Today Dr. Gillian Bowser will discuss DEIJ in Ecology and why we might be navigating with eyes wide shut! Dr. Bowser is in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Sustainability at Colorado State University and is the lead PI on the Youth Environmental Alliance in Higher Education (YEAH)- a National Science Foundation funded research collaboration network to introduce multicultural youth to global environmental negotiations at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Dr. Bowser’s lab focuses on pollinators and national parks including work on citizen science as a tool to engage multicultural audiences in addressing pollinator declines worldwide and the impacts on sustainable food systems. She is also an author on the upcoming National Climate Assessment (NCA5) on the biodiversity chapter as well as an author on the UN Environment’s Global Gender Environmental Outlook (GGEO2) on gender and biodiversity.
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Justice or DEIJ has emerged as an urgent concept in the sciences where different minority groups remain woefully underrepresented in the sciences. Environmental sciences, especially the fields of ecology, have made remarkable strides on the representation of women, yet the historically marginalized groups do not reflect those successes with minority women still representing less than 5% of the STEM workforce. In this talk, I will explore the parallels with inclusive policy making for other global issues and the application of those frameworks to rethink the approaches of diversifying the environmental disciplines with a focus on the field based sciences like ecology.