RE:
https://climatejustice.social/@rancholibertad/116944347497011525
It's funny because this paradigm of being questioned for what our qualifications are at the Ranch, as though we aren't proving pretty significantly that our research and lived experience is foundationally enough and extremely valuable, is the opposite of what I'm met with in response to some of my writing here on esoteric topics.
Where with ecological topics folks are like "you literally cannot think about this if you haven't been significantly trained by the actual 'experts' with PhDs in universities"
With esoteric topics if I say "look, there are no experts, I'm not the expert, but you should think about this deeply" folks are like "you literally should never have the gall to say that I should *think* about anything that I want, because I want it and that's enough".
I feel like we could unpack this pretty heavily but I don't have the bandwidth at this *exact* moment
Open quoted post Quoting
Sometimes folks are like "what qualifications do you have for talking about [native plants, permaculture, closed-loop farming, rainfall patterns, survival strategy, etc]?"
And I think that's so wild. There are folks out here with biology and environmental science degrees that no doubt comprehend a topic through a framework I don't, at least not on that level, and they're making policy and running the environmental nonprofits in this region. But there's something really fucked up about that: they're *not* the experts.
They're the people pushing the "all invasive plants are bad, rip them all out" agenda, which mirrors pretty hideously the "all immigrants are bad, lock them all up" agenda -- and both share the SAME massive blind spot of refusing to evaluate the reality of relational structure and determine where entities fit and how they benefit system OR how to deal with them holistically and ethically *as* beings when evaluating the drawbacks of their existence in a given space that perhaps cannot support them *right now*.
The point here is that it's really really really easy to think you're really decolonizing your stewardship efforts and social behavior and then fall into something like "science is good, science helps us, therefore anyone who isn't a scientist shouldn't be making any decisions" which is kind of like "well those non-white, non-land-owning, non-male people seem pretty dumb and I'm sure nothing they say or believe or know has any value". ESPECIALLY when it comes to talking to a duo of people where one of the people really pushing the ideas and policy and knowledge format is literally an Indigenous person who has lineage ties to this land.
The other consideration here is that there's enormous potential for hyper-local knowledge and sharing the framework for obtaining hyper-local knowledge to be more beneficial than the kind of generalities that are taught by necessity in universities (the patterns of which are rife with settler assumptions, also). What works here in our Valley is not what works in Morongo Valley, but the framework for accessing what works is the same, and so we share *that* for folks not to claim we somehow know everything about all ecosystems, like the folks with degrees do, but to literally empower all of you to make the most important decisions within your ecosystem and community that no one else can come in and make for you without probably making some critically dangerous assumptions.
The idea of people with more knowledge on a topic is not a new one, but the concept that tenured, degreed up experts are the ONLY people who should ever speak on a topic is relatively new to post-industrial societies and quite frankly it's dangerous and an extraordinarily sharp blade to wield against folks who are actively attempting to heal land that isn't well understood and whose history is actively suppressed.
Open quoted post 
