For thousands of years, ritual has played a
central role in governing sustainable use of the natural
environment.TheTsembaga people of New Guinea for example, use
ritual to allocate scarce protein for their people in a way that
does not cause irreversible damage to the land. The Tukano of
the Northwest Amazon use myth and ritual to prevent over-hunting
and overfishing in their territory. And in the longest
continually inhabited place in the United States, the Hopi village
of Oraibi, people spend up to half of their time in ritual activity
during certain parts of the year. Among all enduring cultures,
ritual has been "a sophisticated social and spiritual technology"
that has helped people to live in harmony with the natural
world.
A recent example of the use of ritual for
conservation comes from Thailand, where "environmentalist monks"
are finding ways to engage Buddhism in the effort to save the
country from further deforestation. In 1991, in the village of Giew
Muang, a monk named Prhaku Pitak helped to breathe life into an
ineffective local forest conservation movement. The effort focused
on a forest used by 10 surrounding villages that had been degraded
and denuded by decades of exploitation. Pitak first used slide
shows, environmental education programmes, and agricultural
projects to teach villagers the importance of forest conservation,
finding ways to make his case in a Buddhist framework. He dubbed
the Buddha "the first environmentalist," for example, because the
Buddha's life was closely : " integrated with forests. And he
stressed the interrelatedness of trees, water supply, and food
production, capitalizing on the Buddhist teaching of "dependent
origination," the interdependence of all things.
Pitak's use of religious rituals to support the
conservation efforts was perhaps his most creative and effective
initiative. Because many of the villagers followed indigenous
religions as well as Buddhism, Pitak first followed their
suggestion to enlist a village elder in asking the village's
guardian spirit to bless the conservation effort. A shrine
was built to the spirit, and offerings were made, involving every
household in the village. Then Pitak turned to Buddhist
rituals. Joined by 10 other monks and surrounded by the villagers,
Pitak "ordained" the largest tree in the forest, wrapping a saffron
robe around it and following most of the rite used in a normal
ordination ceremony. No villager actually viewed the tree as a monk
of course, but the ordination gave the conservation effort a sacred
meaning.Villagers no longer dismissed the effort, because it was
now more than a civic activity. In seeing the trees not just as
resources but as part of a larger ecological and mystical reality,
the villagers were part of the millennia- long chain of generations
that have used ritual to help maintain sustainable resource
use.
Networking
Since the beginning of the 1990s there has been
an increasing number of international symposia and workshops, and a
rapidly expanding list of books and other publications on the
subject of harnessing indigenous knowledge. A simple Internet
search on ‘indigenous knowledge’ will produce about
half a million pages. There is evidence of a global network of
indigenous knowledge resource centres, focusing mostly on
agriculture and sustainable development. The network is fed by a
growing group scholars producing not only academic material but
also feeding information into international policy circles. There
are also parallel developments in other interdisciplinary,
policy-relevant fields such as environmental ethics, common
property resources, and environmental history.
Much of the current activity began in the 1980s
when the Traditional Ecological Knowledge Working Group of the
International Conservation Union (IUCN) was founded on the idea
that traditional ecological knowledge for natural resource
conservation and management had been undervalued. The group
published a newsletter and stimulated further interest through
workshops and publications. Several international initiatives were
undertaken through the United Nations system. One was UNESCO's
programme in traditional management systems in coastal marine
areas. A second was UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere (MAB) Programme,
part of which resulted in scientific investigations of traditional
systems. A third was the work undertaken by the United Nations
Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), which included
an examination of the role of indigenous knowledge in the context
of participatory management in protected areas.
The following examples of indigenous mangement
systems is taken from Fikret Berkes’ book Sacred Ecology,
published by Taylor and Francis in 1999.
Tropical forests
The Mareng of New Guinea practice shifting
cultivation and plant gardens mimicking the diversity of the
tropical forest. Similar shifting cultivation (swidden) systems are
found in Asia, Africa and South America as well. Groups such as the
Runa of Ecuador and the Huastec of tropical Mexico manage the
natural process of ecological succession to produce a sequence of
food crops and other useful products.
Grassland
Many traditional herding peoples of the African
Sahel, such as the Maasai and Turkana of Kenya, have elaborate
grazing sequences which involve rotation and alternation of areas
used by the herds. The Fulani of northern Nigeria say that they
must move at least four times in a season to prevent overuse. Many
herders move their animals to wet season pastures at the edge of
the Sahara, mimicking the seasonal migration of wild ungulates. The
II Chamus of Kenya use two types of dry season reserves
successively depending on the elders' decisions.
Mountains
Terracing as a soil and water conservation method
seems to have been independently discovered by mountain cultures of
the Mediterranean, South Asia, Philippines, South America, and
perhaps elsewhere. Communal pasture use systems in the Swiss Alps
follow traditions at least five centuries old. Migratory herders
who use high mountain pastures in the summer months and who return
to lower elevations in the winter are found in many mountainous
regions worldwide.
Temperate ecosystems
Tribes of the Pacific Northwest of North America
maintained a diversity of access control mechanisms, rules for
proper harvesting behaviour, and rituals to regulate resource use,
for example, in the opening dates of the salmon fishing season.
Resource management practices of native Californians included land
tenure systems and tribal territories, soil and water conservation
techniques, and the use of fire for landscape management and
succession control.
Tropical Fisheries
Customary restrictions by species, seasons and
area help prevent overfishing in many parts of Oceania. An
overharvested resource was declared tabu until it was ready to
harvest again.
A diversity of locally adapted reef and lagoon
tenure systems are found throughout the Asia Pacific Johannes. The
traditional knowledge held by master fishers of Palau, Micronesia,
is in some ways more detailed than the published scientific
information available to tropical marine ecologists.
Waters
Temple priests and rice farmers of Bali,
Indonesia, have devised a water distribution system called subak.
These subaks are not autonomous local units but part of a water
temple system that manages an entire regional terrace ecosystem.
The effectiveness of the subak system has been demonstrated by the
application of computer modelling techniques. Traditional
irrigation systems include the zanjera of the Philippines, a
derivative of the huerta irrigation system presently in use in
Spain that dates back to ancient Arabic rule in Iberia.