From a young age, stories of ancient cultures and their profound relationship with the territory have always piqued my interest. My grandmother used to tell me stories about how her ancestors lived, my great-great-great-grandparents. They lived in harmony with nature, and my grandmother looked back at her ancestors with visible pride. They were, she said, good “forest people”, which has since become a term I use to describe who I come from when I tell that same history.
In our rapidly changing global society, indigenous ecological knowledge remains salient. This knowledge, imparted over generations, is of great consequence for biocultural conservation: a kind of conservation hat looks to preserve biological and cultural diversity. But what, indeed, is biocenervation, and why should we pathologize when indigenous communities have been practicing it for generations?
The conservation of biocultural diversity implies the interconnectedness of biological and cultural diversity. Biocultural diversity conservation extends well beyond the more conventional understanding, settled increasingly among conservation biologists that it is not enough to speak in terms of conserving species and habitats. The above figures should be reason enough for those engaged in biodiversity conservation to take seriously the traditional ecological knowledge and local sense of place that indigenous peoples and local communities from around the world use to manage “their” 80% of Earth’s biodiversity.
Take the Awa, for instance, who live in the Amazon rainforest. They have an amazing understanding of plants and their medicinal properties. The Awa don’t just harvest plants; they care for them. Caring and protecting an environment is truly sustainable only when it keeps the environment healthy and ensures its future for generations to come. I hardly think I have to point out the contrast between this path and the path of deforestation, which we know leads to a poor and less diverse environment.
The ecological knowledge of indigenous peoples is not a narrow ethos; it includes an enormous array of what are sometimes called “adaptive practices” which stretch from farming to conservation. By and large, these are not one-off, do-it-and-leave-it-alone practices, but rather are dynamic and evolving ways in which communities have incalculably long experience in managing for overall resilience in ecosystems that are always changing in some way or another, especially under the joint forces of human management and the chancy variations of overall ecology.
Biocultural conservation stresses the idea of a symbiotic relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world. The concept promises a crucial re-framing of the “culture vs. nature” argument that Hébert and other biocultural conservationists believe not only incorrectly characterizes the actual state of affairs but also stymies any productive conversation about “the next steps” for humanity. Unlike the socioeconomic paradigm of current development models, biocultural conservation takes a hard look at the ones that have allowed a sustainable relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world to form and shows us that this, too, can work as a model.
Tales from the Trenches: Uses in the Actual World
I was given the chance to go to the mountainous area of Peru, where for millennia, the Quechua have been growing potatoes. Do you know that there are about 1,400 kinds of potatoes grown in the world? Well, the Quechua grow a large share of them and in ways that, you might say, are a large part of why there’s such a thing as a potato to taste or relish. The climatic conditions in the highlands of Peru that stretch across the Callejon de Huaylas are part of what makes this an “agriculture of microclimates.” The structures the Incas put up to grow crops afford different conditions for different crops inside the same terraced field.
Don Alberto, a farmer, guided me through his fields. He spoke of how he chose each variety of potato; where and how they grew made them different. He talked like one revealing the secrets of a magic trick. I took notes, but the story I really wanted to tell was the one of Alberto as a potato artist, of his ability to do astonishing things with land, water, and seed, all the while not mixing up potatoes under his paints.
Conserving bioculture isn’t about being stuck in the past or isolating people from the present. It’s about local people, who understand their own history and the biodiversity that surrounds them, innovating for our rapidly changing world. For instance, a group of us recently helped to restore a thousand-year-old fishpond. An ancient saying here is “I ke au o Kaanapali …”—”… in the era of Kaanapali…” So, as we worked, we knew that we were inaugurating a new era of Kaanapali when it came to Hale-o-Keawe.
Indigenous knowledges are rarely presented as a teaching priority in classrooms, which tends to focus more on modern teaching practices to facilitate student learning. Most classrooms would rarely acknowledge places where multiple worlds of knowledge are performed, yet most indigenous speakers make precisely these performances their primary means of explanation. Indigenous knowledge is peace education when ecologically oriented indigenous speakers present ways of knowing that as a peace pedagogy on their terms and is rarely acknowledged as such on the part of modern teachers or scientists.
