Changing contexts for Ethnobiology

Permafrost slumps such at this one in the Richardson Mountains will be come more frequent with climate change.
Contexts for traditional and local knowledges are changing rapidly at the present time. Ethnobiology looks at “traditional” “cultural,” “knowledge”’ of the living world and of the human environment. What any of those terms might mean seems to be a moving target. Global changes in environment, society, economy and the political map are all moving at a dizzying rate. Global appetites for commodities create dramatic shifts in the relationships of Indigenous peoples to their homelands, as their territories suddenly are converted into “empty land” which their enclosing states give away for a variety of resource concessions to multinationals (see the opening chapters of Anna Tsing’s 2005 book Friction, an Ethnography of Global Connection for a graphic description of the impact of timber concessions and oil palm plantations in Kalimantan).
Climate change is an obvious change in the world external to ourselves that calls into question the usefulness of the rich detailed knowledge of rhythms of life in locale. In rapidly and drastically changing conditions, the insights gathered from observations of past patterns of timing and relationship may no longer provide guidance for the future. As a case in point, Joe Linklater, Chief of the Vuntut Gwitchin Nation of Old Crow in the northern Yukon commented on the impacts of climate change for his people and their environment at the Northern Truths Symposium held in Edmonton in January of 2008. ‘The Vuntut Gwitchin are ‘people of the lakes’, he said. ‘There are 2000 lakes in Old Crow Flats and lakes are now draining. Land is being degraded increasingly rapidly. There is uncertainty around the traditional way of life,’ he went on. ‘So what good is traditional knowledge if people are uncertain about future? Technology is changing, and adaptation creates stress in the community. How do we adapt and use our traditional knowledge?’ he queried. Theorists such as Fikret Berkes, Lance Gunderson and CS Holling explore “resilience”, the capacity to productively and effectively respond to change, in their consideration of sustainable life ways and increasingly highlight “adaptation.” (see Navigating Social-Ecological Systems, Building Resilience for Complexity and Change F. Berkes, J Colding and C Folke, eds, 2003, and Panarchy, Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems, L. H. Gunderson and C.S. Holling, eds., 2002). The wave of the future....
A new and quite different change in the context for ethnobiological knowledge entered my awareness this past week: synthetic biology. Synthetic biology is a marriage of genetics and engineering to create life forms from basic DNA building blocks that will be little factories to churn out compounds that interest us. Generally this is accomplished by taking a generic bacterium, say an “E. coli”, and then putting the genes one wants into the bacterial genome, and culturing the resultant tailored strain. Some experiments, according to the New Yorker article in the September 28 issue that introduced me to the term (New Yorker, Annals of Science “A Life of its Own- Where will synthetic biology lead us?" http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/28/090928fa_fact_specter), hope to create wholly synthetic organisms—the stuff of brave new worlds, and of nightmarish sci-fi scenarios. As we read on, my attention was suddenly caught by the word “artemisinin”. Artemisinin is the latest best hope in the arsenal of antimalarial drugs, acting by a wholly different mechanism than quinine and its synthetic derivatives, so still effective against those virulent strains that have become resistant to quinine type compounds. Artemisinin is a component of the common weedy wormwood Artemesia annua and was the basis of activity of Chinese traditional herbal medicines made from A. annua. It has recently been gaining prominence in efforts to combat malaria worldwide, and cultivation of Artemesia annua on a large scale has been initiated in Asia to provide a supply of raw material for drug production. By chance, it seems, one of the early proponents of synthetic biology, Jay Keasling of the University of California at Berkeley, decided to focus on a potentially useful class of organic compounds called isoprenoids for his initial efforts in demonstrating biosynthesis in enngineered organisms. These compounds apparently are present in many economic plants and produce both flavour essences in ginger and cinnamon, and the pigments in sunflowers and tomatos. One day a graduate student called Keasling’s attention to a compound in this class called amorphadiene –which happens to be the precursor to artemisinin. Keasling initially was completely unfamiliar with artemisinin, but quickly saw the potential to create industrial level synthesis of the precursor for drug production through his bacterial process. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a world leader in the fight against malaria, provided backing. A consortium is now anticipating having their synthetically produced artemisinin drug on the marked by 2012. Other medicinal compounds are likely to follow.
The ethical and philosophical implications of this development are enormous. The New Yorker article byline says “If the science truly succeeds, it will make it possible to supplant the world created by Darwinian evolution with one created by us.” This is a far cry from the holistic community of beings of many indigenous cosmologies, where social relations and reciprocity characterize relations between hunter and prey, where other beings have agency and rights inherent in their being. Hubris, too, to imagine that humans can get the balancing act right. Unsurprisingly, bioethicists are also concerned by the implications of such perspectives. The August 2009 issue of The American Scholar (page 14), contains a short piece entitled “Synthetic Biology’s New Bugs” by Professor Arthur Kaplan of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics. Among the questions he poses are several that bear on relations of humans with the living world. He queries: “What is the risk that new life forms created by synthetic biologists will escape into the general environment and cause havoc with natural microbes or other living beings?” and “Is it ethical to patent a new life form? The law seems to permit it, but is this in the best interest of science in the long term? Should all forms of life be outside the realm of patents?” . He also questions “Is life reducible to genetic messages? If a scientists creates a new life form, even a microbe, does that challenge religious views that say only God can create life?” Indigenous peoples, as well as devout members of many of the world’s religions may have perspectives on the inherently sacred nature of life and the rightness of the natural order, and that it is inappropriate, even an act of hubris, to attempt to create living beings. Another question that Kaplan raises deals with global equity: “If synthetic biology brings significant benefits to humankind, how can it be assured that the rich and poor benefit equally?”
We might query, what are the implications of such a fundamental shift in relations of humans to other living beings and the living world brought about by creating novel organisms, however good [or ill] the intent? Do we truly know enough to be sure that no harm can come from these organisms entering the environment, or perhaps causing human illness? Will we respect the miracle of life and the inherent rights of other organisms if we can make life the way we make a chair or an mp3 player? Can we be sure that, if we have the means, we will not choose to make terrible novel biological weapons, or modify multicellular animals nearer to ourselves, or even humans? How shall we value the possibility of an affordable and plentiful antimalarial therapy, or perhaps a fuel source not dependent on fossil fuels against these other possibilities?

