#colonies deciding for themselves where to send their extracted wealth

[spiderbitesandvampirevenom]

I think it's hilarious when people say that Latin America's wars of independence were anti-colonial in nature. Like girl are you stupid

[whiterosebrian]

Letter To Democrats

I felt the need to do something besides raising awareness of environmental, indigenous, and socio-economic issues. I’ve decided to compose and then mail multiple printed copies of a letter to multiple politicians across the USA. I did wonder if I should copy-and-paste the letter to social media profiles like I did for the one that I wrote to President Biden. Ultimately, I decided that posting the letter would serve two purposes. First, I wanted to let indigenous activists know that they have another willing accomplice. Second, this could provide a decent template for anyone who also feels a need to write to political leaders and put pressure on them to take much-needed action. Without any further ado…

Greetings,

I am writing a generic letter to send to assorted politicians across the United States. For reasons that I will articulate over the course of this letter, I felt a serious need to address as many members of the American political leadership as possible. I do not intend to call you out personally. If you do take it as a personal callout, please consider why you feel that way.

The reports of wildfires, heat waves, and floods have filled many, many observers with existential terror. Some have even expressed utter despair over whether the world will be inhabitable by any form of life. At times I have been tempted to join the despair, to give up hope of ever leaving a beautiful legacy for future generations. For the sake of all the people of the world, I must fight that temptation. I need to do my part to fight for the future.

There are a large number of activists trying to protect the environment. However, they need help from people who have the power to make really concrete changes. That is why I am writing to you and other Democratic politicians. That does sound very partisan, but the sad fact is that the Republican party is almost a lost cause at this point. I wish to be proven wrong about that. The fact is that it already engaged in brutal obstruction during the Obama administration. A sinister side to the base already started emerging during that time as well. With the rise of Donald Trump, the much of its leadership and nearly all of its electoral base have become increasingly unwilling to offer the kind of compromise needed for a functional democracy.

The Democratic party as a whole has been criticized as very weak in opposing the radicalizing Republican Party. The current President has spoken of a desire for restoring national unity. That desire is certainly laudable in itself when Trump blatantly stoked resentment and division. Again, however, the Republican party and its core supporters have shown a complete unwillingness to work with any opponents in any way. They view their opponents as subversive enemies that need to be crushed underfoot. The Republican party has inched towards neo-fascism at a time when neo-fascism is mainstreaming around the world. The Republican party has also already been beholden to the selfish interests of major corporations for decades. It even seeks to magnify the already dire influence of corporations chiefly responsible for pollution. Its propaganda outlets outright deny pollution and mislead millions of people.

Some Democratic politicians have also been criticized as going along with corporate interests and watering down legislation meant to oppose corporate influence. By now it has become clear that corporate elites do not have the safety of the world and its human and nonhuman denizens in mind. By now it has become clear that they must be reined in for the greater good. The only language that major corporations even comprehend is money. Here I arrive at the first main point of this letter: I urge you to work with other Democratic leaders to divest from major corporations and their executives, especially those most directly responsible for polluting the Earth. I’ve also seen proposals that corporations be forced to contribute to removing as much pollution as possible. Quickening the transition away from fossil fuels is crucial.

However, alternate energy sources are not enough. Switching from gas-powered cars to electric cars is not enough. Building solar or wind farms in place of coal-burning power plants is not enough. Extraction and consumption cause their own serious problems. The problem of environmental degradation has roots that are far too deep and complicated to address here, though I will touch upon one later. Going hand-in-hand with corporate influence are the bad social and urban infrastructures that do not encourage sustainable lifestyles. I barely even know where to begin in this regard. Cities are too often built for cars and not people. Most people have to drive carbon-spewing cars to work at jobs that are not well-suited to their needs in order to pay their bills and feed their families. Too many people are left in poverty or near-poverty, some people are more-or-less isolated in suburbs, and a tiny handful are virtually untouchable in their wealth and privilege. Healthy food is not always accessible, and even when it is, it often has to be shipped very far from the source.

