Musings on Climate, Common Pool Resources, and the Rights of Nature

Today is the International Day of Climate Action....I guess my first act in support of halting climate change is to write this blog, in which I have already called attention to the climate change issue and its implications on several occasions. A second effort will be to listen to the live broadcast of the Peruvian and American youth from the Potato Park in Peru. The most serious commitment one can make regarding climate change is lifestyle change...and the most difficult. Perhaps knowing this is the International Day of Climate Action I will manage to convince myself to do my errands on my bicycle, though the day is gray and cold and windy. Our Earth’s climate is a “common pool resource” for human societies and for all other creatures. To avoid the tragedy of the commons, as biologist Garret Hardin memorably termed it, we need human institutions that instill in us an ethical concern for others, and which act to provide guidelines or rules to govern our behaviour. Such behaviours are not the individual short term maximization of benefits attributed to “Homo economicus”, the “Economic Man” [note gender] of classical economical modeling. Perhaps it is a hopeful sign that Elinor Ostrom recently was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for her decades of research on common property institutions and governance. She is the first woman to have won this award.
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Well, I did the cycle to the store.....it was OK with sweater, vest, Andean tuque and a windbreaker. Good to get some exercise too. One small pedal for the planet, and a bit of aerobic exercise for me.
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Back to Elinor Ostrom’s contributions- the concept that communally managed property was not managed efficiently dates back to the Enclosure movement of the 17th century in England and Scotland, where the gentry argued that the common folk were not managing communal traditional tenures well, and that they should enclose the land [limit access and exclude the peasants] and should scientifically manage and improve their herd of sheep, goats etc. This was the original privatization. After Garrett Hardin’s eloquent expose of the tragedy of open access abuse, which he mis-called the tragedy of the commons, in the late 1960’s, economists and ecologists alike have assumed that privatization, or government regulation, were the only pathways to “good” [scientific, rational] management of common land and other goods and services, The notion being that enlightened self interest and market competition will, in the case of privatization, result in cost efficient and improved service, seen as a win-win situation. It is clear, however, that one difficulty with such market driven analyses are what is “in” the calculation and what is not- the so called “externalities”--- which include things like the cost of cleaning polluted water downstream to enable re-use, the cost of reclaiming mercury out of used computer monitors, the subtle and not-so-subtle environmental consequences of pipeline construction, and the effect of the CO2 released by the airplane you flew to Hawai’i on, or the 18 wheeler used to bring consumer goods to Walmart. This is where sets of social norms, ethical standards that are internalized as “right”, must come in. We must all internalize an environmental ethic. We don’t dump sewage into the creek because it is wrong rather than because we are concerned about whether we will be fined, the risk of which we might then balance against the cost of installing adequate sewage facilities. Ostrom’s original book Governing the Commons, the Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action , published by Cambridge University Press in 1990. contained fascinating case material on self regulation of Spanish traditional irrigation systems, and how water was allocated fairly and the labour of system maintenance was shared . She laid out a synopsis of the conditions under which sustainable institutions of commons management could evolve, and also called attention to conditions that would destabilize these institutions, causing degradation of communally held or public lands. One key necessity for the evolution of stable commons institutions is access limitation. You need to have a community of users in place, who have the ability to enforce norms or regulations for the common good, and who can exclude outsiders who do not have the incentive to play by the rules. Hardin’s original mistake in his formulation of the tragedy of the commons, was that, as a biologist, the study of social institutions was not his forte, and he conflated commons which is communally owned and managed property, such as the village grazing commons and field lands of England, subject to traditional institutions which regulate use and access and tenure, and open access lands and resources, which exist in a social vacuum with individual users, who are not part of a shared community, and who can take as much as they can get. Unfortunately, with social and political and economic shifts and instability, commons can be converted to open access wild west shows, and local and regional environments and social institutions can be destroyed.