Seasons- Equinox time

As I write we are at the time of Equinox, one of the two times in the year when day and night are of equal length, and the same all over the world. The Equinoxes are also times of very rapid change at higher latitudes, such as most of Canada, where the day lengths change dramatically between our summer and our winter seasons. As my partner recently pointed out, the change in day length over time can be represented as a cycloid, one of those familiar graphs of oscillating peaks and valleys. The peaks and troughs would represent the summer and winter solstices, where the sun indeed seems to stand still for a while. The Equinoxes are placed just at the times of most rapid change, and at our latitudes, we can see the day length change over a period of a few days. Here on Mountain Daylight time, it was just dawning at a bit after 7 in the morning, and the sun will set tonight at 7:38 according to the weather site. If I were in the middle of my time zone, there would be a perfect symmetry. I can anticipate a rapid shortening of day length now and dramatic shifts of the aspect of the land [deciduous trees will all drop their leaves, snow will mantle the ground once winter arrives]. Thinking about equinoxes made me think about seasonal knowledge: moon cycles, Solstice celebrations, predictors of planting dates, evidence of the timing of salmon migrations, and the like. Trevor Lantz and Nancy Turner wrote an insightful article on what they termed “traditional phenological knowledge”, or the use of one kind of seasonal biological event to predict the timing of another (Lantz, Trevor C. and Nancy J. Turner. 2003. Traditional phenological knowledge of aboriginal peoples in British Columbia. Journal of Ethnobiology 23(2):263-286). Among the Gitksan in northwestern British Columbia, the arrival of robins in the spring “announces” the arrival of steelhead migrating up the rivers from the Coast. The Gitksan interpret the robins' song as saying “Gii gyooks milit, milit”. Milit is the steelhead, and the phrase means the steelhead are coming, the steelhead are coming. In other places other indicators of salmon arrival are noted: the fruiting of the red elderberry, for example. In many traditional calendrical systems the names of the months indicate conditions or resources to be expected in those months. Iain Davidson-Hunt and Fikret Berkes give a nice exposition of this for the Shoal Lake Anishinaabe in their 2003 paper in Conservation Ecology (now renamed Ecology and Society, an online journal about adaptation, conservation, and traditional knowledge) www.consecol.org/vol8
and in their chapter in my upcoming book Landscape Ethnoecology, Concepts of Physical and Biotic Space (Berghahn Books, November 2009), a collection of topical papers on landscape knowledge co-edited with Eugene Hunn. Some of the named moons are “budding moon”, “blooming moon”, “ricing moon” [for the harvest of manomin, or wild rice a “cultural keystone species” for Anishinaabe], “berrying moon”, “leaves turning colour moon”, “falling leaves moon” and “whitefish spawning moon” –all obviously encoding information about the cycle of seasonal change and when key events are anticipated to occur. Other systems make reference to significant events in their local ecologies:

