Unit 9: Contemporary Issues—Traditional Cultures, Resource Management and Conservation, and Traditional Knowledge and Intellectual Property

Coffee bush with ripe cherries in Mazatec garden, Huautla de Jiménez, Oaxaca, México. Coffee cultivation was introduced to Mexico in the 19th century and quickly became a part of the economic strategy of indigenous groups like the Mazatec, Zapotec, Tzotzil Maya, and the Sierra Nahua. These groups integrate coffee cultivation into their gardening and swidden practices, producing environmentally sustainable shade-grown coffee. Much of this coffee is now sold through the Fair Trade movement, which seeks to ensure appropriate economic benefits to local producers and producers’ cooperatives. Photograph by Leslie Main Johnson.

In this final unit of the course, we address contemporary issues that are based on ethnobiological foundations. A difficult issue in this time of increasing globalization and population is how to deal with land management and traditional knowledge in the context of modern nation states and global trade.

Issues are many, from self-determination to economic development and sustainability to cultural as well as ecological survival. In the previous unit we examined the nature and importance of traditional ecological knowledge and the relationship between forms of traditional land management and sustainability and biodiversity conservation. In this unit we will deal with the articulation of these small-scale traditional systems with the larger national and global contexts.

There is a parallel between decreasing biological diversity, and decreasing cultural and linguistic diversity. Ninety per cent of the world’s languages will be extinct or moribund within the next century (Krauss 1992, cited in Brush 1996: 3). As we have seen, language and culture hold much fine grained knowledge about different environments of the earth and how to live in them (see Maffi, 2001, for an extended treatment of this issue). Such a loss is therefore alarming. The increasing dislocation of world populations from land bases and in-migration to urban slums is also alarming. But for many groups of people, traditional lifeways are no longer possible in the conditions in which they find themselves. Economic development is, therefore, a necessity. Given the dismal record of large scale externally imposed development with macroeconomic parameters, it is extremely important to consider what types of economic opportunities can draw on the knowledges and skills of the world's rural poor and indigenous peoples to create environmentally sensible and culturally sensitive ways for people to make their livelihoods.

The “last frontiers” of the global industrial system are in fact the homelands of indigenous and traditional rural peoples. Therefore, new resource developments, proposed parks and protected areas, and potential undiscovered new biologically based drugs lie squarely in indigenous homelands. Particularly with biologically based “new resources,” it is likely that people dwelling in regions like the forest of India, the Amazon, and Indonesia will in fact know something about these plants or animals and their uses. How then should the value of this knowledge to the rest of humanity be recognized and compensated? What control should Indigenous and traditional local populations have over their homelands, resource bases, and traditional knowledge? And in the Canadian perspective, how shall we balance the health and productivity of caribou, or of Indigenous sacred sites, against world scale developments such as the gas reserves of the Beaufort Sea or the diamond deposits of the Canadian shield?

In such a context, how will we listen to Indigenous voices, based in knowledge systems with different scope and underlying assumptions, when it comes time to decide how to monitor and manage the caribou? How will these voices articulate with our laws and our Western-based science? In Canada these issues are set in the context of the ongoing national debate about Aboriginal title and rights. Self-determination is an aspect of the global Indigenous movement, and Canadian Indigenous peoples find themselves discussing similar issues with representatives of traditional and Indigenous peoples from all over the world.

Objectives

By the end of this unit you should be able to

1. define “non-timber forest product” and discuss some of the economic and ecological issues of harvesting non-timber forest products.
2. explain how non-timber forest products can enhance ecosystem conservation and biodiversity.
3. explain how Indigenous knowledge often forms the basis of economic development and development of marketable resources.
4. discuss intellectual property rights and be able to explain why this is a concern for medicinal plant knowledge, traditional crop plant knowledge, and traditional environmental knowledge.
5. discuss conflicts between economic and ecological aspects of land management and the rights and understandings of Indigenous peoples.
6. explain the significance of traditional knowledge and land management in the Canadian context.
7. articulate the importance of taking traditional knowledge into account in development projects in areas where traditional peoples live.