The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

Local expressions of indigenous knowledge
the erosion of indigenous knowledge by putting in place mechanisms for its revitalisation
and protection. This must be achieved in close collaboration with the communities
concerned, including their institutions, traditions, language and modes of subsistence,
maintaining those conditions that will allow them to develop further.
An alternative community-based approach that could serve as starting point for
protecting indigenous knowledge has been outlined by Secaira (1992: 124f.). By stressing
the need to establish a convergence of interests between farmers who need to innovate
and conservationists who want to protect the forests in the area, he proposes
to facilitate the flow of innovations and experiences through the promotion of farmerto-farmer
interaction (e.g. in terms of knowledge exchange about the use of green manure).
Conservationists, through the construction of alliances with indigenous and
peasant movements, have the opportunity to increase political awareness and to empower
rural communities, thereby contributing in the struggle for a more equal distribution
of land and power. Respect and sensitivity to local cultures are essential requirements
of a participatory conservation and development strategy and any effort to
support the communities should address maintaining customary legal structures, informal
arrangements and local institutions such as councils of elders and informal
ways of imparting indigenous knowledge.
Even though the recognition of indigenous knowledge is a necessary condition for
participatory processes in contemporary resource management, it alone is not a sufficient
condition to ensure long term sustainability. The process by which pre-existing
knowledge and new information interact needs to be explored, so that research approaches
can be designed to facilitate the acquisition of knowledge by farmers and
counteract knowledge erosion. Departing from expressions such as »Nos hemos olvidado
de la tierra« – we have forgotten the earth, it would be revealing to further inquire about the
underlying reasons for the widely perceived loss, combining findings from psychology,
cognitive science and other disciplines engaged with the phenomena of social memory
and processes of remembering. In the present case, I would postulate a coherent relation
between the modes of memory and individual and collective traumatic experiences
of the war. To conclude with this theme, stimulating thoughts on the emotional
impact of environmental deterioration expressed by Weber Nicholson (2000: 1f.) are
worth mentioning. In revealing the unspoken dimensions of environmental concern, she observes
that with few exceptions, people writing about the natural environment and
people concerned with the interior of the psyche have not yet drawn intensely on each
other's work. In raising the question of how human development relies on the natural
environment and how culture facilitates or disrupts this process, she presents the hypothesis
that humans are hampered in their meeting the contemporary environmental
crisis by a severe and pervasive apathy based largely upon feelings and attitudes of
which they are unconscious. Exploring the conjunction of peoples' attachment to and
their destructiveness toward the natural world remains a challenging endeavour.
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