Conservation and Sustainable Use of the Biosphere - WBGU

176 E Diversity of landscapes and ecosystems
Ministries of natural
resource management
Figure E 3.5-1
Co-management system.
Source: Gadgil, 1999
Advice and technology
Identification of social priorities,
Information requests
Policy
advice
Co-ordination,
information
dissemination
Scientific
community
Institutions of natural
resource
co-management
Practical ecological knowledge and wisdom
Scientific knowledge, technologies
Practical
ecological
knowledge and
wisdom
Natural
resource use
benefit flows
Local communities
prioritized over the desire for complete scientific
clarification in protecting biodiversity.
Further importance is assigned to TEK where the
conservation of biological diversity at regional level
is concerned (Section E 3.9). From this emerges not
just the opportunity, but the virtual necessity for participation
of the local population. Sustainable use
and adaptive management in a bioregion are only
possible if all the available information about the
habitat, its ecosystems and its socio-cultural structure
is used. This means that the incorporation of indigenous
and traditional knowledge is all but imperative,
even if this knowledge is to be modified in the course
of the management process or if its importance is to
be played down (if other findings prove to be more
important). Gadgil (1999) reported from India on an
example of ‘co-management’ that incorporates the
local community just as much as the scientific community,
and where the relevant environment ministry
ensures that both knowledge systems are heeded
(Fig. E 3.5-1).
E 3.5.4
Conserving nature, preserving cultures – a
necessary alliance
‘Culture determines people’s relationship with
nature and their environment’. This sentence from
the report by Perez de Cuéllar (1995) not only
applies to indigenous communities, but also to the
human race as a whole. However, it can also be seen
that this ‘symbiotic’ link between cultural and biological
diversity, as it can still be found in indigenous
and traditional communities, is hardly ever encountered
in a secular and increasingly technological
world. The technologically shaped environment,
once called ‘second nature’ by Gehlen (1940), the
creation of which was necessary for the survival of
humans, the ‘deficient beings’, has long been ‘first
nature’ for many people and it has attained the character
of something that is unquestioned and natural.
For example, to judge from biographical accounts of
appropriation processes, words for cars and machines
are now learnt sooner than those for meadow, wood
and water. It has been sufficiently documented that
children growing up in American cities do not know
the plants on which tomatoes, potatoes or coconuts
grow; even ‘natural products’ come from the supermarket
shelf. Emancipation from natural living conditions
has frequently reached the point of distant
alienation.
The urban culture described so pithily here is
surely not best suited to take sole responsibility for
the necessary protection of biological diversity. But
by demonstrating the effects of out-and-out ‘domination
of nature’ and exploitation oriented only to benefits
and use, it may help people to come to the con-