For management programs to successfully restore imperiled ecosystems and sustain diverse wildlife species, they require the cooperation of local communities. If communities do not see the relevance of these programs, they are at risk of failure. This reality does not hinge on a philosophical debate about whether achieving diversity is the “right” thing to do; it is simply the smart thing to do. In order to save America’s biodiversity, conservation biologists must embrace the country’s human diversity, which is increasing even faster than the human population. Since 1980, the US diversity index—the probability that two people chosen at random would be of a different race and ethnicity on a 0-100 scale—has nearly doubled, increasing from 34 to 65.
One of the most effective ways to communicate the importance of these issues and challenges is for scientists and managers themselves to become more representative of the populations they serve. In addition to promoting greater understanding and acceptance of management initiatives and policies, ethnic diversity in the ranks of the conservation community could also garner greater financial support, as the connection between conservation and natural resources as valuable commodities is made more evident.
Left unasked is whether diversity for the sake of diversity is a good thing or even possible.
Why is it that Leftists want the climate and animal species diversity to remain static but want change in the diversity of heretofore basically static human cultural diversity?
Why must they demand government and it’s accompanying tax dollars intervene in the rate of change of so many things?
(rhetorical question)
These are lobbyists not scientists.
There’s a diversity map county-by-county for the entire USA, a copy posted here: http://metanoodle.blogspot.com/2011/07/30-years-ago-two-random-americans-were.html SDA gets the credit for reporting such an index even exists.
The difference, biologically speaking, between different coloured skin in humans is no more biological diversity than is the difference between red Angus cattle and black Angus cattle and white faced Hereford cattle.
There is an academic value in knowing the varied genetic coding existing in the biosphere and a practical one, too.
That is independent of the skin colour of the biologist studying it.
What’s next? Will there be a politically correct economist attempting to argue that Canadian paper currency is valued higher than U.S. paper currency because the denominations come in different colours whereas the U.S. ones don’t?
He seems to be making a different argument entirely. This guy is really arguing that stupidity adds diversity to the academic biosphere.
Yes, it does. So what? He offers no reasoning why we should value stupidity. Thank goodness, for small mercies.
A little humour for the last long weekend of summer. 🙂
The article didn’t make much sense to me. The author seems
unhappy with the current state of affairs. Somehow diversifying
professional scientists is supposed to improve matters, even though professional scientists as a group are quite diverse.
Or did I misunderstand something?
I think he is trying to say it is easier to silence and scam white people if you have somebody
on stage who can be packaged and sold as the “defender” of local area ethnics and nonwhites.
Maybe if the activists weren’t chomping at the bit to flag hunters as redneck anti-conservationists, more cash flow would come in for conservation.
The “beating around the bush” this guy takes is, that hunters are mainly white. As a hunter for many years I would agree, but it is apparent that we can’t have it both ways. They can’t spew the anti-hunting crap and also expect those people to come back year after year with their time and dollars; and at the same time expect long time hunters to pass the baton.
I will pay my annual dues and hope that it helps keep the populations up and the poachers out, but I’m not going to give up my sacred hunting spots.
So, an ethnically diverse team will have better success implementing policy in an ethnically diverse community.
Isn’t that just stating the obvious?
“This reality does not hinge on a philosophical debate about whether achieving diversity is the “right” thing to do; it is simply the smart thing to do.”
=====
Ah yes, call me dumb, it works every time.
I keep wondering why “diversity” is universally considered a good thing, especially in human societies.
Look at Japan: even with their natural disasters, the country remains relatively calm and peaceful because of the shared values of its relatively homogenous population.
South Korea has grown faster than China, and now has near western standards of living (exceeding GDP per capita of, for example, Spain, Italy, Greece, and Israel). Not for nothing was it called “The Hermit Kingdom”; Korea’s ethnic diversity is virtually non-existent.
When Britain was full of Britons, and France full of Frenchmen, instead of bulging with “diverse” Islamic communities, it was easier for everyone to pull together. If a new Napoleon or Hitler were to emerge in Europe, I wonder how easily these diverse communities could raise an army, or get the general populace to sacrifice or ration goods, as they did in WWII?
I learned a valuable lesson sitting on the parent council for two years at my daughters’ school. There was one other man on the fund raising committee, who was in business as I was. The rest were housewives. Despite he and I presenting fact after fact about the most effective ways to fund raise, we were constantly stymied by our “diverse” committee members, whose responses to our facts were invariably sentences that began “Well, I feel…”. We accomplished very little.
