Separatists in Government

When the Canadian Parliament reconvenes in January, it's looking quite likely that the government will be taken over by a coalition of the Liberals, NDP, and Bloc Quebecois. One point of consternation for some about this proposed coalition is that it includes the Bloc, whose platform includes independence for Quebec. The concern goes beyond simply objecting to power being held by those whose policy priorities you disagree with -- the claim is that it's illegitimate for a country to be run by people who want to see the country broken up. Similar concerns were raised when it was discovered that then-US VP candidate Sarah Palin had ties to the Alaska Independence Party*. How could we possibly vote for a VP who might want her home state to not be part of the country at all?

I have trouble seeing how there's anything particularly wrong with separatists running for, and attaining, leadership positions in the country they wish to separate from. The idea that it's illegitimate seems to come from thinking of the country as an entity with its own interests -- in which case, it does seem odd to give control of it to someone who opposes its existence.

But countries don't have interests independent of the interests of their members. Governments are tools created by groups of people to implement policies in the interest of the citizens. One such policy may be to rearrange the borders of the country. That may very well be a bad policy -- but there are lots of bad policies a party may wish to implement (from what I saw of the Alaska Independence Party's platform, seceding from the US was about the least objectionable plank to me).

To say that separatism is an inherently illegitimate policy for a governing party to support implies one of two conclusions, neither of which strike me as particularly palatable:
1) Separatism, if it's a good policy, must be pursued outside the normal policymaking process -- which means armed rebellion. I don't think I'm alone in preferring to go the way of Czechoslovakia rather than Yugoslavia.
2) Separatism is an inherently illegitimate policy -- it's wrong to want to alter the existing borders of countries. But how can we say the current borders, most of which are accidents of history, are sacrosanct?

It's fine to oppose separatism for Quebec or Alaska on the merits, and on that basis to oppose politicians who back those policies (I actually don't have a real opinion on those issues). But there's nothing illegitimate about them proposing such policies, or of winning high office while supporting them.

*Ties which turned out to be much less significant than initial reports suggested.

Scientific Hubris and Informed Consent

If Inside Higher Ed is accurately summarizing the facts, this case seems like it ought to be open-and-shut. In brief, a researcher got informed consent from members of the Havasupai tribe to take blood samples to do research on diabetes among tribe members. Later, some other researchers used that blood to do other research -- research that the Havasupai did not, and likely would not, consent to.

One of the offending researchers is a case study in scientific hubris:

That article stressed the difficulties posed for researchers by the dispute, particularly since the Havasupai have stopped cooperating with most studies, and some other Indian groups have expressed similar reluctance. Markow noted that the research to which the tribe objects could help many of its members. "What concerns me deeply is that the allegations have resulted in a moratorium on biomedical research on the Havasupai reservation, excluding this and other communities from discoveries with the potential to address their health concerns," Markow told Nature.

I'll grant for the sake of argument that Markow's research would have substantial benefits for the tribe -- though I believe that in general, academic researchers have a bad habit of exaggerating the concrete benefits, to the subjects and to the wider society, of their research. But the people you need to convince of that are the Havasupai. And the researcher whose actions led to the moratorium (again, assuming the Inside Higher Ed story is accurate) has no right to complain about its negative effects.

Scientific research is great. I personally would consent to researchers doing whatever scientifically valid research they like with any samples of my blood they happen to have, and if I had my druthers we'd have a comprehensive database of blood samples with a blanket consent license. However, the fact that it would be nice to have such a thing does not relieve researchers of the duty to secure the actual consent of the subjects. This is especially, especially true when the subjects are in a substantially less powerful social position and have a history of being exploited and having their perspective and knowledge treated as invalid by the very scientific establishment that's now proposing to play fast and loose with the consent rules.

What's more, short term paternalistic hubris that forges ahead simply because you can has negative consequences -- for the subjects and for the scientific community -- in the wider view. In the Havasupai case, we get this:

[Havasupai lawyer Robert] Rosette said that the knowledge that their blood was used against their wishes has had a devastating emotional impact on tribe members, who feel that they have been lured into violating their most sacred beliefs by giving up their blood and who also have lost trust in Western medicine. "Now we have people who won�t even see a doctor. We have plaintiffs in this case dying and losing limbs because they are afraid of doctors."

There are interesting parallels here to the issue of local police enforcing immigration law. When police start short-sightedly taking advantage of any opportunity that presents itself to nab someone who's undocumented or otherwise out of status, they end up undermining trust with the whole community (including citizens and people with status), ultimately causing harms to the community (fear, non-compliance with emergency relief, etc.) and undermining the police's larger job of crime prevention (to the detriment of the immigrants' community and the wider society).

