This article is reprinted from National Review with the permission of the author.

Environmentalism is becoming increasingly irrational and unscientific. The “nature rights” movement, for example, has convinced governments and judges to assign personhood, “rights,” and, laughably, even “responsibilities” to geological features. Concomitantly, the increasing advocacy in many scientific papers to “listen to the wisdom of indigenous people” in determining environmental policies reflects this ongoing shift away from empiricism in environmental research and advocacy.

Yes, indigenous people were and are keen observers of nature and live more softly on the land. But relying on “indigenous wisdom” to craft environmental policies suitable to the needs of modern societies makes little sense. Many of their practices were steeped in religious and mystical beliefs. They developed comparatively rudimentary technologies, had no electricity, and were required to feed, house, and otherwise provide for far fewer people than the 8 billion of us living today.

But don’t tell that to the increasingly ideological science establishment. A new paper published in Nature Communications goes deeper into “indigenous wisdom” argumentation, urging the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) environmental research sites to collect and analyze data in a manner accommodating of indigenous sensibilities.

It’s all about equity, don’t you know. From, “Governance of Indigenous Data in Open Earth Systems Science” (citations omitted):

Broadly, Indigenous Peoples’ expertise has been excluded from settler-colonial and Western systems of scientific inquiry practices, land classification, and relations to the data about Indigenous homelands in digital environments. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) reaffirms Indigenous Peoples’ collective rights to self-determination in the application of their political, economic, social, and cultural knowledge, but settler colonial institutions have largely failed to uphold these rights as they apply in digital environments and Earth science research.

This reflects a broadly anti-Western attitude increasingly seen in environmental science discourse. And it has little to say about the tremendous knowledge to be gained via the scientific method, the strength of which relies on gathering and analyzing data objectively. In contrast, the indigenous approach involves relationships and subjective understandings:

Many Indigenous worldviews center relationships as a core value. Relationships exist at the scale of the individual and collectives and apply to connections between humans, places, and biotic and abiotic communities in the past, present, and future.

“Abiotic” means nonliving. Claiming that nonlife is part of a “community” leaves the world of empiricism and enters into the realm of the mystical. It has no more a place in earth science than would the belief that the dinosaurs were killed in Noah’s flood. Yet, the authors want government funding for this approach at NEON.

The authors claim that the lessons of the Native American “medicine wheel” should be inculcated in data collection and sharing:

For many Indigenous Peoples of North America, the medicine wheel teaches about balance in contrasting aspects of the world and the nature of recurring cycles. The medicine wheel may, at times, represent the cardinal directions, natural elements, aspects of self, stages of life, seasons of the year, and times of the day (inner circle); here, we use it to think about the data and specimen life cycle (shaded outer circle) and the iterative nature of long-term research. We offer suggestions for bringing each aspect of an Earth Science project or institution into balance with sovereignty and multiple ways of knowing across settler colonial and Indigenous systems.

What does this have to do with collecting accurate and actionable data?

The article properly reflects the importance of respecting indigenous sensibilities when conducting science on indigenous lands. For example, the authors urge scientists to consider indigenous names when identifying new species and returning cultural items and biological specimens that have been removed for analysis. No problem there.

But much of the advocacy is about imposing ideology on what should be scientific practices:

As climate and biodiversity crises intensify, Earth Science institutions and researchers globally are racing to collect more data in an attempt to support research on drivers and responses to environmental change that can inform responses, risk communications, and adaptations. However, continuing this work from the same settler colonial framework that led to the current conditions will only perpetuate historical injustices and extractive practices.

This advocacy column in one of the most important science journals reflects an accelerating effort to push environmental science toward what the authors call a “two-eyed approach drawing on both Indigenous and Western worldviews.” Sorry, that would not materially increase our knowledge but, rather, make us scientifically partially blind.