The Benefit (Sometimes) of Ignorance about the Environment

Lack of knowledge -- whether unintended or deliberate -- has received much attention in recent years.  We now know a lot about ignorance: enough for it to be the focus of its own research field -- agnotology -- the basic idea of which is that ignorance is not simply the absence of knowledge, but something that has been itself historically constituted.  The misrepresentation of climate change by oil companies and other interest groups, the suppression of huge amounts of environmental and health information by the Trump administration (and before them, by the Harper government), and the steady obfuscation and lying about environmental and health risks by corporate interests, have demonstrated that ignorance is not just a Bad Thing, but has major (and often destructive) political and social consequences.

But it's been interesting to see in recent years growing awareness of how knowledge can also be sometimes destructive, and ignorance sometimes necessary.  And some of this has to do with social media.

As recently described in Yale Environment 360, poachers and other ethically-challenged people have been using online sources to find rare species to hunt, trap, kill and collect, which they then sell to similarly challenged collectors.  It's a striking example of how novel sources of information that are now available to everyone, and that have often been really useful in conservation, can also be misused.  This includes databases assembled through citizen science.

It's unfortunate that efforts to conserve species and habitat, or to spread knowledge and commitment to nature more widely, can themselves have destructive consequences.  At least, it's a reminder that edicts about the careful sharing of information on social media (avoid stupid party pictures) now need to cross the species barrier.