[Taxacom] The loss of knowledge...

[Doug Yanega]

Eric Gouda wrote:

>On the other hand, Biodiversity is high on the political agendas,
>Conventions on Biodiversity are ratified by governments all over the
>world.
>The knowledge about Biodiversity seems to be relevant to the community,
>than how is it possible that it is lost so rapidly?
>
>*	Are Botanist not capable to show the relevance of their work?
>*	Do we need a political lobby to stop the decline of traditional
>botany and if so how could we mobilize botanists with political
>influence to do so?
>*	Would a global forum be needed?

First, and obviously, this problem is not restricted to botany - ALL 
disciplines within the category of "alpha taxonomy of extant 
organisms" are being diminished by the loss of facilities and 
personnel, with the possible exception of those that are based on 
molecular taxonomic techniques (techniques which, in general, 
de-emphasize the perception that specimen-based taxonomy is 
necessary). Some of this research is conducted in exactly the 
opposite manner than is appropriate; a researcher can get $500,000 to 
collect specimens and do the genetic bar-coding on them all, and then 
turn around and send vouchers to a collection-based taxonomist and 
ask for free IDs (I know I'm not the only taxonomist who receives 
such requests). But that's annother issue, and a minor one, overall, 
though it is symptomatic.

There are TWO major challenges that we face here, as I see it, and 
you only mention the political one. There is also the practical 
challenge. In large part, the act of "showing relevance" means, for 
most researchers, proving to institutional administrators that they 
can attract large amounts of funding. Philosophical and logical 
arguments about the needs and relevance of taxonomy will not convince 
a University to hire a new taxonomist faculty member whose average 
grant income is smaller than any non-taxonomist on staff, or to 
maintain a taxonomic research collection (which costs money instead 
of bringing it in) whose floor space could be converted to a facility 
that brings in 20 million dollars a year in additional revenue.

In other words, while the political challenge is to expand the pool 
of funding dollars available to do taxonomy, the practical reality is 
that taxonomy is cheap at the individual level, and, as such, many 
taxonomists and the facilities they work in will NEVER look 
particularly appealing to administrators who are being trained and 
paid to look at academia as a method of generating profit, and manage 
their institutions accordingly (everyone wants to be like Donald 
Trump). I find it hard to conceive of any way we can work within a 
system where "relevance" is defined as "profitability" and still 
flourish as a community. Look at it this way: what administrators 
like is a field of research where there are a small number of 
researchers, each of whom brings in several million dollars a year - 
they don't have to pay many salaries, and it doesn't require much 
floor space. Describing all of the life forms on this planet, 
however, is a task that requires distributing the effort over an 
incredibly huge number of researchers, requiring lots and lots of 
salaried positions and floor space, while bringing in very little 
revenue. We, as a community, are ill-suited for survival within this 
system. I don't think any amount of political lobbying is going to 
change that, unless we lobby for something quite different.

I would like to suggest, as I have in the past here, that what may 
better suit our long-term survival is to figure a way to get OUT of 
the system, and make taxonomy a self-supporting effort to as great an 
extent as possible. In a nutshell, this is along the lines of what 
the All-Species Initiative had in mind to do; it was a great idea, 
and one I sincerely believe was abandoned too soon. What it amounts 
to is setting up a stand-alone funding agency whose SOLE purpose is 
to disburse funds for alpha taxonomy, not only by giving grants, but 
by actually paying the salaries of the taxonomists themselves so they 
cannot lose their jobs because of some callous administrator's 
profit-margin policies. By extension, this could also mean assuming 
the burden of subsidizing the cost of maintaining research 
collections, as well - e.g., it's probably cheaper to pay Utrecht 
University NOT to close its Herbarium than to build a new Herbarium 
facility nearby so the collection can be moved (using existing 
infrastructure is generally more cost-effective than creating new 
infrastructure).

The reason I bring this up before discussing where the politics comes 
in should be clear now: if we work WITHIN the existing system, then 
the people and institutions and funding agencies who we would be 
lobbying will be a different (though partially overlapping) set from 
those we would need to deal with should we attempt to make the 
taxonomic community a self-sufficient and coherent entity in and of 
itself - and the way we'd be approaching them would be *vastly* 
different. One of the biggest differences is that the latter scenario 
could potentially put us in a position similar to something such as 
the World Wildlife Fund; an international (possibly non-profit) 
organization that attracts philanthropic donations and uses the money 
to fund research. We ought to consider this, at least.

How to do this, what to call ourselves, this is all impossible at 
this stage to say - my point here is to make people aware of what I 
see as the biggest risk we are facing: we are confronted with a 
choice, in essence, whether to spend all of our VERY limited personal 
abilities trying to force the existing system to more fully embrace 
and support us, and hope that this approach succeeds before we drop 
below "critical mass" to effect change OR we can invest that same 
energy in devising a way out of the corner we've been backed into, 
through no real fault of our own (mainly due to the way that the 
culture of academia has shifted over the last few decades, from the 
production and dissemination of knowledge to the production of 
wealth). I don't honestly think we can have it both ways - unless we 
commit FULLY to one approach or the other, I don't think we have any 
hope of success. My purpose here is to suggest that the path we might 
want to commit to is NOT the one we've been on, and NOT the obvious 
path to take. We should consider alternatives, and establish 
long-term goals. Why I see this as a risk is that if we choose the 
wrong path, it may be a dead-end from which we cannot escape. I 
really don't want to see that happen.

Sincerely,
-- 

Doug Yanega        /Dept. of Entomology         /Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California - Riverside, Riverside, CA 92521-0314
phone: (951) 827-4315 (standard disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
              http://cache.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html
   "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
         is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82