Indigenous peoples and nature preservation

DEFINITION: Involvement of the native inhabitants of a region in the protection of the region’s natural resources

The role of Indigenous peoples in nature preservation is a growing side of environmental awareness. While some people are practicing preservation by learning from Indigenous peoples’ traditional ecological knowledge, Indigenous peoples elsewhere are fighting for recognition and political power to preserve their lands and cultures.

Nature preservation encompasses the protection of biodiversity, land, and culture. Nature reserves are areas set aside by governments to protect the species that inhabit those areas from harm or loss. Such reserves generally seek to protect natural areas from human disturbance to reduce loss and prevent extinction of species and destruction of habitats. Protecting nature through preservation in this way is often not the best approach for managing natural resources, however; the reality is that ecosystems, and the biodiversity within them, move through natural changes, and trying to prevent these changes can have negative impacts on health.

Many human activities threaten the biodiversity of the natural world, including logging, drilling, and industries that cause pollution. Another threat to the natural world is the fading of Indigenous cultures that have long traditional relationships with the biodiversity of the areas in which they live. Indigenous peoples have evolved not with the practice of preservation but instead with the practices of and healthy use of natural resources. An important part of preserving biodiversity is to preserve the lands and cultures of the Indigenous peoples who best recognize how to maintain healthy relationships with the environment.

Traditional Ecological Knowledge

The accumulated knowledge of Indigenous peoples regarding the environments they inhabit and their relationships with those environments is often referred to as traditional ecological knowledge, or TEK. Indigenous cultures around the world have a great accumulation of TEK through generations of familiarizing themselves with their home areas, and many scientists recognize the value of TEK in nature preservation and conservation. Although the approaches of science and TEK differ greatly, the combination of the two approaches strengthens both, as well as nature preservation as a whole. In many different parts of the world, Indigenous cultures have developed through relationships with the land that are based on survival and respect. Indigenous peoples in nature-based cultures use their TEK to preserve their cultures and manage natural resources by protecting the land and the biodiversity with which they are familiar. Because the ecological knowledge of Indigenous peoples is developed through experience, it can be preserved only if the cultures of the peoples are also preserved.

Around the world, about sixty million Indigenous persons rely on forests for survival and for cultural identity. In the Amazon, Indigenous peoples have a strong connection to and extensive knowledge of the rain forests. Three-quarters of the national parks in Latin America include land that is inhabited by Indigenous peoples, and globally, up to 85 percent of protected areas are inhabited by Indigenous peoples.

Most TEK is passed orally in cultures that have no written history, and scientists who recognize the value of TEK attempt to learn from Indigenous peoples how they live in their natural environments, how they relate to the land, and how they effectively conserve the resources in their environments. An example of such efforts is a study that was conducted from 1995 to 1998 by scientists seeking to understand TEK on beluga whales. This research included interviews with members of Indigenous communities in Alaska and Russia to learn from their experiences with and knowledge of beluga whales. The researchers found that through indirect, conversation-style interviews with Indigenous persons, both individually and in groups, they were able to gather unexpected and insightful information that would not have been revealed through question-by-question interviews.

Conflicts and Controversies

TEK is gradually becoming an accepted supplement to Western science and methods of nature preservation, but progress in accepting the importance of TEK is slow because of the many differences between TEK and mainstream scientific approaches to environmental issues. In contrast with the quantitative and mechanistic character of mainstream science, for example, TEK is qualitative and spiritual.

Because of differences in cultures, values, and approaches to knowledge, conflicts arise between the interests of Indigenous peoples and those of Western science and the modern world. The Indigenous peoples of the Amazon rain forests, for example, have interests that are in opposition to the modern world’s commercial interests in the oil, minerals, and timber found in regions where Indigenous communities live. In a world of commercially interested societies, Indigenous cultures exist under great threat, as reports have suggested that Indigenous peoples’ lands hold the majority of the earth’s remaining natural resources, including minerals, oil, fresh water, and medicinal plants.

Another conflict between Indigenous peoples and Western scientists concerns the commercial use of TEK. Indigenous peoples have profound ecological knowledge based on generations of firsthand experience, much of which includes natural remedies, access to unique plants, and TEK that could prove useful in bioscience. For example, Brazilian Indigenous communities traditionally use a poison produced by a certain species of frog as a strong painkiller, and this substance has become part of numerous patent requests in both Europe and the United States. The exploitation by outsiders of the biodiverse resources of the lands where Indigenous peoples live (referred to as bioprospecting or biopiracy, depending on the viewpoint of the speaker) is the source of ongoing controversy.

