Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Indigenous Wisdom for a Sustainable Future

by Emma J Devereux

Citation: Devereux, E.J.,(2021), “Traditional Ecological Knowledge: How Indigenous Wisdom Can Build a Sustainable Future”, EcoFoodDev, https://www.ecofooddev.com/traditional-ecological-knowledge-indigenous-wisdom-global-climate-change/

Environmental communication is an urgent and pressing topic, and one that I am especially passionate about. I am particularly interested in work to increase the role of indigenous people and farm workers in shaping environmental policy, and the opportunity this presents for both self-determination and creating sustainable future conservation strategies. Here I present the concept of Traditional Ecological Knowledge and how it can be used to design sustainable environmental policy, and biodiversity conservation strategies (Devereux, 2013).

Indigenous populations, and those working the land, possess significant knowledge regarding their local environments and landscapes that can prove invaluable for researchers, environmental strategists, policymakers, and ecologists. This data can be collected and integrated with other data types to form robust and flexible environmental policy, providing essential insights into important indicators of climate change.

In the next few posts I will consider not only the physical and practical aspects of TEK, but also its holistic and phenomenological characteristics. I will show, by examples, how TEK can be a useful tool for environmental monitoring, for collecting information on culture and identity construction, and for gathering data concerning human interactions with the landscape in the past, present, and into the future. I will detail how TEK can be used to help construct sustainable environmental management strategies, to create policies regarding climate change, and to aid indigenous populations in their quest for self-determination.

What is Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK)?

There are many definitions of Traditional Ecological Knowledge. Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) describes the information about local landscapes and ecosystems uniquely held by indigenous, local populations in a particular place. This includes observed knowledge of animal and plant species, their relative abundance and behaviours, plant and animal community construction and interactions, the changes in these communities over time, and other such environmental factors. This information is both current AND historical as it is handed down through the generations via oral tradition and storytelling, but it is also built from an individual’s own, lived, personal experience. For example, the experience of foraging or fishing of a village youth can differ from that of an elder, and so reveal environmental and societal change, yet that youth will also learn important lessons from their elders that is reflective of generations of experience on the same landscape (Menzies, 2006). TEK is therefore important from an environmental management perspective as it can reveal environmental change over time, from a few years to a few generations, and has the capacity to reflect long-term ecological change as observed using indicators from within a specified landscape- potentially representing hi-resolution, highly focused data. This type of long-term ecological data is relatively lacking and hence TEK presents a particular opportunity to environmental scientists.

TEK builds incrementally through experimentation, is dynamic, adaptive, and flexible. Importantly, TEK is equally composed of, and intrinsically linked to, an indigenous culture’s belief system, thus encompassing their spiritual and moral values. Therefore, to fully understand indigenous people’s interaction with the landscape, this holistic viewpoint must be considered and respected, just as consumer attitudes towards food production must also be considered.

TEK: localized, hi-resolution data on environmental and social change

TEK is related to a groups’ immediate environment and is therefore highly localized. It is the result of human-environment interaction and observation that is gained through daily experience and is hence fine scale and highly practical. It emphasizes information related to all the components of the specific environment of the viewer, as well as the interrelatedness of nature, including the spiritual connection between the people and the landscape, historical usage, and holistic and moral elements (Menzies, 2006; www.nwmo.ca, 2009, Ford et al, 2000; Crate, 2006; Crumley, 1994; Balee, 1998; Turner et al, 2000). TEK is thus related to both the local environment, and to local society and culture. TEK also aims to predict short- and long-term future scenarios, especially with regards to food production and extreme weather events, based on “readings” of signs on the landscape and in the weather.

