Ecological and cultural knowledge transfer and resilience in Earth Stewardship

Background/Question/Methods

Natural resource management and policy may benefit from the intergenerational transfer of local and traditional ecological knowledge to enhance the resilience of Earth’s human-natural systems. Cultural indicators measure the resilience or the ability of a cultural group to adapt, by accumulated knowledge and lived experiences, to fluctuations in natural resources. As more generations are lived in an ecological niche, the resilience of the intergenerational resource users in the place increases, relative to migrants or transients with a lower sense of place and local ecological knowledge. For example, pre-contact Pacific Northwest indigenous societies sustained salmon harvests for millennia in place-based fisheries with a stewardship ethic that coupled resource management to responsibility via cultural norms and community sanctions. Modern adaptive management that incorporates the local and traditional ecological knowledge of communities who have historical relationships with natural resources can help sustain both local ecological and cultural integrity, and thereby contribute to Earth Stewardship. 

Results/Conclusions

Cultural property is a way of knowing shared among community members that values, in addition to possessions and rights, social relationships and place attachments, both of which are integral to the rooted local ecological knowledge, customs, and livelihood practices of traditional and indigenous cultures. I suggest that incorporation of cultural property in natural resource policy may help protect not only ecosystem goods and services, but also the traditional livelihoods, practices, and knowledge of the human communities dependent upon them. By adopting as a cultural indicator a G-index, which measures the number of continuous generations lived in a place by a community while sustainably harvesting its local resources, non-market aspects of the historical relationships of local people to specific places and resources may be valued in the current economy. A natural resource property regime consisting of intergenerational resource owners has been hitherto unrecognized, and may contribute to sustaining the ecological and cultural resilience needed for Earth Stewardship.