A related issue which I’ve been thinking about for a while is rights of nature. Many traditional cultures conceive of humans as part of a community of beings, a society, that includes both humans and non human entities. In such societies, there may be strongly felt reciprocal rights and duties, such that animals give their lives for human sustenance, and humans in turn are obliged to treat the animals’ remains respectfully and to use the flesh, organs and hides appropriately, to enable animals to return. Similarly, plants must be harvested with respect, prayer, and perhaps an offering. Or rituals are held to ensure the rains come and the success of the garden, as described by Eugene Anderson in his 2009 chapter on Maya landscape ecology in Landscape Ethnoecology, Concepts of Physical and Biotic Space (Berghahn Books 2009, L. M. Johnson and E.S. Hunn eds.) and his 1996 book Ecologies of the Heart, and by numerous other authors writing about Maya cultures. As some have pointed out, Western culture seems to be one of the few that divides Nature from Culture, and assumes that humans have been given dominion over nature. Western environmentalists are in this arena more in line with members of other cultures and societies in assuming that wild species, plants, trees and environments are worthwhile in themselves, and should be protected or have “rights”. Anthropologist Kay Milton wrote a very interesting book called Loving Nature, which examines English environmentalists’ perspectives on Nature. Some years ago, there was an attempt to establish the standing of natural objects like trees in court in the United States so that their rights to exist could be argued to counter developers. These legal cases were discussed in a 1997 book by Christopher Stone: Should Trees Have Standing?: And Other Essays on Law, Morals and the Environment. A new version of the book will be released in April 2010 according to Amazon.ca . A recent development which extends this debate is the new 2008 Constitution of Ecuador, which extends rights under law to “ecosystem structures” http://www.celdf.org/Default.aspx?tabid=548 In their September 28 News Release, the Community Environmental Defense Fund wrote:

“By an overwhelming margin, the people of Ecuador today voted for a new constitution that is the first in the world to recognize legally enforceable Rights of Nature, or ecosystem rights.

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund is pioneering this work in the U.S., where it has assisted more than a dozen local municipalities with drafting and adopting local laws recognizing Rights of Nature.

Over the past year, the Legal Defense Fund was invited to assist the Ecuadorian Constituent Assembly to develop and draft provisions for the new constitution to put ecosystem rights directly into the Ecuadorian constitution “Ecuador is now the first country in the world to codify a new system of environmental protection based on rights,” stated Thomas Linzey, Executive Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.
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“Article 1 of the new “Rights for Nature” chapter of the Ecuador constitution reads: “Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution. Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognitions of rights for nature before the public bodies.”’

The Wikipedia article on the Constitution quotes more of the Rights of Nature Section in English Translation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Ecuador:
“Chapter: Rights for Nature

Art. 1. Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.
Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognition of rights for nature before public institutions. The application and interpretation of these rights will follow the related principles established in the Constitution.

Art. 2. Nature has the right to an integral restoration. This integral restoration is independent of the obligation of natural and juridical persons or the State to indemnify the people and the collectives that depend on the natural systems.
In case of severe or permanent environmental impact, including that caused by the exploitation of non renewable natural resources, the State will establish the most efficient mechanisms for restoration, and will adopt adequate measures to eliminate or mitigate the harmful environmental consequences.

Art. 3. The State will motivate natural and juridical persons as well as collectives to protect nature; it will promote respect towards all the elements that form an ecosystem.

Art. 4. The State will apply precaution and restriction measures in all the activities that can lead to the extinction of species, the destruction of the ecosystems or the permanent alteration of the natural cycles.”
The introduction of organisms and organic and inorganic material that can alter the national genetic heritage in a definitive way is prohibited.

Art. 5. The persons, people, communities and nationalities will have the right to benefit from the environment and from natural wealth that will allow wellbeing.
The environmental services cannot be appropriated; their production, provision, use and exploitation, will be regulated by the State.”

I have not read whether any material shift in the Ecuadorian State’s relationship to the environment has occurred since adoption of the new constitution, but the strength of reverence for Pachamama within the Andean region was very apparent to me when I was attending the 2008 International Congress of Ethnobiology just a few hundred kilometers south of Ecuador. As we as a species impel ever more and more rapid change in our earth system, it will become more and more necessary for all human societies to begin to recognize rights for nature alongside rights for humans.

