Conservation Lifestyles | A Study of Geospatial Data & Ecological Cultures

Introduction

It’s the 21st century, and if there is something which humanity has learned by now, it’s that moderns do a poor job at conserving the environment. For 500 years now, the “juggernaut of modernity” has slashed and trashed its way across the earth’s savannahs, jungles and oceans sowing trouble in its path.

We once could have called it primitive capitalism (“primitive accumulation of capitalism”) and predicted the future ramifications. 

Today we live in those ramifications and assess the situation bleakly as: “A growing human population and globally expanding economic activities exert[ing] unsustainable demands on nature, resulting in widespread deforestation, biodiversity loss, erosion of ecosystem services, and accelerating climate change.”

For as doomy, gloomy and dire the situation may seem, there do exist very real solutions… however, it seems to be the case that unfortunately, the best of them will make us ‘moderns’ very uncomfortable. This is because, one of the best things modern humanity can do, is step back, let go of control, and put others in a position of authority.

Why It Matters

This article is part of a wider effort at New World DAO known as the Ancestral-Future Initiative. Here, we cover the latest research, ideas and perspectives which diagnose the research around creating a world with a modern-traditional embedded framework.

The phenomenon of focus here is research indicating that indigenous populations actually conserve land and natural resources better than moderns. 

For many people this may be a sort of bien sur… a self-evident fact which doesn’t need to be explained. While it may seem obvious that indigenous populations better conserve land and natural resources than moderns, the actual impact of this knowledge is revelatory. 

This is because, what it would mean is that if in all seriousness - we, humanity - want to maintain balance with nature, then maybe the moderns need to step out of the driving seat and bring in somebody who doesn’t talk the talk, but lives the life.

Statistics Proving Indigenous Conserve Better

Context

In 2018 a key piece of research was reported which has been used in a litany of further academic contributions to both theory and practice. It was a geospatial mapping of all the land which indigenous populations ‘own’. Not only did they crystallize this data, but they also cross-analyzed these findings with all “terrestrially protected areas and ecologically intact landscapes”.

Their intent here was to see if indigenous peoples really did have a natural capacity to conserve land at exorbitant rates. The logic follows that if indigenous peoples have lands which protect more ecologically intact landscapes, then their culture inherently is better at conservation than modern culture.

The Results

There are at least 370 million indigenous people globally

• Indigenous Peoples manage at least ~38 million km2 on all inhabited continents (this is ¼ of the world’s land surface)

• About 7.8 million km2 (20.7%) of Indigenous Peoples’ lands are within protected areas

• This encompasses at least 40% of the global protected area 

• The proportion of Indigenous land in protected areas is significantly higher than the proportion of other lands that are protected

Although Indigenous Peoples’ represent <5% of the global population, they manage many of the world’s most sparsely populated, intact places.

What these findings are saying is that indigenous lands significantly overlap with immaculately conserved lands globally. This significance is not insignificant, because it makes the point - indigenous societies are better at creating a socio-ecological balance than moderns.

How They Do It

There’s been a host of scientific development since 2018 which has built off of this cornerstone research. For instance, the results were reconfirmed in 2020 when another team of researchers did a cross-analysis analyzing the overlap of Intact Forest Lands (IFL) with indigenous lands. They added that “IFL loss rates have been considerably lower on Indigenous Peoples’ lands than on other lands.” 

So how do they do it? 

Here are a few bullet points to consider (based on some 2022 meta-research):

• Most Indigenous communities have developed land-use systems that promote three notable features vital for sustainability: (i) high levels of biodiversity, (ii) socioecological resilience, and (iii) stable stewardship over long periods. 

• The formation of landscape mosaics under Indigenous management is critical in maintaining and promoting biodiversity

• Indigenous resource use strategies result from the intergenerational transmission of knowledge, are often communicated through oral histories, and encompass traditional systems of species and landscape classification, sustainable resource use, and symbolic ritual and religious practices. 

• Most traditional knowledge is linguistically exclusive such that each Indigenous language encapsulates and represents unique information concerning plants, animals, landscapes, and their sustainable management

• Many Indigenous Peoples practice low impact and resilient land use, which often includes patterns of spatial and temporal resource rotation and landscape management, incorporated within sociocosmologies that value and promote biodiversity (Fig.  2)

• Over many millennia, Indigenous Peoples were primary actors, knowledge holders, managers, stewards, stakeholders, and decision makers over their lands, and coexisted with and helped sustain large expanses of comparatively unmodified forests (32, 73).

• Within Indigenous communities, hunting lore, behavioral proscriptions, and food taboos often emphasize environmental balances, and reciprocal exchanges between humans, prey species, and other nonhuman beings. These, at least in principle, constrain excessive hunting and can facilitate sustainable ecosystem relationships (63, 82, 83).

Summary

This research crystallized between 2018-2022 really indicates a revelatory thing - Modern Socio-Ecological Systems are not as good as Traditional Socio-Ecological Systems at conservation. 

Conservation is one of the most important aspects in mitigating climate change and environmental degradation. Both of these items can be seen as affecting humanity to an existential degree. 

So the results are simple, the indication obvious, but the practical implementation will be hard to swallow. Indigenous people because of their cultural traditions and knowledge ought to be put into positions of power in order to guide global civilization’s mature stewardship of land and natural resources. 

It’s time to step back, and let the classical masters teach us what we seem to have forgotten.