Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
indigenous cultural and religious traditions in North America, South America,
Africa, and the Pacifi c.
Although cultural borrowing does sometimes occur, an idea or concept from one
culture inserted to another can often be counterproductive. It can be called coloniz-
ing, imperialistic, and totalizing. Such has been the fate of the national park idea and
the related wilderness concept in Africa and southern Asia. Because both call for
the exclusion of humans from natural areas, there has been considerable social
disruption and resentment as local peoples were prevented from their traditional,
centuries-old relationships with the land. In addition, teaching Western environ-
mental values has proved to be very diffi cult because children usually form their
values tacitly
10
long before entering elementary school. G. W. Burnett and Kamuyu
wa Kang'ethe (
1994
, p. 159) in “Wilderness and the Bantu Mind” point out that
“efforts to instruct Kenyan school children in Western wildlife and wildland values
are predicated, at least in part on an assumption of an indigenous attitude to wilder-
ness that is unacceptable to the West.” They continue:
Efforts to instruct Africans in Western wilderness values have proceeded with little, or no,
articulation of how Africans might already understand wilderness, and consequently, what
ideas the interventionist seeks to change. It would be far easier if the Bantu concept of
wilderness could be articulated and developed as an indigenous philosophy of wilderness
(Burnett and wa Kang'ethe
1994
, p. 159).
The fate of stewardship internationally could be much like that of the national
park idea and the wilderness idea in non-Western countries. Burnett and wa
Kang'ethe speculate that if the West had left Bantuland alone, the Bantu might have
come to love wilderness just as the Puritans did in New England, but the imposition
of national parks has made that impossible.
11
20.4
Stewardship Versus Citizenship
An alternative way to promote something like the original meaning of
dominion
probably without crosscultural problems is to focus on the notion of ecological or
environmental citizenship, a notion that is religiously neutral and not associated
specifi cally with Western culture. Environmental citizenship began with
Environment Canada,
12
which developed programs for children on the web on this
theme (although more recently it seems to have abandoned this project). The United
Nations Environmental Programme has also embraced the term for a time, although
references are also currently mostly missing from its website. When UNEP was
more active in developing global environmental citizenship, Alicia Bárcena, Senior
Advisor on Global Environmental Citizenship wrote: “… new relationships and
10
See Polanyi (
1967
), p. 4. This topic is an extension of Polanyi's basic position developed more
extensively in Polanyi (
1974
).
11
Ibid., p. 160.
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