Experience Distributed in the Biodiversity Science-Base

Abstract

Critics of biodiversity science and environmental governance point to exclusion and absence of diverse experience from science-based governance, sometimes effectively dividing domains of science and experience/values. This paper, following an alternate line of thought drawn from John Dewey’s Nature and Experience, analyses a series of scientific publications on biodiversity from 1989-2020. It argues that experience abundantly populates the biodiversity science-base, although in highly distributed forms. Dewey’s account suggests that knowledge of biodiversity derives from an unanalyzed continuum of experience. Reading the publications as traces of occurrences of encounters preceding, accompanying, and sometimes deriving from knowledge, the paper locates and characterises differentiated, sometimes impersonal gradients of experience, developing a figurative model of distributed biodiversity experience. It concludes that experiential diversity occurs widely in the science-base, but communication of and participation in this experience is frequently marginalised by the primacy of knowing.