I’m all for diversity in the gene pool, but when it comes to decision making and cohesiveness in society, I think it’s a crock.
Good thing that the article by Columbus H. Brown and Roel R. Lopez supports itself.
Why not just make every scientist pick a “spirit animal” to associate with? I pick wolf.
“There is a problem. Only I am smart enough to do something about it. Give me money and power and I will take care of the problem.”
Government empire building at its best.
Government “science” is way ahead of the curve on this one, since individuals are already selectively hired/posted/promoted on the basis less of scholarly achievement than of “visible minority” status.
Workin’ great, ain’t it?
“conservation biologists” like “environmental biologists” are not biologists, they are sociologists with a bias toward the ideologies of biological systems. No real biologist would, or could, ever write such drivel.
The racial make up of the US still has over 80% self identifying as white.
No surprise the whites tend to dominate pretty much every scientific and social grouping.
Short of restricting whites participation in all organizations, you will only see them in a minority in situations specifically designed for those of other races, such as the NAACP, or La Raza, or native groups (http://www.hanksville.org/NAresources/indices/NAorg.html), or asian groups (http://www.janet.org/)
Yawn, nothing to see here, move along.
Objectivity was such an anachronism. How science succeeded for so long being so burdened is incomprehensible.
skip
“conservation biologists” like “environmental biologists” are not biologists, they are sociologists with a bias toward the ideologies of biological systems. No real biologist would, or could, ever write such drivel.”
From the first papagraph of the article….
“The decimation of Native American populations during the colonization of North America resulted in a major shift in values and demographics. The introduction of many new species, such as trout and potatoes has been beneficial.”
Yep…..this guy is a real biologist…credentialed anyhoo….
Now I realize he is a product of much more recent schooling than myself but I learned in elementary school that tobacco and potatoes were introduced to the rest of world from North America. This guy must originate in one of Obama’s 57 states……
Or am just being petty?
Yes, the true purpose of Science is to support and validate Leftist theory. Whatever that may be this week.
wadda maroon.
As Larry points out, this ‘diversity proposal’ is scientifically ignorant. Skin colour and other variations of eye colour, nose shape, height etc are just variations within one species: homo sapiens and have nothing to do with genuine diversity of type.
Furthermore, to declare that the result is the cause (diversity of type promotes diversity of type; and diversity of type promotes more funding)..well…
Oh come on folks everyone knows that Science is the new state religion and appeals to it are unassailable. In this instant the statists have staked a claim in Science therefore it is incumbent upon the rest of us to bow and scrape before their claim or be called atheists or heretics. Next time make sure you stake your claim first then they will have to do the bowing and the scraping as we call all of them atheists and heretics.
This is just more crapola from the Agendites of the left. No matter what they come up with in their efforts to save us there is an agenda behind it.
Social Engineering requires diverse turds to sell their heuristic (pile of turds) scientific hypothesis.. (Per reviewed by a select group of the worlds tallest mental midgets)…Diversity provides for a large grouping of all the Village idiots…Simple
Affirmative action science…nice.
I am a victim! I am only so-so at Maths and I don’t really know anything about chemistry (I like that thing where they make the test-tubes bubble and turn pretty colours, but that’s neither here nor there).
For these reasons and probably also because I’m female I am not asked to peer review papers and I am not offered grant money to conduct research in the fields of Chemistry, Biology, Physics or Medicine.
The ignorant, unstudied and untalented are hardly even a minority. We have rights, you know! Why is our point of view not represented?
(You say there’s no such thing as Hispanic string theory? Well I beg to differ.)
file ( or would that be pile) this rite next to NASA’s muzzle-em out reach
____________________________________________
joe
“as we call all of them atheists”
you sure have a hardon for us atheists, try making sure you don’t ever stand behind me
thanx in advance
They are worried about their current make up and status as being a Neo Nature Nazi White Supremacist group. I don’t blame them, they are.
Just another watermelon marinated in the biodiversity mantra for the last 2 decades developing strategies for their essential conquest of the other half of humanity that conquers nature for the survival of all.
The number of blind assumptions made and unsupported (and ridiculous) relationships presumed, all within two paragraphs, is astounding. I started a fisking, but realized that it would take two pages of dense text to deconstruct the strange and bizarre reality this writer must live in.
Just one example
Last paragraph (Paraphrase)
sentence:
“In addition to promoting greater understanding and acceptance of management initiatives and policies, ethnic diversity in the ranks of the conservation community could also garner greater financial support, as the connection between conservation and natural resources as valuable commodities is made more evident.”
