Landscapes Lost and Found - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 9

You must be in constant contact with the land and the animals and the plants. . .
When Gamaillie was growing up, he was taught to respect animals in such a way
as to survive from them. At the same time, he was taught to treat them as kindly
as you would another fellow person.
This Inuit perspective is common across the Arctic. Fikret Berkes
documents the careful management by the Cree of the Canadian eastern
sub-Arctic populations of beaver, caribou and fish. None of the species
used by the Cree has become locally extinct since the glaciers departed the
region some 4000-5000 years ago. Berkes says: 'hunters are experts on the
natural history of a number of species, and on food chain and habitat relationships'. The
management of beaver is particularly clever. Cree communities appoint
stewards, or beaver bosses, who oversee the codes and rules for hunting
and are also a chief source of knowledge about past hunting patterns and
current beaver abundance. The trick is to manage in balance. If there are
too many beavers, and the willow and aspen decrease until a threshold is
passed, beaver numbers crash, and the whole system takes many years to
recover. Cree management involves hunting once every four years to
prevent such an ecosystem flip. Berkes indicates the subtle way the Cree
see this balance: 'these adjustments are articulated in terms of the principle that it is
the animals (and not the hunter) who are in control of the hunt' . Thus, there is
reciprocity between animal and hunter, and these connections echo similar
rules for social relations. For the Cree, there is no fundamental difference
between people and animals. 15
Some believe that the ruin of common resources is inevitable - an
unavoidable tragedy, as Garrett Hardin put it more than 30 years ago. 16
Each person feels compelled to put another cow on the common, because
each derives all the benefit from the additional animal; but the costs are
distributed amongst all of the other common users. In the contemporary
context, each polluter continues to add greenhouse gases to the atmos-
phere, while reaping the immediate benefit of not having to pay the cost
of abating the pollution, or of adopting clean practices. The costs, though,
are spread amongst us all - including future generations who will have to
pay for climate change. Other theorists have been equally pessimistic.
Mansur Olson was convinced that unless there is coercion or individual
inducements, then 'rational, self-interested individuals will not act to achieve their
common or group interest' . 17 This indicates a problem with free riders -
individuals who take the benefit, but do not invest anything in return. The
temptation, some would say, is always to free ride. The logic has been so
compelling that the state has stepped in, developing policies directly or
indirectly to privatize common property systems. Although this has been
going on for centuries, it has accelerated during the late 20th century's