All these aspects of TEK can be brought together to build effective and sustainable landscape management strategies. How? Such data obtained from long-term interaction with the landscape can reveal previously unknown indicators of climate change and hence facilitate conservation efforts and sustainable landscape management. TEK can therefore help to direct focus and finance to areas where they are needed most. It can also complement scientific research into sustainability and conservation (Turner et al, 2000). But TEK must be researched in totality, encompassing not just adaptive strategies, observation techniques, and sustainable agriculture techniques, but must also include the philosophies and spiritual nature of human-landscape interaction. It is the incorporation of all these elements that allows indigenous peoples to forge sustainable relationships with the environment (Lefale, 2010; Berkes et al, 2000; Turner et al, 2000). There are relatively few parallel, hi-resolution, long-timescale scientific datasets on the environment and environmental change. This is due in part to changing research priorities, changing research practices, and constraints such as financial limitations and issues surrounding knowledge/talent retention. Thus, harnessing TEK represents a necessary and unique opportunity to gather fine scale environmental data that we may not currently have, and use it to form insightful conservation and climate change policies, mitigation strategies, and future management practices that are robustly tailored to their specific environment. Of course, this information has implications beyond the scope of the local environment. Data on environmental impacts caused by sudden climate change in one area can provide important insights (regarding for example resource distribution change) for other areas experiencing similar issues.

How Does TEK Work? Traditional Ecological Knowledge & Indigenous Subsistence Strategies

Human populations have manipulated the landscape for the purpose of subsistence for millennia. To increase the productivity of the land, indigenous, hunter-gatherer, and nomadic/semi-nomadic groups throughout history have practiced a range of different habitat management, soil enhancement and plant propagation techniques. These practices used by indigenous peoples to maintain and enhance their resources were derived from generations of experimentation and observation, which led to an understanding of complex ecological and physical principles within their ecosystem, as well as environmental variation (Turner et al, 2000).

Examples of such practices include careful harvesting, which aids in the management and sustainability of plants. In this method, the required parts of the living plant are harvested whilst leaving enough for the plant to regenerate, e.g., only removing a certain amount of bark from a tree. Careful harvesting can even lead to increased propagation (Turner et al, 2000).

Differential harvest timing has also been employed to increase production and food security in a sustainable way. Turner looks at the specific case of “Avalanche lily”, Erythronium grandiflorum, in British Columbia, a nutritious wild root crop. Harvesting these plants requires the turning over of shallow segments of soil, selecting bulbs to harvest while replanting the rest. This creates a time lapse in harvesting, meaning that they can be harvested in succession from May until the end of August. This not only allows the root to be harvested at different stages of its development for different markets, but also provides a greater chance of avoiding crop failure due to adverse weather. Interestingly, bears are fond of these foodstuffs and hence it is likely that they were revealed to humans by bear tracking (Turner et al, 2000).

Another application of TEK for subsistence is outlined by McKenna (2008), who discusses mental maps made of Lough Neagh, Northern Ireland, by local fishermen. These mental maps are created by fishermen working on the lake over time and have proven to be highly accurate, being not much different from those created by various mapping instruments. These maps are conceptualized by the repeated action of generations of local communities fishing on the lake, driven by economic need- hence their accuracy. Different fishermen possess different levels of knowledge with regards to the lake, dependent upon experience (and presumably age), and any inaccuracies are dealt with by creating the maps within a group. The maps consist of several generations of information passed down orally. Family groups are incredibly important in this community, with most young men/women being taught to fish by their older family members thereby inheriting the TEK through repeated action and family instruction- tuition and stories told on the boat and around the kitchen table. However, this way of life is threatened due to modernization, developments in agriculture and fishing policy, and threats such as Brexit and COVID-19. In recent decades, the number of fishing families around Lough Neagh has decreased significantly, threatening the sustainability of TEK in the region and the local fishing economy.

Traditional Ecological Knowledge & Environmental Management

One of the most widely recognised applications of TEK is probably that of controlled burning, practiced worldwide but perhaps most famously in Australia. The result of controlled burning is the enhancement of successional species (Turner et al, 2000). Successional growth describes the spontaneous growth that occurs following a disturbance, and fires can produce essential minerals that encourage strong growth, as well as remove plant litter to increase sunlight penetration to plants.

In Australia, the use of fire by indigenous peoples led to an increase in the abundance of game animals by encouraging the successional growth of grass and legumes. This technique is known as ‘fire-stick farming’, cool burning, or cultural burning. These burns also reduced the risk of wildfires by removing dry brush and scrub before the hottest months of the year arrived. Indigenous controlled burning was banned by the Australian government but later overturned when the benefits of decreased wildfires were realised (Balee, 1998). This practice demonstrates complex human understanding of the environment as applied via this traditional technique.

