Ecocultures
Description
Andrea Farias:
"Ecosystems shape and are shaped by human culture. Culture is part of the ecological niche within which humans live, culture is how we adapt to our environment.
Biocultural or Ecocultural diversity is the diversity of life in all of its manifestations: biological, cultural, and linguistic, which are interrelated (and possibly coevolved) within a complex socio-ecological adaptive system. By recognizing cultural diversity, biocultural diversity offers a better approach to understand the interrelationships between humans and nature.
In healthy systems, careful observations and understandings of nature shape cultures over time, and in turn these cultural narratives and institutions guide actions towards nature. For example, in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, Indigenous scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer argues that sweetgrass coevolved with humans, with humans creating cultural traditions that supported the plant's growth, while the plant provided humans with an essential resource.
Certain combinations of cultural and ecological components build ecosystem health: natural capital that delivers a flow of ecosystem goods and services; social capital in the form of relations of trust, norms, obligations and institutions fundamental for collective action; human capital in the form of knowledge, skills and capabilities to produce the technologies for well-being; and physical and financial capital that provide infrastructure and financial resources. Interdisciplinary progress in approaches to address social-ecological and ecocultural systems
The levels of ‘health’ in communities centres on the intersection between technology (how to transform capital assets) and social capital (the arrangements of trust that build collective actions)."
(https://diome.xyz/2+%F0%9F%8C%BF+Leaves/Ecocultures)
More information
* Scientific knowledge vs ecocultural knowledge
"This paper reviews the environmental sub-disciplines that have emerged to seek solutions for conservation and maintenance of the resilience of social-ecological systems. It shows that a central component is engagement with the knowledges of people within their contexts. Local knowledges of nature (traditional, indigenous, local ecological knowledge and ecoliteracy) are used by place-based cultures to guide actions towards nature. The importance of new engagements between different knowledges is now becoming more widely recognized by scientific institutions. Yet there still exist many false dualisms (for example local knowledge versus science) which tend to emphasize a superiority of one over the other."