Ethnoecology, Resource Use, Conservation And Development In A ...

populations of beaver and caribou (Berkes 1998, 1999). Beaver hunting appears to
operate so as to maintain populations at their maximum levels of production, while
fishing practices seem to have succeeded in finding solutions to the problem of
maintaining viable populations in conditions in which conventional approaches to
fisheries management have been manifestly unsuccessful. A summary of fisheries
management practices among coastal peoples of North America highlights their
success in maintaining harvests in sustainable limits, in stark contrast to the
outcomes of conventional fisheries management strategies informed by scientific
methodologies (Hipwell 1998).
Hipwell (1998) points out the highly detailed specificity of traditional systems to
local conditions, and their sensitivity to, and flexibility in the face of, micro-level
fluctuations in conditions. He argues that the adoption of a new paradigm in fisheries
management, based upon an integration of these methods and their associated
knowledge systems with scientific approaches, is long overdue. Moran (1993b)
presents a similar argument in relation to Amazonia: a massive diversity of traditional
systems for natural resource management exists, each adapted in a detailed fashion
to the specific ecological context within which it operates. He asserts that this site-
specificity of local systems makes them the most appropriate starting point for
devising strategies for increased food production in Amazonia, given the problems
encountered by conventional approaches in the face of the extreme environmental
heterogeneity that exists. A more detailed account assembles data on Amazonian
cultural ecology in order to specify the contributions that the traditional knowledge of
Amazonian populations can make to development in the region (Posey et al. 1984).
Areas given particular attention are agriculture, aquaculture, game harvesting,
gathering plant foods, use of both anthropically-modified and ‘natural’ environments,
and cosmology. The authors of this paper note the artificial nature of this
categorisation, and emphasise the interrelations among all aspects of the
environmental relations of indigenous populations and the cultural systems within
which they are embedded.
The essentially holistic nature of traditional resource management systems is
further elucidated by Alcorn (1989), with the perspicacious observation that they
tend to be based upon the regulation and maintenance of ecological processes. This
is in contrast to conventional management strategies, whose focus is typically a
single ecological variable (Berkes and Folke 1998a: 11-12). Thus the dynamism and
interconnectedness of the ecological systems being managed is generally ignored,
with consequences that may be catastrophic. Among researchers, in contrast, the