The science establishment is continuing its drift into mysticism regarding environmental issues. Our latest example comes from Nature — the most prestigious science journal in the world — extolling an Australian environmental scientist who lists a river as her co-author on science papers.
Elite science is besotted with the “knowing” of indigenous people — no matter that it is often an expression of mystical religious belief. Sure enough, the subject of the story is an indigenous scientist named Anne Poelina:
Conservationist Anne Poelina has a deep connection to the fresh water that runs through the dry red-rock landscape of the Kimberley region in Western Australia. Poelina identifies as a Nyikina Warrwa woman, and her people are the Traditional Custodians of the Martuwarra Fitzroy River. . . .
Poelina’s interdisciplinary work at the Nulungu Research Institute of the University of Notre Dame in Broome, Australia, focuses on health, land and water conservation, climate change, and law and environmental policy and combines Indigenous traditional knowledge with Western science. Her interest in the Martuwarra is both personal and professional.
Poelina is so taken with indigenous ways that she names the Martuwarra as co-author on her professional papers — and apparently the editors of the science journals in which she publishes go right along:
Because Poelina works with the river to produce fresh knowledge and assimilate ancient wisdom, she decided to recognize its contributions formally. In 2020, she started including the Martuwarra River of Life as the first author on her publications.
Of course, the river doesn’t actually contribute anything. It has never written any text or edited Poelina’s papers. It is a geological feature. It is insentient. It does not “produce fresh knowledge.” Humans gain fresh knowledge and apply it to earlier understandings through various empirical means. A river not so much.
A law professor applauds:
One of Poelina’s human colleagues is less circumspect about the importance of their riverine co-author. “It’s hard to overstate the significance of having Martuwarra as the first author on academic papers,” says Erin O’Donnell, a specialist in water law and policy at Melbourne Law School in Australia. Authorship for the river poses a profound challenge to Western and colonial views of what knowledge is and who holds it, adds O’Donnell.
“I have co-authored with Anne and Martuwarra and seen first hand the challenge this presents to journals, where copy editors attempted to remove Martuwarra as first author,” says O’Donnell. In one of their papers, authorship for the river was restored after an appeal to the journal’s editors.
Those editors did science no favors by allowing irrationality to prevail.
By contributing to Poelina’s work in meaningful ways, O’Donnell explains, Martuwarra connects her to Country and brings together many river First Nations to be caretakers for Country. For instance, in Poelina’s PLoS Water paper, which includes the river as a co-author, the author information states, “without Country, without the River, and its complex, multi-layered, and ever-evolving inter-relationships with its custodians, there would not be a paper” (Martuwarra, RiverOfLife et al. PLoS Water 2, e0000104; 2023).
No. Without human endeavor, the papers would not exist. That river has flowed for millennia prior to Poelina’s authorship, and it never once produced a scientific treatise.
It’s all about climate change, of course. But the river can lead the way!
Poelina is optimistic that the Martuwarra’s authorship can make a difference in broadcasting the message that rivers and their associated Indigenous wisdom are essential to tackling urgent and complex global problems.
Please. By publishing this kind of performative virtue signaling — without one word of dissent from anyone skeptical of incorporating indigenous mysticism in science papers — Nature‘s editors are making a mockery of science and degrading the trustworthiness of the professional discourse.
“Follow the science!” Really? These days that decree rings increasingly hollow.