Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
work the soil, plant seeds, nurture seedlings and harvest crops, they experience
the fuller development of their natural connections and participate in the age-
old Pueblo way of connecting to place and living a healthy life.
(1999: 53)
One logical extension of this worldview is the philosophy and practice of
permaculture, where nothing is wasted, everything is used and all life is respected.
This thinking has influenced a great deal of environmental education in the developed
TEK is therefore neither quaint nor antiquated. It is being increasingly exploited
commercially by pharmaceutical and other big corporations, whose patent applications
frequently conjure up property rights from life itself as well as the culture and
environment that fostered it (Shiva, 2000). However, governments, the scientific
establishment and the major conservation bodies have slowly recognized the
significance of TEK in other ways. Indigenous peoples are now more often than not
incorporated in to large-scale projects to protect areas rich in biodiversity. As people
who know and work the land, they have traditionally conserved and used it wisely,
and are increasingly doing so again. Only by protecting cultural diversity can
biodiversity be protected too. As Mark Dowie writes in his book
Conservation
Refugees
: 'Every shaman, healer, chief and elder knows that without biotic wealth
there is no food security. Thus biological diversity becomes an expression of culture.
They appear and disappear together' (2009: 91).
In Indonesia, since the late 1970s, there has been a revival of interest in traditional
medicine and particularly herbal remedies as part of a larger campaign to promote
the prevention of illness, to foster self-reliance and improve the health status of the
population. Indigenous knowledge and wisdom has consequently been re-evaluated
in its partial integration into primary healthcare programmes, resulting in a widening
recognition and acceptance of indigenous cosmologies 'in which an equilibrium
between the natural and supernatural forces is reflected in the balanced interrelation-
ship between health and disease' (Slikkerveer and Slikkerveer, 1995). Culture, religion,
wisdom and spirituality enables many Aboriginal peoples to have a direct, emotional,
ethical and often personal involvement in the reasonable use and sustainable
management of a variety of natural resources (Lansing and Kremer, 1995; Anderson,
1996). It also offers Western environmental philosophers an opportunity to re-
evaluate the epistemological basis of Western ethical systems. Cheney, for example,
argues that being able to apprehend the sacred in the Earth, as indigenous peoples
do, may enable Westerners to understand existence as something more-than-human.
Assuming those in the West are sufficiently mindful of such a consideration, the
enduring presence of rocks will become our most important teachers: 'Once we give
up epistemologies of domination and control, nature's complexity, generosity and
communicative abilities, its kinship and reciprocity, come to mark our epistemological
relationship with the Earth matrix' (Cheney, 1998: 274).
Latour: relations and networks
Connectedness is increasingly influencing political thought and policy making. In
Politics of Nature
, Bruno Latour (2004a) wishes to move beyond a concept of nature
that sees nature as an asocial objective source of truth. For Latour, the essentially
