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

and complementary engagement between traditional and scientific approaches to the
study and management of nature.
The potential of such an integrative approach will be enhanced with the ongoing
maturity of ethnoecology as an academic discipline. One important aspect of this will
be the nature of the concepts it seeks to address. In this preliminary study, the
concrete ethnoecological data was of a form which, while consistent with the working
definition of ‘ethnoecology’ employed in this thesis (chapter 1.1, Posey et al 1984),
corresponds more accurately with natural history than with ecology under its
definition as a science. Ecology as a formal scientific discipline works with such data
as raw material, and has a historical continuity with natural history (Atran 1990), but
advances upon it in terms of the conceptual tools it provides to account for and
assess the outcomes of observed relationships within and between species.
Ethnoecology will develop and realise its potential by making a parallel advance, by
relating such data to the concepts used by non-scientific ecologists to explain the
ecological phenomena they observe, and determining the heuristic value of such
concepts both in their own right and as aspects of a framework that also draws on
scientific ecology. Results obtained in the present study indicated that concepts
corresponding with a stricter definition of ecology were employed by ethnoecological
collaborators. Their full investigation among this and other groups of people will be
among the tasks of future ethnoecological studies.
One concrete application of an approach based upon the integration of
ethnoecology and scientific ecology would be in establishing minimum sizes which
would ensure the ecological viability of indigenous territories. This requires
information on the range of species used by people and the level of consumption of
each, their spatial distributions, the ecological requirements of these species –
including detailed information on subjects such as seasonal migration and the use of
rare or spatially patchy habitats, population densities, and population dynamics
including source-sink dynamics in areas where the resource management strategy
includes the use of spatial reserves. Ethnoecology can provide detailed and
comprehensive information on the spatial distributions and ecological requirements of
useful species in particular. In these subject areas, the quantity and quality of
information that can be provided by ethnoecology far exceeds that which could be
achieved in a conventional ecological research programme. As already noted,
ethnoecology would also involve a far more efficient use of both human and financial
resources, much of the work involved effectively having already been done by local
nature experts in the course of their lifetimes’ experience. Scientific ecology can