My second main point is this: in addition to transitioning to cleaner energy, the very infrastructure of our society needs to reformed. Local communities need to be lifted up so that they can better care for themselves without the need for distant figures constantly having to provide for them through convoluted supply chains. It’s true that right-wingers speak of “small government” with the unspoken agenda of leaving corporate oligarchs and ultra-conservative clergy to rule over ordinary human beings. Nonetheless, I believe that, at this point, government needs to assist in rebuilding communities so that they can eventually leave denizens to stand on their feet and care for each other. The pandemic, along with the poor responses of many local officials, has shown the need for communities to engage in mutual care.

I will confess that this exhortation is the vaguest one in this letter. I lack in-depth education on such matters. I bring it up in order to further nudge you in a direction that would be far better for the Earth and its people. I can offer one example of what must be done that is slightly clearer: helping communities establish gardens and small-scale farms to better feed themselves.

On a very important side note, this nation needs to divest from the military as well. The largest and most powerful military in history is known to be among the largest polluters on earth. Too many politicians seem to ignore how massive the military already is an insist on subsidizing it at the cost of actually building a peaceful and prosperous society.

I further wish to discuss the need to center indigenous peoples in renewing our society. No, I am no indigenous myself. I simply wish to point to their wisdom. Yes, the sagely magical Indian who is one with Mother Earth is a crude stereotype, and I have no intention of reinforcing it. With that said, I follow a number of indigenous writers, activists, spiritualists, and influencers on social media. I learned about how many indigenous people are attempting to reconnect to previously outlawed and hidden heritages. The stereotype could be rooted in reality.

In most cases, those heritages include animistic spiritualities, in which aspects of the natural world, from plants to animals to waters to stones, are seen as having spirits. Furthermore, these aspects of the natural world are seen as relatives to humans. I should note how some well-meaning white people, wishing to bond with the earth instead of submitting to organized religion, appropriate these indigenous spiritualties and associated practices. Indigenous writers will encourage such people to instead delve into their own pre-Christian heritages, which have similar animistic philosophies, however obscured by time they may be. I have actually been doing just that—though I won’t elaborate because I don’t want to center myself.

You may be asking, what is the relevance said common thread of the spiritualities of indigenous peoples? That animism seems to go hand-in-hand with methods of land care that developed over generations of trial and error, along with the principles behind those methods. With the subjugation and expulsion (and worse) of the land’s original caretakers, though, these practices fell into obscurity. The most dramatic example, perhaps, is the suppression of controlled burnings on the western coastline leading to the wildfires that we have seen in recent years. Indeed, the different lands of different indigenous nations need their own subtly distinct approaches, based on ecosystems, geographies, local histories, and general senses of place. Indigenous activists and figureheads are calling upon governments to heed their words on not only conservation but also regeneration.

One of the main demands that indigenous activists make is for the return of their lands, full sovereignty over them, and the facilitation of cultural revival. Yes, that is a very simple manner of justice and righting a historic wrong. It has become evident that their wisdom is a crucial piece of the puzzle of solving environmental problems as well. Simple “colorblind” or “globalized” liberalism won’t suffice when working for social or environmental justice. Indigenous activists argue that colonialism is at the root of so many of our world’s problems. Many of them even outright state that the “colonial state” in itself is a problem. I can see how colonialism has promoted the rise of an all-devouring capitalism and perpetuated it. The grim historical fact of how the enslavement of Black people and the elimination of indigenous peoples contributed to building this nation remains a grim historical fact.

I myself am figuring out the world and learning many truths, but I am sympathetic to people who have borne the brunt of colonialism. I welcome the humanistic achievements of modernity and utterly oppose fundamentalism and fascism, I assure you, but I’ve come to accept that the modern world is broken. Simple progress won’t heal the world. “Big government” certainly has a role to play in mobilizing the needed social changes, such as what I’ve alluded to above, but the “colonial state” needs to ultimately divest its own power.