The Martu people of Australia use fire to tend their landscape, a practice sometimes referred to as “fire-stick farming.” Using fire in resource management is actually what the rest of us are doing when we label our methods “controlled burning.” The Martu light fires on their land to burn up dead brush before the brush has a chance to hold a large lightning fire. They’ve been doing it for thousands of years, and recent research suggests that it might be a game-changer in modern fire management in Australia and elsewhere.
The Kayapo people of Brazil shield large areas of the Amazon rainforest through a mix of age-old know-how and newfangled tech. They keep an eye on what’s happening with satellite imagery and use GPS to zero in on the locations of not-so-good-for-the-trees “timber poaching.” The Kayapo’s 21st-century approach to conservation also embraces the power of video. Using “sting” operations, they’ve had Earth Rangers go undercover and film the flagrant axing of trees to obtain wood and clear land.
Moving Ahead: Esteem, Cooperation, and Activity
For biocultural conservation to be embraced, we must change the way we look at nature. Instead of seeing it as a realm overseen by the laws of ecology and a series of relationships in which some organisms eat others and are in turn eaten themselves, we must embrace a new concept—participation. Participating, or not participating, in food, is the bridge that separates or connects cultures to nature.
A promising development is the recent establishment of the Thaidene Nëné National Park Reserve, which will be co-managed by the Parks Canada national agency and the Łutsël K’é Dene First Nation, a local indigenous collective. These are just two examples of a recent push by North American conservationists to establish various types of legally protected areas that are led by or partnered with indigenous groups and informed by their ancient knowledge. The push is not without precedent or controversy.
Raising awareness and providing an education on the subject are also of the utmost importance. If we incorporate what is known as “Indigenous Ecological Knowledge” into not only the education system (think “new school curricula”) but also the same local and national conversations that inform “new public policies,” then we can start to get somewhere, a different somewhere than the local plant “somewheres” that have become all-too-rare.
We, too, can play our part as individuals. We can declare support for and work alongside the more than 370 million people in 70 countries on five continents who constitute the world’s native and tribal populations. We can also assist them in gaining the same basic human rights that most people reading this sentence take for granted. We can become advocates for their increased well-being in both a “social and ecological sense.” In personal terms, this can mean anything from volunteering and donating to, and even learning from, the “best of the worst” situations in which they live.
The powerful tools needed to address today’s environmental crises can be found in biocultural conservation and indigenous ecological knowledge. These ancient wisdoms are still very relevant today. When integrated into the modern world, they can lead to the building of a resilient and sustainable future. As my grandmother said, “We don’t own the land; the land owns us.” Indigenous peoples live by a profound respect for the land. They and other rural cultures have developed intimate, place-based knowledge over many generations. This knowledge continues to guide our scientific understanding and to underwrite the design of a sustainable world.
To underline the significance of biocultural conservation, we need to probe a little more into some instances that bring out the wonderful indigenous practices that are friendly to our ecological systems and environments.
For the Inuit in the Arctic, the transfer of knowledge about nature and especially ice, their skills and ways of being on the ice are collateral aptitude. They have for a very long time been able to do weather prediction. They know when it’s completely safe to go out on that ice, and yet they also know these signs that tell them when they shouldn’t go out on that ice, ’cause there’s a good chance that it could break up.
In sum, what positive climate change education strategies do you look for in your work that you could recommend to others?
In the Himalayas, the Sherpa people follow the agroforestry method. They combine trees and shrubs with agricultural landscapes. This farming method on steep mountain slopes mixes different plants, trees, and crops. The Sherpas have long recognized the multiple benefits of this far-sighted practice. In a region prone to soil erosion, mixing trees with crops protects fragile topsoil from being washed away. And in a place where every inch of fertile soil counts, the trees also double as green fertilizers, enhancing soil productivity. The mixture of trees, crops, and pastures provides a much more diverse set of ecological niches than would be found in a treeless landscape. This, in turn, supports a broader range of life forms and ecological processes.
