Adriana Luna-Díaz

Sacred Ecology by Fikret Berkes

KEY POINTS:

- Emic approach in the development of the book

- Traditional knowledge as dynamic everyday-tested worldview that
evolved to ensure healthy and sustainable relationships between man
and nature and between the members of the community.
- Setting Traditional Ecological Knowledge as a science on its own merits
with intellectual roots based on Human Ecology and Ethnoscience.
- Guidelines of Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Adaptative Management
and Social Learning.
- Final proposal: Unity of mind and Nature – how the emic and the etic, the
Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Western science can be
complementary and integrated views to the current ecological problems
and in general, as a new way of humans to relate with nature.

BOOK REVIEW

My approach to Berkes’ book at first was cautious. I am used to read “white

man’s” studies on the “native” cosmology, way of living, relationship with
nature, community structure, etc. etc. etc. Lots of these studies, full of
theories, statistics, observations and sometimes romanticism, are based on
what Berke calls the etic view and they tend to describe their findings as if
they were describing a piece of pottery, an archaeological site or a population
of grazing animals living in the wild. My first happy surprise was when he
talked about the emic view, or “how the Cree themselves saw their systems”;
the view from the inside out, which determine the line of the rest of the book.

He is very careful in explaining the different uses of the words traditional,

indigenous and local knowledge and the environmental sphere of those. Finally,
he uses the term Traditional Ecological Knowledge, to describe the system of
knowledge-practice-belief that surround the way of life of non-Western groups
and he stresses that these systems are a dynamic everyday-tested worldview
that evolved to ensure healthy and sustainable relationships between man and
nature and between the members of the community within a context of
respect, attachment and love more than a superstition of “pristine noble
savages”.

In order to set a common playground for Traditional Ecological Knowledge and

Western knowledge, in chapter 2 and 3 he gives a context of intellectual roots
of the first one – human ecology and etnoscience-, in terms that the second
understands and acknowledge the traditional ways as science. For example, he
presents a series of studies in which western scientists contrasted western
classifications into Linnaean species with the “folk” taxonomies of non-western
people; the result was that in several occasions throughout the world, the
“folk” taxonomies matched almost perfectly with the western system of
species of classification.

The chapter 4 is entitled “Traditional Knowledge Systems in Practice”. First of

all, it is worth to mention that, in previous sections he clarifies that most of
non-western communities do not have the concept of “resource” or
“management”, given that the territory (land + biotic + abiotic elements) is
not a commodity but a living entity, therefore, in order to adopt the traditional
systems, the western land management must encompass also ethical, social,
political and spiritual perspectives and not merely apply methodological
recipes. This issue is also key to recognize the importance of the control of this
knowledge by its original owners and “developers”.

He points out two key concepts in traditional ecological knowledge that might
explain the success of traditional land use by non-western communities and
that give lessons to current managers: Adaptative management and social
learning.

The first one is based on the assumption that “nature cannot be controlled and
yields predicted; uncertainty and unpredictability are characteristics of all
ecosystems”. The second one recognizes that “traditional knowledge
represents the summation of millennia of ecological adaptations of human
groups to their diverse environment”. Together, these two concepts provide a
picture of thousands of years of observation and co-evolution in which the
humans are part of the land as any other species and therefore are subject of
the same ecological phenomena (i.e. succession and biodiversity), so they work
with them not against them and in which the concepts of respect and
reciprocity naturally arise from the everyday life. Insights of how this
knowledge is constructed are given in chapters 9 and 10

Chapters 5 and 6 exemplifies those concepts in the context of the Cree

relationship with their environment, specifically in the hunting of Caribou and
fishing and in chapter 7 the adaptative management is tested through
response of traditional communities to climate change providing lessons on
how the local knowledge translated into sensitivity to critical signs and signals
from the environment, can be linked to scholar knowledge to deal with this
problem from all scales.

The last two chapters address the challenges of the traditional knowledge and
finally propose making “unity of mind and nature” in the sense of linking the
traditional knowledge in all its extent with what we know as formal science as
an another step in the evolution of the first one and as an expansion of the
second that might help it to overcome the environmental problems that have
arised from its limited scope.