When the window is a mirror: how do dominant theories limit our understanding of nature? (ESA 2023 INS23)

The narratives and metaphors that ecologists use to describe natural phenomena influence what we study and how we do it (Larson 2011, Craver and Darden 2013, Otto and Rosales 2020). Stories about ecological processes and patterns are told through particular frames and are laden with assumptions arising from their framing. For example, the tubercle bacillus became the cause of tuberculosis, rather than unregulated industrial capitalism, through storytelling: the framing of the story was biomedical, and as a result the assumption for how to treat tuberculosis was through individual medical intervention, rather than (for example) a social revolution (Levins and Lewontin 1985). More recently, a commonly cited solution to rising CO₂ emissions is to plant trees, which conveniently elides the social and economic roots of global warming.

The responsible use of particular frames, narratives, and analogies for understanding nature requires that we reflect on our choices: Which stories do we tell? How do we tell them? And how do they structure the way we study the natural world? To make room for this kind of reflection, we organized and participated in an Inspire session entitled “When the window is a mirror: how do dominant theories limit our understanding of nature?” at the ESA 2023 meeting. This session was an attempt to explore the limitations of current theory and their consequences for understanding what we observe in the natural world. In a set of case studies, we examined existing “mirrors”: examples in which ecological models are built on assumptions that constrain the research process, and in doing so reveal something about ourselves and the narratives we privilege.

Our speakers described the limits of theory on topics ranging from sexual behavior to plant–microbe interactions to genetic polymorphism. This allowed us to look for uniting themes across subdisciplines of ecology. In bringing these subdisciplines together, we attempted to highlight such limitations not as isolated exceptions, but rather as recurring consequences of singular, dominant ways of approaching ecological questions. Our session emphasized the importance of creativity and wonderment in scientific research and the power of pluralistic approaches for confronting theoretical limitations brought on by societal assumptions.