The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

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The cultural context of biodiversity conservation
Sponsel (2001: 185f.) points to the lack of confidence in the adequacy of secular approaches
such as science and technology to reduce if not resolve environmental problems.
They are recognised, but not considered sufficient because they focus on symptoms
rather than on causes and consequences. The ultimate cause is thought to reside
in morality, wherein religion can play a crucial role as a fundamental source providing
a worldview, values, attitudes, practices, rituals, institutions and sacred places. Religions
are seen as alternative ways of representing nature, affording it spiritual, moral
and cultural meanings and values and defining the place of humans in nature, including
how they should and should not act toward non-human beings and other natural
phenomena. Nature is considered to be an interwoven web of material and spiritual
relationships from the local to the global levels. Thus, spiritual ecologists view humans
as an integral part of nature and focus on an ecocentric environmental ethic instead of an
anthropocentric one. This view implies the need to maintain and restore the dynamic
equilibrium of society in nature, which is an essential concern of spiritual ecology.
In contrast to spiritual ecology, which is to be seen as a social, political, intellectual
and religious movement rather than a merely transdisciplinary arena of academic research,
materialist critics question the discrepancies between ideals and actions. Such
sceptics assert that giving primary causal weight to religious beliefs may oversimplify
complex historical, cultural and environmental conditions. Religious responses may
not address ecological problems and the ›ecological balance‹ that is seen expressed in
indigenous religious traditions may be the result rather than the cause of particular
practices said to be ecologically sustainable. In this way, it has been argued by Kalland
(2003) that the sustainability of many indigenous societies can more plausibly be explained
as an outcome of particular technologies, ecological conditions or levels of
population density than the result of spiritual attitudes about nature. He critically asserts
that non-Western religions are depicted as ecocentric and as harbouring profound
ecological knowledge and sound environmental ethics in order to construct the
dichotomy between anthropocentric and ecocentric worldviews (2003: 165). Elsewhere,
Kalland (2000: 323) notes that understanding the natural world as a sacred
sphere does not necessarily require an ethic of environmental conservation or stewardship,
and infusing nature with spirits is no guarantee for the well-being of the environment.
It would be too naïve to assume that everybody within a culture acts in accordance
with a set of norms and values. Such a conception would ignore the contradictions
that exist in any culture. He attributes the driving force behind the interest
devoted to traditional ecological knowledge to the same logic that informs those who
see the solutions to environmental problems in non-Western indigenous worldviews.
We cannot a priori assume that people's perceptions and norms are mirrored in their actual behaviour,
and if such a connection is present this is not necessarily a result of ecological understanding and
conscious conservation but might be a coincidental side-effect of something else. [...] It is tempting to
suggest that any religion is likely to support values that are inhibiting over-exploitation of natural resources
as well as values that are facilitating or legitimating such behaviour. Explaining behaviour
from ideologies may rest on selective reading of evidence. (Kalland 2003: 171)