten ourselves into?
A less visible part of the problem is that those who question science base their claims on a very real defect in the production of knowledge itself. Scientists tend to consider themselves the owners of the only truth, repeatedly presented to the public as an inviolable “black box”.
In biodiversity conservation, decisions about where and how to install protected areas are usually based on scientific ecological data, which, although rigorous, do not represent the whole reality. These decisions can put aside the perspectives of those who live in areas that must be protected, including indigenous populations who for centuries have lived in these ecosystems that do not have access to institutional avenues, unlike environmental agencies, to guarantee their own rights.
This arrogance often causes real problems for the communities that inhabit the territories. Therefore, environmental policies and actions based solely on scientific recommendations often cause rejection and a feeling of exclusion among those affected. This repeated scenario, in turn, strengthens the questioning of scientific institutions and, in this way, the scientific community as a whole also ends up being negatively affected.
Need for a ‘new transdisciplinary science’
So how can we scientists help regain confidence in science? How can we use the huge amount of data that technology offers us to try to stop the loss of biodiversity and climate change, but also to improve people’s lives? How can science contribute to building a more just world from a social and ecological point of view?
To find a way out of the post-truth problem, science must begin by questioning itself. And while the rigor of scientific analysis and the pursuit of objectivity are crucial to moving towards a more sustainable future, shouting and blaring that scientists have the only truth or continuing to insist that science is the only legitimate source for environmental decision-making is not will help us.
The challenges we face today in environmental matters are full of risks and uncertainties that must be addressed from different perspectives that make up a broader picture and leave room for dialogue. A transition to a more open science is needed that learns to relate to other types of knowledge such as policy-making practice and indigenous knowledge.
This new perspective of how to do science, called “transdisciplinary science”, is a process of production and circulation of knowledge that, in turn, brings together different views of the world and aims to reach dialogued solutions to real problems of different scales. The diffusion of this type of science can help us to regain legitimacy and confidence in scientific efforts, but not through technocratic commitments, but through democratic ones.
We scientists have to learn to work with difference and recognize our place as intermediaries of diplomacy and critical thinking about complex problems in order to build solutions together with the people and for the people.