I’ll try to summarize my points now. Major corporations and economic elites need to be drastically reined in and disempowered (along with the military). The transition to renewable energies needs to be quickened—but also needs to be accompanied by drastic changes to infrastructures and supply chains so as to result in less extraction and consumption. Localized communities need to be empowered so they can better care for themselves without much out faraway aid. Indigenous peoples need to be given their lands back, be elevated to leadership roles in caring for and regenerating said lands, and be empowered so they can rebuild their cultures. Settlers should learn from them as well. In the end, the state and the socio-economic system that it has upheld need to recede—not for billionaires or grand inquisitors or dictators, but for ordinary people and the earth. In truth, humans are meant to be a part of nature, and the generational challenge is for humanity to reconcile with the rest of nature.

This all may sound idealistic or radical. This past summer has shown us that we shouldn’t settle for anything less than radical social change. This nation, which has been a major world power for over a century, needs to be radically reimagined. This all may sound vague as well. I have little education in politics and governance apart from what I’ve tried to learn for myself across the internet. That is all the more reason for people like you—people with more real-world power than I—to push along radical social change. This letter is meant to raise awareness of your duty as a leader. A leader is meant to be a guide, not a dominator. There’s a chance that you could be recorded in history as a leader who did what was necessary to make the world’s healing and renewal possible.

Thank you.

You may call me Brian Solomon Whiterose.

[orbemnews]

