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

Subsistence is also heavily dependent on certain local ecological processes. In
particular, the major basis of subsistence is long-fallow swidden agriculture, where
productivity is maintained by the process of secondary succession. Succession in old
farms is, in turn based upon the growth of plants from the seed bank and from seeds
inadvertently introduced by people, immigration of plants via wind dispersal, and the
immigration of animals and their dispersal of plant seeds into the gap created. The
immigration of species to fallows depends upon their production of a population
surplus via ecosystem processes in mature forest and secondary forest in various
stages of regeneration. Many species of game animal are favoured by vegetation
changes occurring in old farms, and succession and associated processes thus
support the procurement of animal food as well. Production and procurement of fish
depend upon a different set of ecological processes: seasonal changes in hydrology
and the associated large-scale movements of fish stocks.
9.2 Does the Wapishana subsistence system exhibit features that
can be considered habitat/resource management?
What is of most interest in the context of this thesis is management with
conservation functions, which I here define as any rules or behaviours relating to
exploitation of the natural environment whose effect is to promote the conservation
or sustainable use of natural resources. I have already stated my adherence to the
controversial position that effective management of natural resources for sustainable
use can be an emergent feature of human social groups even if individual actions are
neither consciously nor explicitly directed to this end (chapter 1.2.2). This position
contradicts that of some previous writers (Alvard 1993, 1995; Hames 1987), and
while I agree with them that there are important qualitative distinctions between
management practices directed to conservation that are and are not based upon
conscious intent, I disagree with their argument that unintended ecological effects of
human actions are not significant to discussions of human ecological management.
Data collected in the present study can provide some support to this position, in
that certain features of the Wapishana subsistence system can be plausibly argued to
encode functions relating to sustainable use. However, this data does not
demonstrate that these features operate in any systematic fashion, or that they do
actually function to promote the sustainability of resource use. Further data are
needed on the relationship between accepted subsistence practises, symbolically
encoded restrictions on exploitation, and the ecological effects of these, in order to
advance this argument further.