So, having more diversity gets you more money, because nobody understands natural resources are a valuable commodity? (more after) And how does having more black people, or brown people, or women (BBW), around get you more money? Does everyone hate the mostly white males that do conservation now, and so won’t give them money?
Now if understanding that natural resources and ‘conservation’ (badly termed, using a verb as a noun) It’s really an “undisturbed environment”) are BOTH commodities, well then, the question remains how exactly does having more BBW’s around inform people about this competition? Maybe BBW’s can communicate better then the uniformly pasty white environmentalists of today? Mebbe lots of them are Wise Latina’s.
I could go on, there are levels within levels just within this one sentence, but like I said, a sisyphean task, deconstructing this persons strange mind.
There is a whole breed of wisetards that are out to manage nature and as a result, human activity. Time to shut them down. Who wants an academic tard speculating on the real world with power to act? That is best left for the Ivy covered cloisters of woulda coulda shoulda. These people exemplify why a little knowledge is dangerous.
Bureaucratic entitlement expansion. This is not about science . Thats the red Herring. Its all about increased finding (read wages) for useless, never to be used research to profit an organization. Science is a process, when it become an unbendable belief system, its morphed into state funded Mythology.
JMO
Assume the lotus position close your eyes and chant it like a monk.
“Diiiiiiiiiverse Community Sustanabilityyyyyyyyyy”
“Diiiiiiiiiverse Community Sustanabilityyyyyyyyyy”
Ohhhhhh, Diiiiiiiiiverse Community Sustanabilityyyyyyyyyy
/repeat/
You’ll get a house in the Anex with a Volvo, grow fond of Interpretative dance and Margaret Atwood , a pension and you’ll never be fired.
GYM: Look up. Waaaaaaayyyy up. See that tiny speck? That’s my comment going over your head.
KevinB at 2:28 AM: “I’m all for diversity in the gene pool, but when it comes to decision making and cohesiveness in society, I think it’s a crock.”
Right on! Re school councils: they’re not the only sections of our schools full of “feelies”: the hiring committees are far more on the lookout for candidates of “diverse” background than those who can actually speak the language, know anything, teach, and/or think. E.g., I happened to observe a student teacher in a class not too long ago: he had a lovely personality, but could barely speak English—and, as per the propaganda he’d been exposed to, he actually told the kids that they had more rights than adults! (We had a little chat about that after and he seemed to get my point.) Not too many jobs were available, but I was sure this viz. min. person would land one of them—because he’s viz. min.
What utter cr*p—and a crock too! Those now in “positions of responsibility” don’t have the faintest clue about what “responsibility” means. And, as they’re paid mega bucks not to know, “Houston, we’ve got a problem”: a REALLY BIG one, as in the brain-dead propaganda written by these idiots, Brown and Lopez. Kyrie eleison.
”
One of the most effective ways to communicate the importance of these issues and challenges is for scientists and managers themselves to become more representative of the populations they serve.
”
Sooooooooo….where are they gonna find all those trees,birds,worms,AGW,etc…?
Oh wait.They got them. They are called leftards.
What a load of BS this clown is trying to push.Unfortunately,the clowns in gubermint will listen,instead of locking them up for perpatrating a scam.
For Joe and GYM:
The school system had much more integrity when Christianity was honoured. The militant secularism of all our systems theses days—and that includes the “mainline” Protestant churches!—has, and will continue, to reduce Western societies to hollowed out husks as far as truth and integrity are concerned. And that’s the truth! Kyrie eleison.
lookout
I went to a god kristian school, and LIES was the normal there, even worst than at “church”. You need to understand that just because YOU believe something doe not make it so!
GYM, like I told Trollex the other day, nobody says you have to believe it. Nobody says you have to be a d1ck about not believing it either.
Me, I don’t share my religious beliefs on-line. They’re boring, they’re nobody’s business but mine, and I don’t expect anybody to believe them but me. Saves a lot of wear and tear on my last nerve, know what I mean?
Well lookout GYM my point was not an attempt to ‘share’ my world view with anyone. What I said was simply that in temporary Western culture the dominant religion is Science. Those whom disagree with Science are considered either heretics or ‘atheists’. However Science has become a catchall method of forcing conformity on the masses and as such is completely devoid of what used to be called science. AGW is a prime example. Disagree with the theory and you should be thrown in jail, stoned, hanged drawn and quartered or any other torture/shunning method deemed suitable for heretics and atheists by true believers.