At the same time, the Yurok Tribe of the Pacific Northwest makes large-scale efforts to return the basics of their ecosystem to what it was. The Klamath River was one of the mightiest rivers bubbling with salmon in the West, and the Yurok lived with it through cherishing eons of history. However, Americans recently set on a centuries-old course of damming, polluting, and overfishing that took the salmon populations down by over 90% within half a century. Now, like the Forest Stewardship Council, the Yurok combine Western science, which they have learned how to use, with something much more profound, their deep cultural knowledge of how to relate to this river. Because they know what this river was in the past, they have a vision for what it can be in the future, and they are taking the steps to get it back there with a number of return-to-health river projects.
The biocultural conservation model is not a simple, all-encompassing solution. Just as each human culture has a unique language, each ecoregion has a diversity of unique ecosystems, making conservation a complex issue. While modern scientific methods have been successful in helping us to understand the ecological underpinnings of conservation, working with local people might be the missing piece needed to ensure the long-term success of conservation. Traditional methods of working with the local people are often successful because they harness their intergenerational wisdom and life experience underpinning the close-to-nature lifestyles led by many indigenous peoples around the world.
Successful biocultural conservation cannot be achieved without the legal recognition of the land rights of indigenous peoples. This is an absolutely critical component of any work related to conservation, natural resource management, and “development.” Why? Simply put: indigenous peoples often have the longest land tenure in many parts of the world, such as in Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Amazon. When indigenous communities are in political control of their landscapes, we (i.e., those who are not part of the community but are instead “external” conservationists and policy makers) stand a much better chance of successfully upholding a conservation ethic and practices in those places.
An essential aspect is bringing the knowledge of local, aboriginal people into national and international plans for preserving nature. These people have been overlooked and heard far too little in the conservation movement, and when it’s time to put conservation initiatives into practice, they are the first to be evicted. By working with aboriginal people in the conservation planning process, by listening to them, a plan written largely with their words, a plan can then become much more inclusive and certain to preserve vital Earth’s biomes.
Changes in policy are important, but they aren’t enough. We also need indigenous-led education (and reeducation of the non-indigenous people in their lives) as well as opportunities for “Two-Way Exchanges”—whereby the (re)educator is also educated. One good model for this is Australia’s “Two-Way Science” initiative, in which indigenous ecology is given equal billing with Western science (rather than being subsumed under the latter’s umbrella, which is the customary approach in Western conservation).
At a truly personal level, we can each help to conserve biocultures. We can be more aware and make more conscious decisions about how we live our lives. Any kind of purchase we make, food, clothing, a book, etc.—is a declaration of how we intend to treat the environment and indigenous cultures. We can also make a statement with any sort of travel or touring we do. Are we directly responsible for engaging in “human zoos,” where tourists go to cities or tribal lands and feign interest in local cultures so they can gawk at natives?
The road to biocultural conservation is paved with education and intelligent adaptation. On this path, we are coming to understand that not all methods of knowledge production are alike and that paying respect not only to the diversely potent ecology of humanity’s understanding of nature but also to the perhaps equally diverse multitude of understandings of culture can only enhance any conservation initiative. By joining modern science with the wisdom of indigenous peoples, we are not only affecting biocultural conservation but are also creating something of a revolution in modern various ways of thinking about the more-than-human world.
In the time that remains, we must not forget that biocultural conservation is not just a theory or a far-fetched dream, it’s a long and patient practice. Indeed, conserving this relationship between biological and cultural diversity is what humanity has done—successfully—through most of its time on this planet. If you were to overlay paleoanthropology and archaeology spectrums onto the biocultural timeline, you would hardly see any overlap with what we commonly call “modern times.” The collective experience that has led us to this point—good and bad—has strengthened our ties to this place we call home and this thing that we do called biocultural conservation.
We should look to the indigenous communities for inspiration. They have long understood what many of us are only now coming to appreciate, that it is possible to exist with much less of an ecological footprint and to inhabit the Earth without disturbing the natural rhythms that have always sustained it. For millennia, communities have thrived not only without electricity but without the systemic production of the kinds of ecological ‘disturbances’ that researchers say are not sustainable if they are practiced over the long term.
The next time you hear the rustle of wind-blown leaves or feel the dirt under your feet, take a minute to meditate on the seemingly infinite number of generations that have preceded us here. Let the experience and wisdom of those long-ago people help us today as we grapple with making our own lives work on this planet. Our way is not the only way; there have been many successful ways of living, and all of them took time to develop and depended on living naturally and sustainably.