Traditional Ecological Knowledge & Weather Prediction Strategies

Puri (2007) documents how TEK is used by indigenous people in Samoa to describe and predict weather and climate conditions, and to document their observations of local climate change. The local population “read” the cloud formations and observe the behaviour of animals to forecast weather changes. They use this information to plan for adverse weather changes and put adaptation strategies in place. The below tables provide an example of these ecological signals as adapted from Lefale, 2010. The tables show that the inhabitants of the island use ecological signals to predict weather changes, and that this information is culturally transmitted through the naming of features such as wind and cloud types. The names convey not just a title, but contain a message of conditions and possible meteorological impacts:

We are not unfamiliar with this phenomenon in Ireland, where cirrus clouds are known as an indicator for rain, or where the red colour of the sky in the evening or the morning is an indicator of good or bad weather.

Another example of the ways in which indigenous peoples predict certain weather events can be seen with regards to the fishermen and farmers of Peru. Indigenous Peruvian farmers and fishermen observe the ocean currents and recognise a correlation between warm waters and heavy inland rain. In addition, they watch the constellations (the appearance of the Pleiades constellation in June can, for example, predict the arrival of the October rainy season) to forecast, cope with, and adapt to, the El Nino weather event (Puri, 2007).

Traditional Ecological Knowledge in the Archaeological Record

The adaptability of TEK was of particular use to populations dealing with climate change or going through a major transition. Rosen (2011) details the use of TEK by Near Eastern populations in the transition from hunter gatherer lifeways to agriculture, and how it enabled them to cope with environmental changes occurring in the Levant at that time. She has done so archaeologically, by investigating charcoal evidence, changing settlement patterns, and faunal and botanical assemblages. Rosen argues that hunter-gatherers in this region, from the early Natufian to the PPNA (10500BC- 9300BC, as described in http://www.ecofooddev.com/the-ancient-origins-of-modern-barley/), went through cycles of adaptation before adopting agriculture, reading the landscape and adjusting to the climatic oscillations occurring at the time. Importantly, their cultural memory, transmitted knowledge, flexibility, and innovation allowed these hunter-gatherer groups to adjust their procurement strategies in the face of changing resource availability. Thus the indigenous peoples occupying the Levant in the late Pleistocene sustained their foraging systems until the final Holocene warm phase led to widespread sedentism via Traditional Ecological Knowledge (Rosen, 2011).

Cooper (2012) notes the remarkably interesting adaptive measures taken by native populations living in Pre-Columbian Cuba. Ethno-historical research shows that the indigenous peoples of this area had complex belief systems that took environmental change into account. Different deities represented different weather oscillations, particularly hurricanes. Guabancex was the god of chaos and destruction, this chaos being wrought by hurricanes and storms. Such oral histories, myths and symbolism all contributed to the construction of their Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and the creation of adaptation strategies to predict and deal with adverse environmental conditions. These strategies can be detected materially in the archaeological record. Wooden pole structures were repeatedly used in the construction of Pre-Columbian houses in the region described by Cooper. The posts were buried up to 1.7m into the ground and consisted of strong mahogany. These hardwood foundations were surrounded by a lighter superstructure, such as thatch. Radiocarbon dating has shown that these mahogany foundations remained in place for hundreds of years, but that the lighter material had been replaced again and again. This suggests that the houses were built so that in hurricane conditions the house foundations would remain in situ, with only the light dressing around it being damaged- providing important flexibility that likely prevented the structure from being destroyed completely. This light layer would have been easily replaceable, showing clever resilience on the part of the indigenous population (Cooper, 2012).

Here we have reviewed TEK, in the next post we will talk in more detail about TEK in climate change policy and environmental sustainability.

Cover image: Centuries old tradition of cormorant fishing, China. Traditional fishing method whereby fishermen used trained cormorants to catch large fish. Image from Wikicommons https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/%E6%9C%80%E5%90%8E%E7%9A%84%E9%B8%AC%E9%B

References cited

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