Seminar 2000
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Lessons for Actual Conservation Initiatives from Central African Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Practice
Central African perceptions that humans are 'part of' rather than 'apart from' nature hold certain lessons for conservationists and all of us in the West who are concerned about the disappearance of the world's biodiversity. Such perceptions affirm what some Western ecologists have also come to realize: we are misguided to manage for a "pristine" nature (i.e., no human influence or presence) because nature does not exist "pristinely". We only place our desire for pristineness upon it. Traditional ecological knowledge of Central Africa reminds us that we are nature, we cannot get ourselves out of it.
Furthermore, such a fact also makes us aware that neither can we view nature outside of ourselves. We will always be looking at it through some degree of subjectivity. Therefore, we would do well to examine and know what our own subjectivities are and how they influence what we see. When we try to manage according to the subjectivity of 'natural pristineness', we often end up moving more against nature's grain than with it, not to mention the damaging effects such management models hold for local people living in management areas.
Thus, Central African traditional ecological knowledge can contribute a corrective to our dualistic ecosystem science and help to amend our disconnection with nature by emphasizing that we must manage for a whole system, humans included. Central Africans certainly recognize the important differences between humans and other parts of nature, but they have less of a tendency than we in the West to come at the two with a cleaver, to lay nature out on the laboratory table and so radically dissect out its human component in order to more "objectively" either conserve or exploit it. Instead Central African peoples remind us that nature and humans are interactive parts of one whole and that any environmental management program must seriously consider the ramifications of such interactions.
One might even propose that the relative ecological balance that has been maintained in places like the Ituri to some degree actually depends on human uses of the environment. As mentioned earlier, the patchwork of primary and secondary forest resulting from human perturbations such as garden clearings provides habitat for a greater number of both plant and animal species than does primary forest. Although much more research is required, it is not out of the question to hypothesize that human perturbations in the rainforest, such as the complex farming/trapping systems described above, are analogous to the perturbations caused by fires (both natural and human-induced) in woodland, prairie, and savanna ecosystems, which ecologists have come to recognize as vital in maintaining the integrity of such systems. Fires are part of the system and not a destructive glitch. Forest-dwelling farmers and their correlated hunting/trapping/farming systems are part of the system, a 'natural' perturbation if you will, and not a destructive glitch. Therefore management models that subtract out the beneficial roles people play in the working of nature can detract from, rather than enhance, the possibilities for fostering the sustainability of the entire ecological system.
Central African traditional ecological knowledge can also do much to clarify that the real problem, the real destructive glitch, is NOT human beings per se, but distinct, human-created socioeconomic institutions that foster unsustainable uses of the environment. Modern capitalist markets, one example of such institutions, interacting with a complex of other forces, including technology and human (African as well as Western) greed, have been and continue to be key factors in destroying the relative balance that has existed between humans and the natural forest environment that has supported them.
One farmer shared with me a poignant example of how these "bad ways" penetrated and changed the relatively balanced systems of land use that existed in the time of his father. "This problem of poison in the waters," he explains, "it came really only with this civilization of the Europeans. They have this poison to put in the soil next to the crops in order to kill pests, but crafty people have taken it and put it in the rivers and streams to kill fish. People took it for a good thing, but it is only ruining our waters, some is even killing people. These ways, they began to change . . . well some of it is due to the whites, those who came to us. It was their knowledge that began to change our knowledge. We saw how much easier it was to get things with these bad ways. We see the ease and we jump into it and even though the rivers may be ruined, I get my fish and I sell it and I get wealthy."
In destroying traditional resource use patterns, this commercialization of nature also succeeded and continues to succeed in destroying the natural ecosystems on which all of life, human and non-human depends.
The RFO, like other Western conservation initiatives, has opted for a management model that, rather than directly restrain this commercialization of nature, establishes State (and in the minds of many of the villagers I talked with, "American") control over vast areas of forest seen by local people as God's gift to them from which they can live. Not only does such a model, in Cronon's words, "privilege some parts of nature at the expense of others"39, it also opens the door for State exploitation of the local population that top-down control has always facilitated.
In short, commercialized use, more than indigenous peoples' use of the forest lies at the root of Africa's, including the Ituri's, environmental problems. Central African traditional ecological knowledge suggests that we would do better to try to control the market forces that lead to overexploitation of the environment rather than unjustly restrict the subsistence practices of people who have lived in these forests much longer than ourselves.
Ecojustice Revisited
I began this talk by suggesting the concept of ecojustice as a guideline for meeting the dilemma of how to conserve biodiversity while meeting neglected human needs. Some possible ecojustice practical solutions for projects such as the RFO might include:
- Undertaking immediate and sustained negotiation of conflicts and differences that exist between the RFO and local communities.
- Creating with local communities authentic institutionalized means for co-management of the forest by its indigenous inhabitants and conservationists.
- Building with local communities alternative means to provide for the resources conservation has taken out of their hands (e.g., rotational agroforestry systems, animal husbandry, captive breeding and export of okapi, aquaculture).
- Beginning on a pilot basis, designing and implementing microprojects that fulfill some of the needs expressed by local villagers (e.g., employing mobile health teams to provide local people with the basic health care they state as being their number one need).
- Making more explicit efforts to control the commercialization of nature by market forces.
Conclusion
In this paper, I have provided only a brief sampling of what Central African perceptions, values, and ways of using the forest have to teach us about living sustainably on the earth. But even at this preliminary level, several features stand out:
First, over a long history of habitation, Central African forest-dwellers have developed complex systems of land use to sustain themselves without jeopardizing the land's ability to provide for future generations. Such knowledge remains alive even though it is being continuously eroded by various market and demographic forces. It behooves us to pay it both attention and respect in our efforts to build sustainability in Central Africa.
Secondly, in Central Africa nature is certainly not considered dead matter, nor even simply a living material system, but in many ways, a socially and spiritually charged entity. Therefore, how one relates to it holds repercussions on numerous fronts. Unlike our own Enlightenment traditions that removed much of this deeper meaning from the natural world, reducing it to inert matter, in Central African thought and practice, the natural world is alive in more ways than one and one must take caution in one's relation to it or bear certain consequences, both social and cosmological.
Thirdly, one's relation to nature cannot be separated from one's relation to the human community to which one belongs. That is to say, that a separate and discrete environmental ethic may be hard to find in Central Africa but not because environmental wisdom does not exist. Rather wisdom in relating to the environment springs from the wisdom and ethics that Central African cultures have developed to govern the social realm. A deep valuing of social harmony and communalism has real implications for the human/environment relationship. Individual property, desires, needs, and uses of the environment were and are allowed but seldom if ever are they free from the restraints of communal obligations and communal harmony, a harmony that extends to both the past and the future. In one's relation to the environment, one must think of and act with regard to both ancestors and offspring, both one's family and the common good; and one can extract from the natural world only in certain places, and in quantities not to surpass the needs of one's family and one's social obligations. Limits definitely were, and in some cases, still are very real and what is taken from nature must be shared. Thus Central African traditions remind us that the search for environmental solutions requires an elaboration of problems in social as well as ecological terms.
Finally, the environmental wisdom of Central African forest peoples stems from the knowledge and belief that nature and humans are never separate entities but parts of one system. We are part of nature not set apart from it. Nature and culture, humans and environment, social ethics and environmental ethics, ecology and justice go hand in hand. It is not humans or nature that are central; rather it is LIFE that is primary, and that includes the entire community of life, for all of life is important, all of life is bonded, all of life is sacred.
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