Uprooting Colonialism From the Fossil-Finding Field In 2019, Mohamad Bazzi, a doctoral student at Uppsala University in Sweden, launched an expedition to Tunisia in search of fossils. He and his colleagues traveled to the phosphate mines around the city of Gafsa, where 56 million-year-old rocks record a time of rapidly warming oceans and mass extinctions, particularly of apex predators like sharks. Mr. Bazzi made some distinctive choices for this paleontological expedition. For starters, his team hired Tunisians to help dig, rather than bringing students from his university. Mr. Bazzi and his colleagues also chose to reach out to the residents of Gafsa wherever possible, holding impromptu lectures on the area’s fossil history to interested onlookers. This was a contrast with the secretiveness of many paleontologists in the field, who might worry about their sites being raided for the fossil black market. The fossils the team collected from Gafsa are important for learning more about how animals adapted to the hothouse world of the Eocene, a period that may foretell what’s in store for the planet in coming years if carbon emissions don’t slow. But while Mr. Bazzi’s team removed the fossils from Tunisia, they did so under an agreement with local institutions that Mr. Bazzi himself insisted on: After he finished his research, the remains would be returned. Historically, these specimens are seldom returned, and locals may never see them again. But Mr. Bazzi and his colleagues are part of a movement among the next generation of paleontological researchers, one attempting to change scientific practices that descend directly from 19th century colonialism, which exploited native peoples and their natural histories. Over the last few decades, multiple countries have demanded the return of looted art, antiquities, cultural treasures and human remains from museum collections in North America and Europe. Countries such as Mongolia and Chile have likewise demanded the return of collected fossils, from tyrannosaur bones to the preserved remains of giant ground sloths. “There’s a consistent pattern with these specimens of high scientific or aesthetic value, where they’re taken out of the developing world and shipped abroad to be displayed and shown to a wider audience elsewhere,” Mr. Bazzi said. “There should be some balance so that local parties have a say in what happens to them.” Many countries with less money to spend on funding their own scientists are home to important fossil deposits that could drive major advances of our understanding of the prehistoric world. If the field of paleontology is to move forward, these researchers say, it’s important to figure out how to study specimens in these places without extending colonial legacies. That will take the development of a different approach to the field, more like the ones being tried by Mr. Bazzi and other scientists that rely less on extraction and more on collaboration with and the development of local institutions. While many cultures throughout human history have long traditions around collecting or studying fossil remains, the discipline of scientific paleontology — as well as the formation of modern natural history museums — arose in the 18th century, when European powers were actively colonizing large swaths of the globe. According to Emma Dunne, an Irish paleontologist at University of Birmingham in England, European scientists were part of a colonial network that sucked natural wealth — including fossils — into imperial capitals. In the 20th century, some countries pushed back. Brazil and Argentina provide government funding of paleontology. Those countries and others, such as Mongolia, established laws forbidding the export of fossils from within their borders. The two South American countries also mandate that foreign researchers work with local paleontologists for research on fossils found in the country. “You still do have non-Argentinian researchers working with local ones, for example,” said Nussaibah Raja-Schoob, a Mauritian paleontologist based at Germany’s University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. “But you definitely see that there is a bigger local influence.” Even in the aftermath of colonialism, however, fossils from across the globe still tend to end up in American and European museums. Some are collected through approved scientific expeditions. But because fossils are also traded privately, fossil-rich countries with fewer resources and legal protections often see interesting and potentially valuable finds put up for auction in Western markets. Questions about where fossils belong and who is best suited to work on them have sparked sharp controversies in recent years. In some cases, researchers have raised concerns about the ethics of working on such privately collected fossils — particularly those which may have been exported illegally. At the same time, paleontologists in Western countries have bristled at the rules required by countries like Brazil. In one case in 2015, David Martill, a paleobiologist at the University of Portsmouth in England, dismissed questions about his team’s lack of collaboration with Brazilian researchers on a specimen found there. “I mean, do you want me also to have a Black person on the team for ethnicity reasons, and a cripple and a woman, and maybe a homosexual too just for a bit of all round balance?” he said in an interview at the time with Herton Escobar, a Brazilian science journalist. Dr. Martill said in an interview in December that he chose his words poorly. But he said he remains opposed to laws that dictate where fossils go. In 2020, he was a co-author of a paper on another find exported from Brazil and described without a Brazilian co-author. “I do not think governments should dictate who works on fossils,” he said. “I think scientists should be able to choose who they work with.” These sorts of controversies