The Ethnobiology of Thanksgiving

Local varieties of potatoe at the village of Huito, District of Pitumarca, Peru (upper photo) and Woman with turkey at the market in Toluca, central Mexico 1968 (lower photo)
The quintessential symbol of Thanksgiving as we celebrate it in North America is the turkey, a new world domesticate, and a wild bird hunted by Indigenous peoples in New England where the legendary first Thanksgiving occurred.
Scientifically the turkey is Meleagris gallopavo- the “rooster-peacock Guineafowl” . Meleagris is a name for guinea fowl, according to the Wikipedia article I checked to confirm the scientific name, while gallus is the rooster and pavo is the peacock. Turkeys were new to the colonists when they arrived in the Americas, and their true relationships were not immediately apparent...so the Europeans likened them to edible domestic fowl of three distinct families (guinea fowl are Numidae, roosters are Gallidae, the family to which turkeys in fact belong, and the peacock, in the genus Pavo, is in the Faisanidae or pheasant family). Turkeys are apparently named “turkey” because Turkey symbolized the exotic, and it was also a name for Guinea fowl. In Mexican Spanish, turkeys are called “guajolote” an onomatopoetic name derived from the Nahuatl guajolotl [in Spanish the ‘j’ is pronounced like an ‘h’). Turkeys were domesticated in what is now Mexico, and are still the basis of a number of delicious Mexican specialties like mole poblano, a delicious concoction of cooked turkey or chicken, chili and spices and chocolate, and other ingredients like sesame butter and raisins.
The next most iconic food at Thanksgiving is the cranberry Vaccinium macrocarpon, a tart round red fruit of a leathery leafed plant in the heather family that grows in the peat bogs of New England. These tart fruits remain edible after freezing, and with the addition of some sweetening, make a tart sauce to counteract the richness of rich meats. As I discussed earlier, the lingonberry (V. vitis idaea) of the circumboreal North has a similar flavour, but much smaller fruits, and grows in the mossy understory of coniferous forests. The large and now domesticated cranberry of our Thanksgiving table also has smaller wild relatives. I have harvested bog cranberries from sphagnum bogs in northwestern British Columbia, and also recorded stories from some of my Witsuwit’en Elder friends about harvesting this cranberry. This species is called Vaccinium oxycoccus. When I first moved to Northwest British Columbia more than 30 years ago I used to harvest instead the highbush cranberries Viburnum edulis to make my holiday sauce.
In my school days stories of the first Thanksgiving, corn was also a feature of the meal, though I now associate it more with summer plenty. Corn, Zea mays is a grain, the seeds of a large erect grass. Much has been written about the unusual anatomy or corn, and about its inability to propagate itself at all without the assistance of people. There is a lot of fascinating archeobotany of corn and its gradual transformation into the large robust cobs we see today, and it is also a crop that has thousands of cultivated varieties of different textures, colours, and cooking qualities, a staple food from Peru through Mexico and much of the present United States, extending even to what is now Canada. In our ethnobotanical saga of Thanksgiving, I don’t want to get too distracted by the very rich literature on corn, so I’ll simply say here that it was grown by the indigenous peoples of coastal Massachusetts when the settlers arrived, in conjunction with beans and squash in mixed gardens, the so called Three Sisters. (I won’t discuss the beans today, and we’ll get to the squash shortly when we consider dessert....)
More typical of the Thanksgiving dinners of my childhood was candied yams, likely not a part of the celebration at Plymouth Plantation. Yams Dioscorea sp. and sweet potato (Ipomea batatas) - are both tropical starchy tubers. Apparently the orange fleshed tubers we buy as yams in North America are actually varieties of sweet potato and are thus also Ipomea batatas. Sweet potatoes apparently occurred in the south Pacific (where they are called kumara), and in South America, where they name was apparently also kumara, as well as in southeast Asia, suggesting there must have been some trade and contact across the Pacific before European exploration. In contrast yams of the genus Dioscorea were an important food of Australian Aborigines and of various tribal peoples of southern India. Incidentally Mexican yams were also the source of the plant steroids originally used to synthesize birth control pills.
