Cultural and Biological Diversity
Some 200 million indigenous peoples (4 percent of the world’s population) live in and have special claims to territories that, in many cases, harbor exceptionally high levels of biodiversity. Their claim rests on their long occupation of a particular place; their cultural, spiritual, and economic ties to the area; and their ability, in most cases, to manage it sustainably. At the same time, the cultural diversity inherent in the world’s indigenous groups is imperiled by the encroachment of dominant societies and economies. Preserving indigenous territorial rights thus protects biodiversity and the local culture, including knowledge and resource-management skills with potentially wide applications, as well as spiritual ties to the environment that could provide direction for the development of a biodiversity ethos in the wider society.
The specter of cultural extinction hangs over hundreds of thousands of tribal people who live in the forests of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Marius Jacobs writes in The Tropical Rain Forest,
“All these people, who live entirely in and off the forest, are the only ones who have mastered the art of exploiting the rain forests on a really sustained basis, thanks to an enormous amount of practical knowledge,” “They know everything about food plants, medicinal species, edible insects and their larvae, and the collection of wild honey. With bow and arrow or a blowpipe they hunt the scarce animals of the rainforest to obtain protein.”
Tragically, the people most threatened by deforestation are the very people who know things about living in harmony with nature that their countrymen competing for space in the forests need to learn.
Sustainable Use of Natural Resources
In Chiapas, Mexico, about 450 Lacandón Maya Indians still live in their traditional way in North America’s largest remaining tropical rain forest. Until the 1960s, the Lacandón Maya were virtually isolated from outsiders, so they have preserved their way of life far longer than have other Mayan groups. Logging roads constructed in 1965, however, abruptly ended this isolation and sovereignty. Hundreds of thousands of colonists and cattle ranchers streamed into the forest, threatening both Lacandón traditions and the forests themselves.
Today, more than half of the Lacandón rain forest is gone. But the small group of Lacandón Maya who remain in the region still practice a form of ecologically sound agriculture passed down from generation to generation for many centuries. This agroforestry system combines tree crops with food and other crops. Masters of this system can produce up to 79 kinds of food and fiber products simultaneously and keep the same plots productive for up to seven years in a row, compared to the one or two growing seasons that nearby colonists usually get. Even after seven years, rubber, cacao (the basis for cocoa and chocolate), citrus, and other easy-care trees are planted. Eventually, the plots are allowed to return to forest and left to recover for several years before being cleared to begin the cycle anew.
Indigenous groups living throughout the rest of Latin America, Asia, and Africa are also ecologically savvy. In Thailand, the Lua harvest more than 200 wild plant species for food and other purposes. These people are also consummate land-use planners: they designate different categories of forest around their villages and declare some off limits to farmers and wood collectors. In Zaire, the Efe pygmies of the Ituri Forest gather more than 100 species of forest plants to eat and to make tools, baskets, dyes, and medicines. For some months of each year, the Efe dine exclusively on forest plants and animals.
Loss of Nature, Loss of Culture
Worldwide, tropical deforestation has decimated the indigenous groups that depend on forests for their survival. Their tropical lands fall prey to colonists, miners, and loggers and the people themselves to violence, or, more likely, disease. Measles and influenza carried into the forest by colonists kill people who have never before been exposed. Even if they escape with their lives, indigenous peoples are being forced to give up their traditional cultures. Many tropical countries–if they have any government policy at all toward forest dwellers–have one designed to take them out of their forest homelands and absorb them into the dominant culture.
The loss of traditional rain forest cultures is the world’s loss for they know how to relate to nature in a symbiotic rather than parasitic way–wisdom that the world sorely needs. As Susanna Hecht and Alexander Cockburn put it in The Fate of the Forest,
“This knowledge [on the part of indigenous and local populations] permits an understanding of the forest as the outcome of human as well as biological history, and hence the view that humans can continue to make their history in the forest, sustaining and sustained.”
Biodiversity conservation has traditionally focussed on species and genes and ignored the human culture with which biodiversity co-evolved. Now, knowledge of human farming and resource use systems must be increased before it is irretrievably lost. Further, studies of traditional methods of resource management can provide important insights into techniques for sustainable resource management in tropical regions.
