Well the end of my Master’s course work is finally here and I won’t lie, I am so looking forward to it (although let’s see if this feeling holds true next year; I might be yearning for the concrete schedule course works provides). It’s been a funny semester filled with snow days, driven by some crazy weather St. John’s has experienced over the past few months (definitely something to look into if you are thinking of attending graduate school at MUN). Well St. John’s, spring is technically here and this plant biogeographer is ready to see the white replaced with green.
My last blog post compared and contrasted my experience being a student enrolled in BSc versus MSc courses and commented on my struggle with internal self critique. To be honest, since my last post the majority of my time has been dedicated to course work and because of this I struggled to come up with an original topic for this blog post. This past week, in the Geography Department’s “how to be a graduate student” course we had a stimulating discussion on ethics and were assigned the open-ended assignment of writing a page on ethics surrounding your research project. I have ethics on my mind so there we have it, let’s talk about ethics.
The education system drives into us from a young age that plagiarism is bad and has consequences, theft of another’s intellectual property is ethically wrong. I have heard a few stories since being in graduate school about friends working as teaching assistants (TAs) finding plagiarism when marking, to which I reply “I am surprised that these undergraduate students don’t know better.” So to my surprise, when I was researching the philosophy of ethics in my field, I found an academic that directly copied-and-pasted a paragraph from an online source. Coincidentally, I had just come from that site into a forum on ResearchGate, to which I had no response but to shake my head and laugh at the irony that during research into ethics surrounding ecological research, I stumbled upon out right plagiarism.
We are not undergraduates anymore and research ethics includes a lot more then intellectual theft. For those of us who are part of fields that do not have external regulations in place, ethics surrounding our projects (other than those surrounding theft and fraud) may be out of sight and out of mind. Let’s use my research as a case study; I am conducting a plant ecology study that includes experimental manipulation along a forest-alpine transition in Central Newfoundland. Since, my research doesn’t involve vertebrates, endangered/threatened species, or protected ecosystems I have the green light to go ahead and do what I please without external review.
So, what have I learned since reading into the philosophy of ecological ethics and following up with self-reflection? Ecological research aims to understand relationships between organisms and their environment, and ideally this knowledge will be used in conservation efforts and/or development of public policy surrounding sustainable use of ecosystems, which humans are inherently dependent on. With this arises an unavoidable conflict between my responsibility to ecosystems and my responsibility to science. For example, good research mandates replication in experimental design, but the more I replications I include in my experimental design the larger the negative impact I have on my study system. Interestingly, the literature includes very little investigation into these negative impacts, and conversations surrounding these conflicts are only recently emerging1,2,3. Most ecologists, likely, operate under the assumption that the positives surrounding knowledge gained compensate for negative environmental impacts involved in the knowledge generation1. But shouldn’t we consider these impacts prior to conducting research and aim to design experiments that minimize conflict between value of data, interest of study systems, and welfare of organisms3? Ecological ethics is an emerging field that integrates: animal welfare, environmental ethics, research ethics, and professional ethics, and is geared to help ecologists with moral dilemmas surrounding their research2.
I understand everyone is not conducting ecological research, but I think this example demonstrates that despite ecological field studies not requiring external review, it doesn’t mean it is void of ethical issues. Exploring the literature and self-reflecting has been eye-opening for me and I challenge you all to do the same.
Cheers,
~Anna
References:
- Fransworth, E.J. and Rosovsky, J. 1993. The ethics of ecological field experimentation. Conservation Biology, 7: 463-472.
- Minteer, B.A. and Collins, J.P. 2008. From environmental ethics to ecological ethics: toward practical ethics for ecologists and conservationists. Science and Engineering Ethics, 14: 483-501.
- Parris, K.M., McCall, S.C., McCarthy, M.A., Minteer, B.A., Steele, K., Bekessy, S., and Medvecky, F. 2010. Assessing ethical trade-offs in ecological field studies. Journal of Applied Ecology, 47: 227-234.