the findings of this study aren't really that surprising if you think about it--indigenous peoples tend to know the land they're on and utilize it better than people who have moved in or displaced...
the findings of this study aren't really that surprising if you think about it--indigenous peoples tend to know the land they're on and utilize it better than people who have moved in or displaced them from that land--but it does again emphasize that it might pay to actually not treat native peoples like dogshit when it comes to climate and conservation issues, particularly in places where there are a lot of them and a lot of biodiversity.
ironically, this itself is a mildly anglophone-country assumption. there are a lot of indigenous peoples who, while they have been afflicted by colonialism because basically all indigenous peoples...
I would be careful about making broad generalizations like this. The idea of modern indigenous people's natural connection to the land is tenuous at best, of course largely due to the destruction wrought by colonialism.
ironically, this itself is a mildly anglophone-country assumption. there are a lot of indigenous peoples who, while they have been afflicted by colonialism because basically all indigenous peoples have, still do things pretty much the same as they always have irrespective of whatever's going on above them. in america and canada and australia, yeah, they weren't exactly in touch with the land as is typically depicted and they certainly tend not to be now, mostly on account of the fact that most of them don't even live on their ancestral lands anymore. in central and south america and parts of asia, though, there are lot of places where indigenous peoples have been touched by colonialism but not displaced by it and accordingly still preserve the knowledge that living in remote, almost uninhabitable places that aren't charted by white westerners very well tends to imbue in you.
that all said though, even the ones which are displaced tend to know more about the things where they live than white westerners do by simple virtue of that being where they're from; there's a reason for example that there's a ridiculous amount of crop diversity that exists in central and south america that does not exist in most of the agricultural belts of the western world, and it's because peoples who grow those crops tend to know more about the crops they're growing than the westerners who came in and selected a few varieties of those crops they enjoyed and proceeded to grow them monolithically without regard to whether or not that was actually a very good idea.
Really? What ancestral knowledge do native people have that white people don't, from the virtue of where they're from? I was born in the Midwest, why do I not have this ancestral knowledge? I've...
that all said though, even the ones which are displaced tend to know more about the things where they live than white westerners do by simple virtue of that being where they're from
Really? What ancestral knowledge do native people have that white people don't, from the virtue of where they're from? I was born in the Midwest, why do I not have this ancestral knowledge? I've spend all my life here, I know no other country as home.
This is just noble savage part 2. It's not like there is some magical connection native persons have to the land. It's just that most Americans could care less about preserving biodiversity, but also had the tools to really mess stuff up in a way indigenous people couldn't. And at this point we will never know if indigenous people would have done the same, given the chance.
it's like you literally did not read what you quoted. you probably know a lot more about your local town and what goes on in it than someone from the state over, because that's where you live and...
Really? What ancestral knowledge do native people have that white people don't, from the virtue of where they're from? I was born in the Midwest, why do I not have this ancestral knowledge? I've spend all my life here, I know no other country as home.
it's like you literally did not read what you quoted. you probably know a lot more about your local town and what goes on in it than someone from the state over, because that's where you live and they don't live there; in that same vein, it's not really a shock in my example that predominantly crop raising native people who have been doing that for a few hundred to a few thousand years might know a bit more about the corn which originated with them than westerners who came in and took some strains and planted it everywhere.
But what is your assertion? I have no doubt indigenous people know a ton about corn. We've also gone ahead and industrialized the process, and genome sequenced it. I'm sure some of the scientists...
But what is your assertion? I have no doubt indigenous people know a ton about corn. We've also gone ahead and industrialized the process, and genome sequenced it. I'm sure some of the scientists involved were indigenous. But how does this support the conclusion that they utilize the land better? That's your main argument from the first comment.
It's true that biodiversity is higher on native land. Whether that is a direct causal relationship I'm not sure. I think it's clear that Europeans and European descendants have destroyed the earth. But it was "indigenous" Clovis people who caused one of the first man made extinctions - of the mammoths and other big game. And I put indigenous in quotes because the Clovis people are a loose collection of nomadic tribes who probably weren't even from North America in the first place.
the findings of this study aren't really that surprising if you think about it--indigenous peoples tend to know the land they're on and utilize it better than people who have moved in or displaced them from that land--but it does again emphasize that it might pay to actually not treat native peoples like dogshit when it comes to climate and conservation issues, particularly in places where there are a lot of them and a lot of biodiversity.
ironically, this itself is a mildly anglophone-country assumption. there are a lot of indigenous peoples who, while they have been afflicted by colonialism because basically all indigenous peoples have, still do things pretty much the same as they always have irrespective of whatever's going on above them. in america and canada and australia, yeah, they weren't exactly in touch with the land as is typically depicted and they certainly tend not to be now, mostly on account of the fact that most of them don't even live on their ancestral lands anymore. in central and south america and parts of asia, though, there are lot of places where indigenous peoples have been touched by colonialism but not displaced by it and accordingly still preserve the knowledge that living in remote, almost uninhabitable places that aren't charted by white westerners very well tends to imbue in you.
that all said though, even the ones which are displaced tend to know more about the things where they live than white westerners do by simple virtue of that being where they're from; there's a reason for example that there's a ridiculous amount of crop diversity that exists in central and south america that does not exist in most of the agricultural belts of the western world, and it's because peoples who grow those crops tend to know more about the crops they're growing than the westerners who came in and selected a few varieties of those crops they enjoyed and proceeded to grow them monolithically without regard to whether or not that was actually a very good idea.
Really? What ancestral knowledge do native people have that white people don't, from the virtue of where they're from? I was born in the Midwest, why do I not have this ancestral knowledge? I've spend all my life here, I know no other country as home.
This is just noble savage part 2. It's not like there is some magical connection native persons have to the land. It's just that most Americans could care less about preserving biodiversity, but also had the tools to really mess stuff up in a way indigenous people couldn't. And at this point we will never know if indigenous people would have done the same, given the chance.
it's like you literally did not read what you quoted. you probably know a lot more about your local town and what goes on in it than someone from the state over, because that's where you live and they don't live there; in that same vein, it's not really a shock in my example that predominantly crop raising native people who have been doing that for a few hundred to a few thousand years might know a bit more about the corn which originated with them than westerners who came in and took some strains and planted it everywhere.
But what is your assertion? I have no doubt indigenous people know a ton about corn. We've also gone ahead and industrialized the process, and genome sequenced it. I'm sure some of the scientists involved were indigenous. But how does this support the conclusion that they utilize the land better? That's your main argument from the first comment.
It's true that biodiversity is higher on native land. Whether that is a direct causal relationship I'm not sure. I think it's clear that Europeans and European descendants have destroyed the earth. But it was "indigenous" Clovis people who caused one of the first man made extinctions - of the mammoths and other big game. And I put indigenous in quotes because the Clovis people are a loose collection of nomadic tribes who probably weren't even from North America in the first place.