Nearer the equator, seasonal shifts are much more subtle, but nonetheless, in the Andes not far south of the Equator, the Quechua people have elaborate ceremonials at their winter solstice in June. The winter may see frost in places with cold air drainage, whereas in the summer season, the higher precipitation means that mists will prevent radiation of heat away at night, and the frost line is much higher. The present Intí Raymí Ceremony is a mid 20th century re-creation of an ancient annual Inca ritual, which was suppressed during the Colonial period by the Catholic church. The present re-created ceremony makes offerings to Pachamama, the mother earth for a successful renewal of the seasonal cycle and the return of the sun. Apparently the visibility of the Pleiades constellation at winter solstice, gives information about the coming season and when to plant (Orlove et al. "Forecasting Andean rainfall and crop yield from the influence of El Niño on Pleiades visibility." Nature 403, 68-71 (6 January 2000) | doi:10.1038/47456). Depending on the amount of moisture in the air at high altitudes, more or fewer stars will be visible. The fine tuning of traditional knowledges such as this are likely to shift dramatically with present and on-going global climatic change, as all global systems become less predictable, and show more events that are extreme or outside of historic conditions.
Joseph Bastien wrote a compelling and sensitive ethnography of the people of Mt. Kaata in the Bolivian Andes not too far from Cusco where I was, which details the spiritual and agricultural cycle of the local people as it was when he lived there in the early 1970’s Mountain of the Condors, Metaphor and ritual in an Andean Ayllu (1978 St. Paul, MN: West Publishing Co.)

On Highbush Cranberries

Walking in the ravine today, an urban greenspace in the middle of Edmonton, where I live. The ravine is an eclectic mix of species, exotic and native, and encompasses a multitude of meanings and uses overlapping in a single geographic space– some commensurable, and some in one degree or another of conflict. The ravine is also a site of natural and human history- once a green riparian forest along a source of permanent water scoring relatively dry and treeless prairie. Until the late 1800’s, the high rolling plain south of the North Saskatchewan was grassland, home to herds of bison and to the Cree who hunted them, periodically fired to maintain it in an open and productive state. Then the settlers arrived, transforming the cultural landscape of the city of Strathcona, now part of Edmonton, bringing with them their notions of gardens and landscape aesthetics derived from European values and land uses, creating neat Victorian clapboard and brick homes with picket fences, planting shade trees, shrubs, lawns and flower gardens. These gardens are the sources of the “alien” species in the ravine mix such as Caragana, a Eurasian leguminous small tree with myriad yellow flowers in spring followed by pea-pods full of [to us] inedible seeds, and many forms of crabapples, seeded by birds, and each tree showing its own unique mix of fruit size and shape, and rowan or mountain ash, full of bitter red-orange fruits beloved of birds. Some garden weeds also multiply in the ravine: exotic “Russian orchids” (a tall species of patience flower or touch-me-not with magenta or white flowers), which find the moist and fertile soil beside the creek congenial, thistles, which thrive on disturbance everywhere, dandelions in grassy places along the trails. But there are plenty of indigenous species too: balsam poplar and aspen [Populus balsamifera and P. tremuloides], pin cherry and chokecherry [Prunus pensylvanica and P. virginiana], saskatoon [Amelanchier alnifolia and red willow [Cornus stolonifera which is not a “true” willow as botanists reckon it, but rather a form of dogwood]. Soapberry or russet buffaloberry [Shepherdia canadensis] and highbush cranberry [Viburnum opulus], hanging with glowing scarlet oval fruits in heavy clusters also grow along the trails. Many of the indigenous shrubs have various tones of berries [in the popular sense of small round fruits], some food for wildlife, and some edible by people. As I walk in the summer and fall, I snack on the various fruits as they ripen, and contemplate the role they played in the diet of the Plains Cree before they were displaced from this part of their homeland. Saskatoons were sweet and abundant this year, despite considerable dry weather, but are now dried up. Pincherries were an occasional tart snack. Chokecherries I leave alone for the unpleasantness of their puckery skins, though I have tasted local chokecherry wine that was superb, and they were an important component of pemmican according to a Lakota acquaintance I knew years ago. Today the highbush cranberries are ripe, and I sucked the juice from various translucent ovals, refreshing in the heat, and discarded the large flat seeds, perhaps propagating more cranberry bushes for the future. These fruits are not related to cranberries that grow in mossy spruce forests or bogs in the northern forests of Canada and Eurasia, nor to the large now domesticated cranberries of New England’s bogs. Those are low growing plants of the heath family which favour acidic soils, and require you to bend to the ground to pick their fruit. “Lowbush” cranberries [also known as lingonberries in Scandinavia] and bog cranberries [the commercial cranberry and a couple of small related wild species of sphagnum bogs] lack large seeds. Our seedy, juicy “cranberries” that grow on tall shrubs with maple-shaped leaves do not much resemble these, but they do share a tart, acidic “cranberry” taste and red colour; hence the English common name. The Cree in this part of the world appreciated the fruits of the two species of Viburnum that grow in northern Alberta (Viburnum opulus and V. edule; nepinana and moosomina in Cree). Viburnum edule is often called “mooseberry” by Cree when they refer to it in English, a translation of the Cree name for the plant. (The bark and buds also have a number of medicinal uses which are summarized in Plants of the western Boreal Forest and Aspen Parkland by Johnson, Kershaw, MacKinnon and Pojar; more on Cree and Dene uses of highbush cranberries can be found in the book Aboriginal Plant Use in Canada's Northwest Boreal Forest by Robin Marles and his co-authors).

