Traditional Ecological Knowledge: co-opted by the West
The latest nomenclature for sustainable farming practices is Regenerative Agriculture. Regenerative farming practices are meant to restore degraded land and include no-tillage, diverse cover crops, on-farm fertility, no, or minimum, pesticides or synthetic fertilisers, and multiple crop rotations in order to restore its carbon content (Hawken 2017). By doing this, the soil’s fertility, texture, water-retention ability, and all of the fauna return. Living organisms such as archaea, bacteria, actinomycetes, fungi, algae, protozoa, mites, nematodes, earthworms, ants, and more, all inhabit healthy soil. Hawken projects that “from an estimated 108 million acres of current adoption, regenerative agriculture to increase to a total of 1 billion acres by 2050. This increase could result in a total reduction of 23.2 gigatons of carbon dioxide, from both sequestration and reduced emissions. Regenerative Agriculture could provide a $1.9 trillion financial return by 2050 on an investment of $57 billion” (Hawken 2017). This is assuming that the increase will be realised both from an increase in organic farming methods as well as an increase of Conservation Agriculture to gradually transition to regenerative. Conservation Agriculture also focuses on improving soil but allows synthetic fertilisers and pesticides. Conservation agriculture is a more static system aiming to achieve sustainability, while Regenerative Agriculture is a more dynamic system, aiming to renew and rebuild.
Not coincidentally, Regenerative Agriculture embraces all of the components of Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) and its subset, the Traditional Ecological Systems (TEK). It aligns agriculture with natural principles, which is the way our indigenous populations and ancestors have always done. Jessica Hernandez, an environmental scientist, is cited by Wheeling (2022), as saying that Western conservation movements often ignore or co-opt indigenous science as their own, while sidelining the people who have produced that knowledge. It has been estimated that the market value of pharmaceuticals derived from indigenous medicine to be in the tens of billions (Wheeling 2022). “The conservation movement has a long history of sidelining indigenous peoples and discounting their ecological expertise. When the United States established its national parks system, ultimately setting aside some 85 million acres of territory, it forced Native American tribes from lands they'd stewarded for millennia” (Wheeling 2022).
We’re ignoring the past. This disregard for indigenous knowledge is replayed throughout history. The newly Christianised Norse population of Greenland, reliant upon crop cultivation and dairy farming, was not able to survive the Little Ice Age at the beginning of the 1400s and migrated (D’Andrea et al. 2011). The Inuit population, deemed as pagan, backward, and inferior, survived with their seal-hunting and whale-eating skills. The Norse on mainland Scandinavia ignored the knowledge of the indigenous Scandinavians, the Sami. These are the people who have inhabited Scandinavia for over five thousand years. The Roman historian, Tacitus, wrote of them in 98 C.E. They are reindeer hunters and fishermen. Again, they ate what was there. The hunter/gatherer model mixed with fishing and some farming seems to continually outperform Western food cultivation as the best defence against climatic changes.
More recently, in March 2010, The Arctic Ocean Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in Chelsea, Canada, was convened. Ministers from Canada, Norway, the US, Denmark, and Russia were invited to discuss “responsible development”. The Chair of the conference, from The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, stated that the aim of the conference was that new frameworks for gas pipelines and fishing stocks to be built upon “a solid knowledge base – built on Arctic science, research, and traditional knowledge”. He added that “the Arctic Ocean coastal states have an important stewardship role in the region. By looking ahead, we are better placed to build a region that can fulfil its true potential and to ensure that change benefits its inhabitants.” Yet no representatives from the indigenous Inuit, Inuvialuit, or Sami community organisations were invited. As Jessica Hernandez points out, indigenous people are “seen as areas of expertise rather than experts… as research subjects rather than researchers” (Wheeling 2022).
Indigenous Knowledge Systems and TEK: Working with Nature
Traditional Knowledge Systems (TEK) are defined as “a cumulative body of knowledge, practice, and belief, evolving by adaptive processes and handed down through generations by cultural transmission, about the relationship of living beings including humans with one another and with their environment. It is a subset of indigenous knowledge, which is local knowledge held by indigenous peoples or local knowledge unique to a given culture or society” (Berkes, 2001).
Indigenous methods vary according to habitat. They are different everywhere but are inherently localised systems that share common goals. Dennis Martinez, a community organiser from California’s San Joaquin Valley, has summarised the “essence of the indigenous model” as comprising five ideas: “1) the indigenous concept of ownership; 2) the ‘minimum necessary yield’ or leaving a biodiversity surplus trumps ‘maximum sustained yield’; 3) that people are obliged in the creation of biodiversity to promote ecological stability and diverse production in a constantly changing environment; 4) to obey the Natural Law, e.g., do not force plants or animals to grow; 5) to use incentives for wealth redistribution” (Nelson and Shilling 2018: 169-170). Martinez also asserts that the reasons for Western science’s rejection of the indigenous expertise in land stewardship are that they believe that “nature was so bountiful that little or no effort was required by indigenous peoples to survive reasonably well; that indigenous populations were so low that they could not have made much of a difference in the structure and composition of the landscape even if they had wanted to, and that their technology was too primitive to have had any significant effect on the environment” (Nelson and Shillin 2018: 154-155).
TEK can be directly applied to freshwater management and irrigation. Its main themes of soil health, biodiversity, crop suitability, dry farming, rainwater harvesting, and minimum necessary yields are the natural directives that will steer the sector through the climatic trials to come. Indigenous knowledge systems are critical for restoring the agricultural crisis and the balance of the earth’s biospheres. It is this ancestral knowledge, tried and tested, upon which sustainable farming systems should be modelled. “Indigenous peoples have secure land tenure on 1.3 billion acres globally (18% of all land area), although they live on and manage far more. Under their stewardship, there are higher rates of sequestration and lower rates of deforestation (Hawken 2017).
The past is the only way to preserve the future.
LJB, Founder, The Wine and Climate Change Institute