Who Are the Scientists Here?
The first thing we did after arriving in Moʻorea, a high volcanic island 20 kilometers northwest of Tahiti, was pick up a hitchhiker named Didier. I was visiting the island with Hannah Stewart, a Canadian marine biologist with a passion for tiny “housekeeper” crabs as well as Polynesian culture. Stewart was busy with the first iteration of a new class she’d created to bring Berkeley undergraduates to Mo’orea. The students stayed at the University of California’s Gump South Pacific Research Station, but ranged over the island, learning about biodiversity, environmental policy, and Tahitian culture from local experts.
Stewart pulled over so that I could look down the densely foliated hillside to the lagoon. Coconut palms stuck their heads over a white sand beach, from which thatched tourist bungalows crept out over impossibly turquoise water, splotched with shadowy outcroppings of coral. Stewart is the kind of outdoorsy blue-eyed blond I envied in high school, but what’s really appealing about her is a kind of impetuous energy that makes it seem, when you’re with her, like anything could happen. Didier must have felt it, too, because he immediately asked in French whether she was single. Hannah let him down gently, then asked a question of her own: What did he know about the American research station on the island?
“Gump?” Didier said. “I thought that was closed.”
“That’s the problem,” Stewart said to me after Didier hopped out. Marine conservation in Mo’orea was stymied by foreign scientists’ failure to communicate with the island’s Indigenous people and other local communities. “That’s what we’re trying to address with this class.”
I had come to Mo’orea because of something Stewart told me during our first call in the summer of 2021. “We’re not just training scientists, because we maybe—probably—don’t need more scientists,” she said. The reasons Stewart was fed up with academic research—the parachuting in and out of field sites to collect data, and the intense specialization inside even very similar subfields—were what interested me. I’m a novelist, and I sometimes write about scientists. Imaginary worlds rest heavily on concrete detail, and nothing is more concrete than a complex experimental set-up in a lab. Because conflict is at the heart of fiction, I wanted to know more about the tension between scientists and French Polynesia’s Indigenous
