Humans and human culture and society have evolved over millions of years to become what we know as the modern world today. Due to globalisation (the easy flow of information, finance and movement of people all over the planet), a global culture and way of life has emerged over the past 100 years or more. If we go back a few hundred years, humans were more isolated and lived in separate tribes or civilisations that had much less interaction with each other than is possible today. Each tribe or civilisation developed unique cultures that were deeply embedded in and influenced by the natural environment that they evolved in.
Only in recent times has the human population and the development of technology, science and commerce led to the huge environmental impacts that humans are having on the planet. Although certain civilisations did impact negatively on the natural environment even thousands of years ago, which often led to the collapse of those civilisations, the large and global scale of environmental degradation today is unique. The field of nature conservation emerged as a response to these negative impacts that human society and the economy were having on the natural world. This started when people began to realise that the destruction of the natural environment was mostly caused by human activities through the extraction of natural resources for production and manufacturing and the production of waste and pollution that led to destruction or harm to natural ecosystems. The scale of human impact on the environment increased greatly with the start of the industrial revolution in Europe about 300 years ago that gradually spread all over the globe.
Natural scientists, conservationists and environmentalists have drawn on the sciences to better understand how natural ecosystems work (for example the science of ecology) and come up with better ways to manage natural resources and ecosystems so that a better balance between human society/economy and the natural environment can be found. At the same time, many have also looked at human behaviour and culture (the social sciences) to better understand how human society needs to change or adapt to become more environmentally sustainable or in balance with the natural world that human civilisation depends on.
The role of Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) in nature conservation and sustainable development has become more widely recognised in recent decades as natural scientists have come to understand that native people throughout the world have developed knowledge and practices (cultural heritage) that is closely linked to the natural environment in which they evolved and are situated in. Much of this knowledge and cultural practice has developed as a way of keeping a balance between these societies and the natural world that they depend on. One can understand this as an evolutionary pressure that applies at the level of a society in the sense that knowledge and practices that are sustainable and do not harm the natural environment are more likely to survive and be passed on to future generations than knowledge and practices that harm or destroy the natural ecosystems in which these societies live.
Effective conservation management must be informed by robust information on the status of species and their habitats of concern. In relation to human interactions, this is generally derived from research-led scientific studies. Increasingly, however, it is recognised that indigenous communities around the world possess an extremely rich body of knowledge about local environmental resources and biodiversity, developed through interactions with the non-human environment around them. Indigenous knowledge has the potential to be an invaluable tool to aid conservation around the world – helping to monitor key components of biodiversity, support sustainable use of environmental resources and enforce conservation management through indigenous value systems. Although there is huge scope to integrate indigenous knowledge into conservation management, nonscientific knowledge systems are becoming progressively eroded worldwide and the information cannot always be easily interpreted, creating barriers for use in many social-ecological conservation systems.
(Source: https://www.zsl.org/science/whats-on/indigenous-knowledge-and-conservationmanagement-challenges-and-opportunities Accessed on 31/08/2022)
Figure 2.13 – Indigenous communities with their knowledge and cultures have a lot to offer to nature conservation in developing sustainable land management practices.