are one example of the way the discipline’s colonial history lingers, Ms. Raja-Schoob says. But there are others. Much of global paleontology is still conducted in languages like English, German and French. And according to an ongoing research project by Ms. Raja-Schoob and Dr. Dunne, countries with higher G.D.P.s — places like the United States, France, Germany and China — tend to report more fossil data, in part because they have the money to invest in academic paleontology programs. Many institutions around the world have neither the tools nor enough government support for sophisticated studies of fossils. But that is something scientific institutions from wealthier countries can help with. “We have to ask why we’re bringing this knowledge to the centers, rather than spreading it out,” Dr. Dunne said. “We can work with things like 3-D scans of fossils, we can work with digital data sets. The problem obviously is getting funding for museums to do this for themselves.” Ms. Raja-Schoob said that academic funding could promote geology and paleontology in more countries. “Why not put that money into local people doing something?” she asked. “At the end of the day we are all going to be using that data. So why should they not also benefit?” While the fossil riches present in the rocks of North Africa and the Levant have long drawn fossil hunters and scientists, Mr. Bazzi said, the majority of fieldwork has resulted in fossils being exported to European or American institutions. Mr. Bazzi’s parents are from Lebanon, while his colleague Yara Haridy — a doctoral student at Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde — was born in Egypt. Because of the lack of opportunities, neither can find steady academic work in paleontology in the Middle East. As part of their trip to Gafsa, both wanted to try to start building up paleontological resources instead of just removing them. That was part of what led Mr. Bazzi and Ms. Haridy — after many careful conversations with local participants over coffee and tea — to the ruins of a museum in the small mining town of Métlaoui. The museum had been burned down during the protests of the 2011 Jasmine Revolution that helped trigger the Arab Spring. It had not been restored, and on their third day in Tunisia, a mining engineer told them it might be worth visiting. Stepping carefully through the ruins, they found an unexpected wealth of fossil material: immense turtle shells, crocodile jawbones, dinosaur vertebrae and even ancient human remains, all scattered across dusty floors and charred rubble. The collection had to be salvaged, the team decided, but not taken out of the country. “Every other question we got was, ‘Oh, are you guys going to take this stuff?,’” Ms. Haridy said. “And we told them, no, it’s yours. It should stay here. It’s part of this region’s story.” Instead, they partnered with the people of Métlaoui to help them save the remains. Within a day, the town’s mayor and other community authorities had assembled local workers and students from Gafsa University. Mr. Bazzi’s team handed out gloves and masks and a stream of Métlaoui residents went to work pulling fossils from the ruins. “It was a pretty big operation,” Ms. Haridy said. “Everyone got really excited.” The team cataloged the bones before boxing and sending them to a government facility in Gafsa. The hope is that the museum remains will provide the nucleus for an ongoing paleontology program at Gafsa University; Mr. Bazzi has been helping to supervise interested students. One such student, Mohammed Messai, said that he didn’t know much about paleontology before meeting Mr. Bazzi, but that he’s now made identifying the fossils recovered from the museum part of the research for his master’s degree in science. It’s important for paleontologists to build genuine partnerships with local researchers, Ms. Haridy said. Not only does this create community engagement and prompt people to regard fossils as worth protecting, it also helps ensure that specimens are properly studied when they are returned to their country of origin. “There’s this problem where even if a country demands fossils back, like Egypt did for a long time, a lot of the paleontological knowledge doesn’t necessarily return with it,” she said. Without investing in independent paleontology programs in the countries in question, fossils can end up “consigned to a dusty room, where nobody knows what to do with it.” But efforts to create more inclusive and distributed paleontological networks face considerable headwinds. “Funders don’t necessarily put any emphasis on the ethical side of the research,” Dr. Dunne said. “We do rely a lot on other countries for their data. Fossils are worldwide, they’re global, they don’t respect political boundaries. But we should be identifying these patterns of colonial bias in our research and stopping them.” To some extent, the presence of these conversations is itself a sign of change. “When I began paleontology some 45 years ago these issues were of no concern,” Dr. Martill said. “Today, they seem to be dominating paleontological discussions. Perhaps it is me who is now out of touch.” He added that, “a fantastic new generation of paleontologists emerging and they are flexing their muscles and demanding different things.” For now, Mr. Bazzi’s team hopes to drive funding toward local paleontology in Tunisia. “Ideally, the Tunisian government would just believe these people on their own and agree that their fossils are important and worthy of preservation, and is of international interest,” Ms. Haridy said. “But they tend to get interested once scientists are actually actively trying to visit and actively trying to work with people.” “You now have local people starting to drive this themselves,” Mr. Bazzi said. “Eventually there will be no need for others to come and do it.” Source link Orbem News #Colonialism #field #FossilFinding #Uprooting

