Lessons Learned from Waterfleas, Whales and Bees: 

A journey into environmental controversies in the search for sustainable food

Ecology seeks to understand how organisms interact with their environment. It is a biological science that looks at how things are interconnected, how they interrelate. I am an ecologist interested in how we, the human species, interact with our environment. My work is transdisciplinary; researching the human/nature relationship through overlapping lens of biological science, ecological ethics and environmental politics. In this talk I will present some of the lessons I have learned about how ethics and politics are entangled in the science of environmental harm. These are lessons I have learned from working with waterfleas, whales and bees.

How we feed ourselves, as a species, is one of the foundational ways we construct and conduct our interaction with nature/the environment/our ecological community. It is a key mode of entry into our relationship with the rest of life on Earth. Today there is increasing recognition that modern industrial food systems have created extensive environmental damage and there is an urgent quest to find sustainable solutions. In this quest though, certain technologies and practices generate intense socio-political controversy over their role in a sustainable future. 

This presentation will explore two such sustainable food controversies: genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in agriculture and the hunting of whales and seals in the North Atlantic. Through my ongoing engagement with these issues, I will demonstrate how the question of what constitutes environmental harm is a splendid swirling nexus of science, ethics and politics. And that in this complexity, there is much we can learn from being attentive to waterfleas, whales and bees. Indeed, to all the other species we share this extraordinary planet with.

Fern Wickson is an Australian citizen who has been living in Norway for over a decade. She is a Research Professor of Environmental Governance and holds an interdisciplinary PhD across biology and political science. Her work has focused on the science/policy interface and specifically, the integration of science, indigenous knowledge, stakeholder views and environmental philosophy in the pursuit of sustainable food systems.

Dr. Fern Wickson is the Scientific Secretary of the North Atlantic Marine Mammal Commission (NAMMCO) and a Senior Advisor at GenØk Centre for Biosafety in Tromsø, Norway. Committed to ecological ethics and a politics of socio-ecological care, the primary objective of her work has been to advance sustainability in food systems and responsibility in research and innovation arenas.

Fern has served as an expert delegate to the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) working group on the diverse conceptualization of values in nature. She is also a member of the Norwegian Biotechnology Advisory Board and past President of the international Society for the Study of New and Emerging Technologies (S.Net).

In her spare time, Fern enjoys hiking, snowboarding, kayaking and trying to grow her own food. She is also a yoga and meditation teacher and runs her own studio in Tromsø called The Peaceful Wild.