Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Natural Resource Management

There is indeed a '600 pound gorilla' in the room, but I'm not so certain that it has much to do with 'expressive science.' The profit motive within a market economy is a major driving force that has the potential to undermine erstwhile good intentions. But without descending into a back and forth on whether human behaviour is totally controlled by 'material force' (of which the economy would be one) or humans totally shape these same material forces, etc. . . ., let's at least point to some of the strengths of understanding and making sense out of ways that human beings, acting under conditions they haven't selected but shaping, nonetheless their own histories. In many of the chapters in my edited book the subject matter focuses on how people make collective choices to act differently. Rather than falling prey to despair we would rather look to examples where thigns work.The government official (who was defeated in election after serving only one term) couldn't see any other future except one that involved large industry (incidentally, he worked for that industry for many years and then found himself summarily dismissed after he lost his election.) This failure of vision is a form of social entrapment that plagues many human systems unable to change or adapt to new circumstances.I won't say that economy has no effect, but I will say that human action can -at times- go against the current and make changes that are durable. That is what I hope is the underlying message of this edited collection.

The authors contend that Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) has much to offer to economic and political programs that manage ecological resources. They do a good job of noting the characteristics of TEK (local, dynamic, etc.) that act as both strengths and weaknesses for the campaign to insinuate TEK into current policy and management practices. The chapters are all good studies of TEK as found in historical subsistence practices of indigenous people. These studies tend to argue against other anthropological collections which seem to disprove what they see as the myth of the ecologically noble savage. However, the real problem with this text is not the analytical voice but its inability to address why the goals of its expressive voice will never be met with this type of approach.In the introduction Menzies recounts a conversation with a politician in which Menzies hopes to persuade him of the importance of introducing TEK into policy and planning processes. The politician wants to know what is in it for the industry. Menzies' reaction is the typical moraline despair and the rest of the book want to argue for a new moral compass. What is missing is any real sustained discussion of the 600-pound gorilla in the room. By this I mean the profit motive which drives our economic engine and the fact that societal or political regulation of that engine has been ineffective if not nonexistent. Rather we might say that our symbolic politics and our administered society are simply dressed up in the trappings of an empowered regulatory force; it only seems to be so. Our actual practice is determined in the last instance by considerations of profit.The authors take the moral position that greed and exploitation of natural resources is wrong and that a lack of sustainable practices will hurt us in the long run. But as Keynes said, in the long run we'll all be dead. Perhaps the biggest mistake of these kinds of texts is that they never completely analyze their opposition. Therefore they can never mount a serious debate for social change.This is ironically a built-in flaw of expressive science. The more completely we identify with a cultural object or social movement, the less valuable is the product of any analytical work we may do on that subject. And in a time when the scientific method, objectivity, decontextualization, etc. serves as the foundational method for epistemic warrants, this makes our pronouncements on this subject as social scientists ever more suspect.It becomes clear that our findings are motivated by a desire to persuade rather than to interpret, in short it is too obvious that seek to change the world, not just interpret it. This is not necessarily a problem in itself. But there is one other aspect of the scientific foundation for warranting truth that is critical to `good science' and that is the rigorous application of systematic doubt.The next time you read any social science analysis of environmentalism that seems to be guided by a clear and constant moral compass heading, try to find where that particular heading has been subjected to systematic doubt.