Building Enduring Bridges: Or How Can We Get To Post Neocolonialism?

As AMS and other scientific organizations and their members are striving toward fully embracing diversity, equity, inclusion, and access as fundamental values to be interwoven into the very fabric of these organizations (and by extension more broadly across all forms of scientific practice), it is wise for us collectively to pause and truly reflect critically and candidly on not only what an inclusive and equitable world would look, sound, and feel like, but also on what practices might become the levers for reshaping the research, operations, and application of Earth systems sciences. Put another way, how do we begin to influence and reshape research practice to move beyond the inherent and lingering legacy of colonialism and neocolonialism?

As many of us know, structural and individual biases hold great sway of human behaviors. These biases sometimes harden into prejudices bot visible and invisible to us. As challenging as it is to seek to alter or nudge individual behavior, structural biases present the kind of problem that looms at a scale that is truly intimidating. How do seek to alter the very fabric of society?

The purpose of this presentation is to raise awareness, encourage reflection, propose key questions, and engage the audience in beginning a deep consideration of how we can build enduring bridges, or commons, or other mechanisms, that couple research with (especially) vulnerable and underrepresented communities in healthy, sustainable, useful, and enriching ways.

Some important questions for us to consider:

1. How can we use issues of equity and compassion to inform scientific activities (research, policy, and application) while maintaining the integrity and rigor of the science?
2. What are the crucial questions (social scientific) researchers should ask themselves in conceptualizing research projects and applying for funding support?
3. Who should play the crucial role of informing and educating decision-makers within and across communities?
4. What role can and/or should members of the weather enterprise assume (or not) in raising the voices of disenfranchised communities and groups of people so these can be heard in resource decision-making?
5. What specific behaviors can each of us as individuals choose to use or avoid as a means to contribute to spreading and supporting diversity, equity, inclusion, and access in the patch of world we each inhabit?