Indigenous peoples inhabit more than 85 percent of the Earth’s protected areas, yet only 1 percent of the billions of dollars spent each year on philanthropy goes to indigenous peoples and the ecosystem services they support. Indigenous communities have inherited millennium-tested traditional ecological knowledge, land-based lifeways, and a holistic, interdependent relationship to the Earth. In State of the World 2013: Is Sustainability Still Possible?, contributing authors discuss the value of the relationship that indigenous groups have developed and maintained between native lands and waters, including through the cultivation of native foods.
“According to many native traditions, to live well is the goal of life,” says Melissa K. Nelson, contributing author and associate professor of American Indian studies at San Francisco State University. “And to live well means not only sustaining foods and a lifestyle but actually regenerating the ecological systems that people depend on to enhance their happiness and spirit.”
Many indigenous communities know how to grow, nurture, harvest, process, cook, and feast on native foods in a way that can sustain both an ecosystem and a society. This is a result of a long tradition of intergenerational knowledge transmission. It is how the Paiute in Utah know how to gather and prepare tule bulbs as foods, how the Pomo in California know how to gather and process acorns, and how the Tohono O’odham in the Sonoran Desert know how to take an heirloom tepary bean and grow it in a beautiful desert garden.
By occupying nearly 20 percent of the Earth’s surface, indigenous groups, who live in 80 percent of the planet’s biological diversity hotspots, are acting as caretakers of these biodiverse places. Many indigenous communities and ecosystems, however, are at risk due to a lack of rights and fair treatment by governments and corporations.
“Forced evictions devalue not only the importance of indigenous communities but also the traditional ecological and agricultural knowledge these groups possess,” said Rebecca Adamson, contributing author and founder of First Peoples Worldwide. “By removing indigenous groups from their lands or recklessly exploiting natural resources such as minerals and forests, corporations and governments are effectively erasing thousands of years of practiced traditional ecological knowledge—the cumulative body of experience an indigenous group has collected over generations, encompassing knowledge, practices, and beliefs about their customary lands.”
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