Researchers have a duty to gain the trust and consent of both the wider public and the specific research subjects -- especially if the justification for their research is its alleged benefits to those very people. The drive for knowledge does not trump everything else. Even when people ought to consent to research, the researcher has no right to enforce that duty by forging ahead despite a lack of consent.

There are some more complicated issues circling in this area. One that springs to mind is the clash between individual and collective consent. The current paradigm of informed consent assumes that the harms from participating in the research accrue to the research subject, and thus can be accepted or avoided on an individual basis. But that is not always the case. For example, one of the harms that leads the Havasupai to not consent to the new research is that the results support the theory that Native Americans migrated from Asia, disproving the tribe's traditional religion (causing emotional distress and undermining their way of life which was premised in part on that origin story). Let's say a researcher followed proper informed consent protocols and found a significant number of Havasupai who would in fact consent to having blood samples taken for the out-of-Asia research. When the research results come out, it's not only the actual blood donors whose traditional religion is challenged -- it's all Havasupai (and indeed, there would likely be collateral impacts on all other Native American tribes). So do the non-consenters just have to suck it up and deal? Or do they get a veto -- and if so, how many noes are needed to cancel the research? What person or institution has the authority to speak for the tribe? And how can non-tribe-member researchers sort through the issues when tribal members dispute the answers to these questions with each other?

Another issue is where the boundaries of consent lie. Imagine that the out-of-Asia paper didn't require re-analysis of the actual blood samples -- instead, the author could support her point simply by citing the published results of the consented-to diabetes study. In one sense, such a paper seems to have potentially the same effects as the real direct-blood-analysis-based paper, albeit without the additional sense of invasion created by the direct work with Havasupai body parts. But to stop published research from being cited in support of projects the original subjects wouldn't consent to would be a serious change in the norms of scientific discourse.

NIMBY as the moral high ground

There's a common story in environmental politics that goes like this: Some locally unwanted land use (LULU), such as a trash incinerator or factory, is proposed for some location. The neighbors object. The proponents of the LULU charge that the neighbors are just NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard) -- they're fine with the facility in the abstract, but they selfishly want to foist it off on some other neighborhood. In order to reclaim the moral high ground and rebut the idea that they just want to stick the LULU elsewhere, the neighbors reply that their view is actually NIABY (Not In Anyone's Back Yard, which on an expansive definition of "backyard" amounts to NOPE (Not On Planet Earth)) -- they think society can do without the LULU, at least in its current objectionable form.

Here in Casa Grande, we have a proposal to put a metal shredder that would grind up old cars and so forth in a light industrial park. The neighbors are upset, and have written numerous letters to the editor of my employer, the Dispatch (which unfortunately do not appear to be on its website). What I find interesting is that several of them reverse the usual NIMBY dynamic. They insist that they support recycling in general and metal shredders in particular, but they just don't think it's right to put such a facility here in Casa Grande. In other words, 'Don't accuse me of NIABY! I'm NIMBY!" (Granted, it's not a perfect reversal, since these writers would probably not approve of a shredder in a similar light industrial park elsewhere -- they want it located far from other houses and businesses.)

Immigration Reduces Deforestation

There's an interesting perspective on the "immigration versus the environment" question in an article just published in Human Ecology by Birgit Schmook and Claudia Radel*.

Schmook and Radel looked at what happens in the southern Yucatan -- where deforestation is a significant environmental problem -- when people migrate to the U.S. looking for work. The simplified version of the story they tell goes like this: In the 1960s, a new road through the area allowed lots of people to move in and take up farming, creating significant deforestation. The advent of neoliberal policies in Mexico -- the withdrawal of state subsidies and an emphasis on private activity in the global market -- led to increases in growing chiles for sale. Households who were successful in chile-growing had the money to pay for one or more members to migrate to the U.S., while those that were very unsuccessful were forced by their debt to look to work in the U.S. for sufficient funds to get back on their feet. Households with migrants saw an increase in their wealth and material well-being. They also generally experienced re-forestation, because relying on remittances was more profitable than farming, and the absence of the migrant decreased the labor available to the household. Households with migrants increasingly converted already-cleared agricultural land into cattle pasture (though they didn't necessarily own cattle to graze on it, at least yet), since that's less labor-intensive to maintain (it appears pasture and cattle are also subsidized in various ways).

I can't say there's any clear policy implication here right away, but it does add some new angles to the issue.

*The article is based on research from the Clark University-based SYPR project, which many friends and acquaintances of mine have been part of, though I don't personally know these authors very well.