Another typical part of today’s holiday meal, and likely not eaten by the Pilgrim colonists, is mashed potatoes. Potatoes are the tubers of Solanum tuberosum, a plant in the nightshade family (along with tomatoes and eggplants). Potatoes were domesticated in the Andes and altiplano of Bolivia and Peru, which is still the centre of agrobiodiversity of the potato, and taken to Europe after the conquest of Peru. The starchy tubers of potatoes come in many flavours and varieties from bitter (with higher levels of solanum glycoakaloids) to “sweet” (lacking noticeable amounts of the bitter compounds). As these plants can produce large amounts of food in relatively cold, damp and acidic soils, they were immediately popular in northern Europe, where they quickly became a food staple of the poor, and a well loved and traditional element of European cuisines, especially served with butter or cream from domesticated milk producing breeds of Bos taurus, traditional foods from Europe’s dairy culture.
One of my favourite parts of Thanksgiving dinner is pumpkin pie- pumpkins, orange fruits of Curcurbita pepo, are a type of squash and were domesticated in the New World. Squash seeds are found in some of the earliest agricultural remains in Mexico (Nee, M. 1990. “The domestication of Curcurbita (Cucurbitaceae),” Economic Botany 44(3: 56-68). Squash flowers as well as the large fleshy fruits are edible. Wild relatives of the squash protect their fruits from herbivores with bitter compounds, which were bred out over generations of selection for sweeter fruits. Squash require rich soils, so make good partners in cultivation with nitrogen fixing beans. Modern Thanksgiving pies combine cooked pumpkin with eggs, milk, cream, sugar, molasses and a range of spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger to make a rich and spiced custard filling for a wheat flower crust. Pumpkin pie is a thoroughly hybrid dish, as eggs, milk, cream and the spices and the wheat for the crust are all Old-World products while the pumpkin is a New-World native.
Wheat is so iconic of food in Europe and the Middle East that the Bible admonishes “Man shall not live by bread alone” to remind Christians that there is more than a full belly. Wheat is the seeds of a grass Triticum aestivum, a hexaploid hybrid, and its history too is a fascinating study in archeobotany and plant genetics (see Simpson and Ogorzaly’s 1986 Economic Botany pp156-158 for a brief and readable summary of its genetic history). It was domesticated in the Fertile Crescent around 10,000 years ago, and has been a foundation of European agriculture since it began, along with its fellow grains barley and rye.
Now we have considered the components of Thanksgiving dinner, but what of the significance of this special meal? Harvest festivals have been important in the calendrical cycles of agricultural peoples throughout history. They bring people together to celebrate and share the successful harvest. While most of us are far removed from harvesting the food we eat, and the Supermarket offers abundance year round without our efforts, Thanksgiving is still in its essence a harvest feast. Although its particular symbolism has been assimilated, in the United States, to the founding of the Nation, it still commemorates and gives thanks for the fruits of the earth...and can thus be seen as marking a relationship.
Canadian Thanksgiving is somewhat of an echo of the American version, but is less significant as a celebration of the founding charter of the state; and because of our more northerly location, is also held about 6 weeks earlier, at a time just after our own harvest season, and before winter really sets in. The menu is much the same as the American version, and for us the same general format seems to have generalized to other Canadian celebration holiday meals such as Christmas and Easter dinners, also typically marked by turkey.
Other traditions also have harvest feasts. The Jewish holiday of Sukkot or the Festival of Booths which ended today, is a week long celebration held out of doors in late September or early October (the 15th of the lunar month of Tishri). It follows Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which mark times of remembrance and atonement at the Jewish new year. There are some fascinating ethnobotanical aspects of Sukkot in the symbolism of plants carried in procession and/or used to construct the booths, which I don’t have space to elaborate here.
For people who obtain their harvest through hunting, fishing and gathering, harvest feasts, if you will, may mark the first harvest of fish or berries or roots in the year. Hunn and Selam describe this for the Sahaptin in Nichi W’ana, the Big River (University of Washington Press 1990) and the Gitksan and Witsuwit’en celebrate annual landmarks like the beginning of salmon harvest with “First Salmon” feasts. All of these celebrations really mark the relationship of people to the living earth with provides their sustanence....a relationship we need to cultivate to ensure the earth and its plants and animals continue to sustain us, and we them.

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?