Print Page“Wild nature” and the qualities of being “valuable and valued” characterize ecological integrity. For indigenous people, however, ecological integrity cannot be separated from cultural integrity, for in indigenous beliefs and practices, people are not separable from nature. Today, the interdependence of biological and cultural diversity and sustainability may reflect an ecological phenomenon of the past, whereby small human groups coevolved with their local environments, which they modified while adapting and developing specialized ecological knowledge. Indigenous ecological knowledge, practices and ethics can inform modern environmental policies designed to cope with the social dilemmas of common-pool resources. For example, indigenous and traditional peoples, as communities living in marginal lands and highly dependent on natural resources, are among the most vulnerable groups being impacted by global climate change, but they also have tested adaptation and mitigation strategies to local environmental challenges, based on extended place-based observations of the natural history.
Results/Conclusions
Effective adaptations to changing local environments depend upon not only natural history, but also cultural history and environmental values. This presentation analyzes natural resource policies and Earth stewardship from the perspective of cultural property, a way of knowing shared among local community members. Cultural property values not only access and ownership rights to natural resources, but also the historical relationships of people to places. Identifying cultural property as a distinct property regime in environmental policy may protect wild living resources and the traditional livelihoods and ecological knowledge of communities dependent upon them. An intergenerational- or G-index, measuring the cultural value of natural resources to local communities, is applied to salmon use by the indigenous people of Norway, the Saami. The long historical relationship of the Saami to their local places suggests traditional ways of life based on evolved knowledge of valuable natural and cultural history, now being lost. Protecting such historical place-based relationships of local communities with nature will be critical for effective global stewardship.