[orbemnews]

Uprooting Colonialism From the Fossil Finding Field In 2019, Mohamad Bazzi, a doctoral student at Uppsala University in Sweden, launched an expedition to Tunisia in search of fossils. He and his colleagues traveled to the phosphate mines around the city of Gafsa, where 56 million-year-old rocks record a time of rapidly warming oceans and mass extinctions, particularly of apex predators like sharks. Mr. Bazzi made some distinctive choices for this paleontological expedition. For starters, his team hired Tunisians to help dig, rather than bringing students from his university. Mr. Bazzi and his colleagues also chose to reach out to the residents of Gafsa wherever possible, holding impromptu lectures on the area’s fossil history to interested onlookers. This was a contrast with the secretiveness of many paleontologists in the field, who might worry about their sites being raided for the fossil black market. The fossils the team collected from Gafsa are important for learning more about how animals adapted to the hothouse world of the Eocene, a period that may foretell what’s in store for the planet in coming years if carbon emissions don’t slow. But while Mr. Bazzi’s team removed the fossils from Tunisia, they did so under an agreement with local institutions that Mr. Bazzi himself insisted on: After he finished his research, the remains would be returned. Historically, these specimens are seldom returned, and locals may never see them again. But Mr. Bazzi and his colleagues are part of a movement among the next generation of paleontological researchers, one attempting to change scientific practices that descend directly from 19th century colonialism, which exploited native peoples and their natural histories. Over the last few decades, multiple countries have demanded the return of looted art, antiquities, cultural treasures and human remains from museum collections in North America and Europe. Countries such as Mongolia and Chile have likewise demanded the return of collected fossils, from tyrannosaur bones to the preserved remains of giant ground sloths. “There’s a consistent pattern with these specimens of high scientific or aesthetic value, where they’re taken out of the developing world and shipped abroad to be displayed and shown to a wider audience elsewhere,” Mr. Bazzi said. “There should be some balance so that local parties have a say in what happens to them.” Many countries with less money to spend on funding their own scientists are home to important fossil deposits that could drive major advances of our understanding of the prehistoric world. If the field of paleontology is to move forward, these researchers say, it’s important to figure out how to study specimens in these places without extending colonial legacies. That will take the development of a different approach to the field, more like the ones being tried by Mr. Bazzi and other scientists that rely less on extraction and more on collaboration with and the development of local institutions. While many cultures throughout human history have long traditions around collecting or studying fossil remains, the discipline of scientific paleontology — as well as the formation of modern natural history museums — arose in the 18th century, when European powers were actively colonizing large swaths of the globe. According to Emma Dunne, an Irish paleontologist at University of Birmingham in England, European scientists were part of a colonial network that sucked natural wealth — including fossils — into imperial capitals. In the 20th century, some countries pushed back. Brazil and Argentina provide government funding of paleontology. Those countries and others, such as Mongolia, established laws forbidding the export of fossils from within their borders. The two South American countries also mandate that foreign researchers work with local paleontologists for research on fossils found in the country. “You still do have non-Argentinian researchers working with local ones, for example,” said Nussaibah Raja-Schoob, a Mauritian paleontologist based at Germany’s University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. “But you definitely see that there is a bigger local influence.” Even in the aftermath of colonialism, however, fossils from across the globe still tend to end up in American and European museums. Some are collected through approved scientific expeditions. But because fossils are also traded privately, fossil-rich countries with fewer resources and legal protections often see interesting and potentially valuable finds put up for auction in Western markets. Questions about where fossils belong and who is best suited to work on them have sparked sharp controversies in recent years. In some cases, researchers have raised concerns about the ethics of working on such privately collected fossils — particularly those which may have been exported illegally. At the same time, paleontologists in Western countries have bristled at the rules required by countries like Brazil. In one case in 2015, David Martill, a paleobiologist at the University of Portsmouth in England, dismissed questions about his team’s lack of collaboration with Brazilian researchers on a specimen found there. “I mean, do you want me also to have a Black person on the team for ethnicity reasons, and a cripple and a woman, and maybe a homosexual too just for a bit of all round balance?” he said in an interview at the time with Herton Escobar, a Brazilian science journalist. Dr. Martill said in an interview in December that he chose his words poorly. But he said he remains opposed to laws that dictate where fossils go. In 2020, he was a co-author of a paper on another find exported from Brazil and described without a Brazilian co-author. “I do not think governments should dictate who works on fossils,” he said. “I think scientists should be able to choose who they work with.” These sorts of controversies