Many countries have made treaties with the Indigenous peoples located within their borders, often regarding land rights and federal recognition. The United States officially recognizes approximately 560 Native American tribes, and hundreds of other tribes are in the process of trying to attain federal recognition. The status of US federal tribal recognition establishes a government-to-government relationship in which the tribe is recognized as a sovereign nation. Federal recognition is beneficial for Native American tribes that are active in environmental issues and preservation because the tribes are treated as separate governments with their own lands to preserve or manage. In the United States, federal funding and other benefits aid tribes in establishing their own natural resources departments, which are necessary for nature preservation as well as for preserving the tribes’ cultures.

Climate Change

Climate change is a well-recognized environmental issue that affects Indigenous peoples across the globe. Some Indigenous populations live in societies with modern cultures, such as the Indigenous tribes of the United States, but for many of the world’s Indigenous peoples climate change poses risks to their ancestral lands, to the sustainability of their food sources, and to the traditional ways of their cultures.

The potential effects of climate change on Indigenous peoples’ agricultural practices are particularly important because many Indigenous cultures rely on farming for survival. Changes in climate conditions that result in droughts, floods, hurricanes, or frosts can have serious consequences for traditionally agricultural cultures, displacing populations and changing their relationship to the land.

Rising sea levels pose a climate change-related to island and coastal Indigenous cultures, which may be directly affected through coastal land inundation that forces people to relocate and increases density. Residents of the Alaskan village of Newtok, the majority of whom are Yupik Alaska Natives, began being driven from their homes in 2007 by the melting of the permafrost on which the village was built. Many other communities of Alaska Natives are likely to face similar situations in the future if climate change progresses as scientists have projected it will. Such displacements of Indigenous populations put cultures as well as communities at risk.

On August 9, 2023, which is the International Day of Indigenous Peoples, researchers from sixty-five institutions collaborated after spending five years gathering and analyzing data from Indigenous peoples and others in local communities to better understand the impact of climate change on various areas. They believed that Indigenous peoples' have an in-depth knowledge of how climate change has affected a region. They called on policymakers to recognize and use this knowledge.

In April 2009, the Inuit Circumpolar Council hosted the Indigenous Peoples’ Global Summit on Climate Change in Anchorage, Alaska, which focused on the effects of climate change on Indigenous peoples. Among the topics discussed by the four hundred participants in the summit was the role that Indigenous peoples might play in developing the successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol, which was to be addressed at the United Nations Climate Change Conference, which held its twenty-seventh conference in 2022. The participants discussed the role that TEK could play in the of and adaptation to climate change. The Global Indigenous Youth Summit on Climate Change was held in 2023 in Geneva, Switzerland.

Bibliography

Colchester, Marcus. “Self-Determination or Environmental Determinism for Indigenous Peoples in Tropical Forest Conservation.” Conservation Biology 14, no. 5 (2000): 1365-1367.

Cuffe, Sandra. "Three New Studies on Indigenous Conservation for International Indigenous Peoples Day." Mongabay, 9 Aug. 2023, news.mongabay.com/2023/08/three-new-studies-on-indigenous-conservation-for-international-indigenous-peoples-day/. Accessed 17 July 2024.

Luthy, Quinn. "How Conservation Contributes to the Displacement of Indigenous People." Earth.org, 8 Mar. 2023, earth.org/conservation-indigenous-people/. Accessed 17 July 2024.

Mauro, Francesco, and Preston D. Hardison.“Traditional Knowledge of Indigenous and Local Communities: International Debate and Policy Initiatives.” Ecological Applications 10, no. 5 (2000): 1263-1269.

Menzies, Charles R., ed. Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Natural Resource Management. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006.

Posey, Darrell Addison, and Michael J. Balick, eds. Human Impacts on Amazonia: The Role of Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Conservation and Development. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.

Selin, Helaine, ed. Nature Across Cultures: Views of Nature and the Environment in Non-Western Cultures. Norwell, Mass.: Kluwer Academic, 2003.

Westra, Laura. Environmental Justice and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: International and Domestic Legal Perspectives. Sterling, Va.: Earthscan, 2008.