As I was appreciating the abundance and fruitfulness of the highbush cranberry here in Edmonton, I thought back to a conference I attended in northwest British Columbia this past June, called Challenging the Paradigm, a focussed look at alternative ways of teaching and learning to help make education more relevant and accessible to First Nations/Indigenous students [and to broaden the perspectives of non-Indigenous students and educators as well]. One of the presentations described a field school looking at cultural landscape and environment in Haida Gwaii (formerly known as the Queen Charlotte Islands). Ecological change is having strong impacts on Haida Gwaii, and making access to certain prized cultural plants difficult. One such change was the introduction of coastal blacktail deer, which were formerly absent on the Islands. The notion was that deer would provide a food source Haida could hunt [the indigenous Dawson caribou having been extirpated in the 1880’s]. However, there are no natural predators for deer in Haida Gwaii....so predictably, the deer multiplied exponentially.... and they are now wiping out many native and culturally important plants which formerly served as food and medicine, from the implausibly spiny devils club (Oplopanax horridus, a medicinal plant related to ginseng) to various edible berry species. One of the highlights of the presentation was that two highbush cranberry bushes hlaayaa hlk’a.aay (Viburnum edule) were discovered by the field school on northern Moresby Island.....doubling the known number of highbush cranberry bushes remaining on the islands....I thought of my Haida colleagues, and reflected what wealth they would see in our neglected, unremarked highbush cranberry in the ravine in Edmonton.

In writing this blog, I referred to Nancy Turner’s lovely book Plants of Haida Gwaii to see what the uses and importance of highbush cranberry were to the Haida. First I learned that cakes of highbush cranberry mixed with hemlock cambium [sweet inner bark of the western hemlock tree] were highly valued food of important persons. Then I learned that they have a lovely traditional narrative detailing how highbush cranberry got to Haida Gwaii (p. 111). The gist of the story is that raven Yaahl was treated by the beavers to wonderful meals of salmon, highbush cranberry, and mountain goat organ meat. He was so impressed that he stole the lake (despite the strenuous efforts of the beavers to prevent him), with its cranberry rich shores and productive fish traps, and carried it to Haida Gwaii, where he unrolled it “and he kept the fish trap and the house to teach the people of Haida Gwaii and the Mainland how to live.” The little tale continues to state “Since then there have been many highbush cranberries in Haida Gwaii.” Sadly, with environmental change this is no longer the case. I thought of my Haida colleagues, and reflected what wealth they would see in our neglected, unremarked highbush cranberry in the ravine in Edmonton.

implications for ethnobiology of the Global Climate Change report from Copenhagen

Greetings- I've decided I want to start a blog to give me a forum to be able to comment on current events and connections in ethnobiology. On Friday a colleague forwarded the link to the Synthesis Report, Global Climate Change, Global Risks, Challenges and Decisions from an international conference held in Copenhagen in April 2009
http://www.pik-potsdam.de/news/press-releases/files/synthesis-report-web.pdf


Reading over the report, I couldn't help but think of the many implications of the scenarios described for the nature and relevance of local knowledge, traditional strategies for food security, gathering and cultivation, ability to remain in homelands, and growing conflicts between groups over increasingly scarce resources. We have to remember that the world is changing rapidly technologically, politically, demographically and environmentally, and that these changing contexts form the background to people's present and future practices and livelihoods, and even perhaps their survival. If any of you read this report, I invite you to share your thoughts on the implications of the report for local communities and for your own lives. What are some of the social justice implications of needing to limit greenhouse gas emissions to 0? What might it mean to transition to a non-carbon economy?