are one example of the way the discipline’s colonial history lingers, Ms. Raja-Schoob says. But there are others. Much of global paleontology is still conducted in languages like English, German and French. And according to an ongoing research project by Ms. Raja-Schoob and Dr. Dunne, countries with higher G.D.P.s — places like the United States, France, Germany and China — tend to report more fossil data, in part because they have the money to invest in academic paleontology programs. Many institutions around the world have neither the tools nor enough government support for sophisticated studies of fossils. But that is something scientific institutions from wealthier countries can help with. “We have to ask why we’re bringing this knowledge to the centers, rather than spreading it out,” Dr. Dunne said. “We can work with things like 3-D scans of fossils, we can work with digital data sets. The problem obviously is getting funding for museums to do this for themselves.” Ms. Raja-Schoob said that academic funding could promote geology and paleontology in more countries. “Why not put that money into local people doing something?” she asked. “At the end of the day we are all going to be using that data. So why should they not also benefit?” While the fossil riches present in the rocks of North Africa and the Levant have long drawn fossil hunters and scientists, Mr. Bazzi said, the majority of fieldwork has resulted in fossils being exported to European or American institutions. Mr. Bazzi’s parents are from Lebanon, while his colleague Yara Haridy — a doctoral student at Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde — was born in Egypt. Because of the lack of opportunities, neither can find steady academic work in paleontology in the Middle East. As part of their trip to Gafsa, both wanted to try to start building up paleontological resources instead of just removing them. That was part of what led Mr. Bazzi and Ms. Haridy — after many careful conversations with local participants over coffee and tea — to the ruins of a museum in the small mining town of Métlaoui. The museum had been burned down during the protests of the 2011 Jasmine Revolution that helped trigger the Arab Spring. It had not been restored, and on their third day in Tunisia, a mining engineer told them it might be worth visiting. Stepping carefully through the ruins, they found an unexpected wealth of fossil material: immense turtle shells, crocodile jawbones, dinosaur vertebrae and even ancient human remains, all scattered across dusty floors and charred rubble. The collection had to be salvaged, the team decided, but not taken out of the country. “Every other question we got was, ‘Oh, are you guys going to take this stuff?,’” Ms. Haridy said. “And we told them, no, it’s yours. It should stay here. It’s part of this region’s story.” Instead, they partnered with the people of Métlaoui to help them save the remains. Within a day, the town’s mayor and other community authorities had assembled local workers and students from Gafsa University. Mr. Bazzi’s team handed out gloves and masks and a stream of Métlaoui residents went to work pulling fossils from the ruins. “It was a pretty big operation,” Ms. Haridy said. “Everyone got really excited.” The team cataloged the bones before boxing and sending them to a government facility in Gafsa. The hope is that the museum remains will provide the nucleus for an ongoing paleontology program at Gafsa University; Mr. Bazzi has been helping to supervise interested students. One such student, Mohammed Messai, said that he didn’t know much about paleontology before meeting Mr. Bazzi, but that he’s now made identifying the fossils recovered from the museum part of the research for his master’s degree in science. It’s important for paleontologists to build genuine partnerships with local researchers, Ms. Haridy said. Not only does this create community engagement and prompt people to regard fossils as worth protecting, it also helps ensure that specimens are properly studied when they are returned to their country of origin. “There’s this problem where even if a country demands fossils back, like Egypt did for a long time, a lot of the paleontological knowledge doesn’t necessarily return with it,” she said. Without investing in independent paleontology programs in the countries in question, fossils can end up “consigned to a dusty room, where nobody knows what to do with it.” But efforts to create more inclusive and distributed paleontological networks face considerable headwinds. “Funders don’t necessarily put any emphasis on the ethical side of the research,” Dr. Dunne said. “We do rely a lot on other countries for their data. Fossils are worldwide, they’re global, they don’t respect political boundaries. But we should be identifying these patterns of colonial bias in our research and stopping them.” To some extent, the presence of these conversations is itself a sign of change. “When I began paleontology some 45 years ago these issues were of no concern,” Dr. Martill said. “Today, they seem to be dominating paleontological discussions. Perhaps it is me who is now out of touch.” He added that, “a fantastic new generation of paleontologists emerging and they are flexing their muscles and demanding different things.” For now, Mr. Bazzi’s team hopes to drive funding toward local paleontology in Tunisia. “Ideally, the Tunisian government would just believe these people on their own and agree that their fossils are important and worthy of preservation, and is of international interest,” Ms. Haridy said. “But they tend to get interested once scientists are actually actively trying to visit and actively trying to work with people.” “You now have local people starting to drive this themselves,” Mr. Bazzi said. “Eventually there will be no need for others to come and do it.” Source link Orbem News #Colonialism #field #finding #fossil #Uprooting