Assam tea tree flowers—dried and sold along with tea leaves—are a highly valued commodity for the Karen villagers of Hin Lad Nai in northern Thailand. But even more valuable to the Karen is the flowers' role in attracting wild bees that sustain their rainforest. Credit: Gleb Raygorodetsky
“The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”
—Albert Einstein
As the negative consequences of human-induced environmental and social changes are becoming increasingly obvious, there is a growing recognition that “status quo” approaches to resource development and management, rooted in the dominant, largely linear, reductionist worldview, are failing.
Over the last years, several integrative fields of inquiry—such as systems science, resilience science, ecosystem health, ethnoecology, deep ecology Gaia theory, biocultural diversity, among others—have been advancing our understanding of the complex non-linear and multi-scale relationships between people and nature. To better enable us to tackle the multiple challenges facing the planet, our home, many of these fields of inquiry seek to develop respectful and equitable ways of generating knowledge about our relationship with the natural world through braiding traditional knowledge systems and conventional “Western” science.
This shift in thinking is particularly significant because of the contributions that traditional territories of indigenous peoples make toward sustaining biocultural diversity and the carbon stocks. According to the Right and Resources Initiative—an NGO working on land and resource rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities—though the world’s indigenous peoples make up fewer than 4 percent of the world’s population, their traditional territories support about 80 percent of the world’s biological diversity. In addition, even without counting the carbon stored in the soil, indigenous territories contain close to a quarter of the carbon stored above ground in the world’s tropical forests and northern subarctic peatlands and wetlands.