The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

Colonialism in science: when the plants of the second most biodiverse country are explored by foreigners

2023-02-14T11:13:09.021Z


It is estimated that Colombia has up to 28,000 endemic species, but only 4,000 have been evaluated to determine if they are at risk of extinction. Many depend on foreign resources and capacity to be studied


EL PAÍS offers the América Futura section open for its daily and global informative contribution on sustainable development.

If you want to support our journalism, subscribe

here

.

In the correspondence found between the Swedish naturalist Carlos Linnaeus (1707-1778) and the Spanish botanist José Celestino Mutis (1732-1808), who sent the former specimens from the New Kingdom of Granada, there is a paragraph by Linnaeus that says the following about one of the plants: “I will call her

Mutisia.

I have never seen a rarer plant: its grass is clematis, its flower syngenesis.

Who had ever heard of a compound flower with a climbing, tendrilous, pinnate stem, in this natural order?

The text, which was compiled in the book

La botánica en Colombia, notable facts in its development,

by Santiago Díaz Piedrahita, serves to understand various botanical logics that still persist in the country, such as the surprise at the abundance of plants;

the lack of attention to the knowledge that ancestral cultures have about them and the need to receive resources and foreign capacity to be able to study them.

“In Colombia there are many species, because it is the second most biodiverse country after Brazil [according to Conservation International].

But we are few people studying them, unlike what happens in more developed countries, where there are fewer species and more capacity.

So, at what time will all the species be able to be evaluated?”, says Germán Torres Morales, associate researcher at the Humboldt Institute.

In the country, adds Carolina Castellanos, who leads the Colombian Group of Plant Specialists, in charge of carrying out risk assessments of plant species and submitting them to the red list of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), only This assessment has been made for some 4,000 species of the almost 28,000 endemics that exist in Colombia, despite the enormous efforts of scientists.

To find the answer to why the percentage is so small, several elements must be taken into account.

Orchids in the José Celestino Mutis botanical garden. Fernando Vergara (AP)

Botanist Ana María Aldana explains that several of the 'type' models, that is, the first known plant of a species and which serves to compare and classify the rest, were taken to herbaria outside of Colombia.

“This has to do with the colonizing history of Western science,” she says, and with the fact that herbaria cost money.

In the country, there are only 32, grouped under the Colombian Association of Herbaria, although there could be a few more outside of that scheme.

But some of them are going downhill.

The Colombian National Herbarium of the National University, with some 540,000 specimens, had serious humidity problems, while botanists from the Universidad del Valle herbarium, with about 80,000 specimens, had to send an SOS in December 2021 because the specimens they were threatened by the lack of something key:

Added to this is the fact that the profession of taxonomy is in extinction, says Milton Rincón, a botanist who has worked with orchids.

That idea of ​​being a wise old scientist, full of knowledge and able to distinguish one species from another because he has a fluff or a spot of color or not, stopped appealing to students.

“We are facing what is called scientific reductionism, where it is believed that classifying species only depends on molecular biology.

That is, make DNA extractions in the field and take it to a laboratory to give the result.

The work of the taxonomist is being relegated.

In Colombia he would think that there are only 10 or 12 of us dedicated taxonomists”, he says.

Little diversity in the study of diversity

In 2022, a group of scientists had a striking question: how diverse are the authors who publish articles on botany worldwide?

This area of ​​science, they affirmed in the reflection of their study, "suffers a more accentuated historical exclusion and a stronger underrepresentation of marginalized identities in comparison with other biological disciplines."

To understand how much, they analyzed around 30,000 articles published during the last decades, finding quite telling figures: 27% were from European authors, 18% from North America, 37% from Asia and 17% were divided between Africans and Latin Americans.

This, again, despite the fact that they are two of the most biodiverse continents.

A student looks at miniature orchids in the Bogotá botanical garden. Fernando Vergara (AP)

In practice, says Rincón, this can be seen in how in Colombia many foreigners come temporarily to study their plants.

“These are biologists who have the resources, so they land to describe or discover our species, and while that is good, it also leaves the feeling that they are taking credit for our national plants.”

In fact, the Colombian botanist Armando Dugand, who died in 1971, already stated in an old essay. "Going back to our country, there are very few plant groups that bear names imposed by Colombian botanists."

And further on he reflects on the need for the science that studies the diversity of plants to also be diverse.

“It is evident that the study of the flora of a country as extensive and with climates and regions as varied as Colombia requires the attention of numerous specialists and can never be the work of a single name or a scholar, but rather that of one or several generations of explorers or researchers”.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2023-02-14

You may like

Life/Entertain 2024-03-27T10:07:17.938Z

Trends 24h

News/Politics 2024-03-28T06:04:53.137Z

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.