A while back I signed up for the academia.edu mailing list. They have a lot of really interesting stuff come through. I have not had a lot of time to read much, but I thought I would start sharing the ones I find particularly striking here.
I Ka Wā Ma Mua: The Value of a Historical Ecology Approach to Ecological Restoration in Hawai‘i is a paper by Natalie Kurashima, Jason Jeremiah, and Tamara Ticktin which discusses biocultural restoration as a method to reciprocally restore ecological and cultural integrity.
We have recently been seeing the results of ignoring indigenous knowledge in land management practices, and at least California and Australia are starting to explore incorporating indigenous knowledge back in management for fire.
To be truly sustainable, however, we need to move past this (literally) put-out-the-brushfires approach, and incorporate wholistic and sustainable practices. Thus biocultural restoration.
For Hawaiʻ i, this means that “since Kānaka Maoli are an inseparable part of every land and seascape in Hawai‘i, any ecological restoration project has the potential to use a biocultural restoration approach,” according to the paper abstract. “However, most restoration approaches are purely ecological, and for many conservation practitioners a sociocultural understanding of the landscape can seem inaccessible. In this article, we discuss the value of a historical ecology approach (understanding the interaction between people and landscapes over time) for successful restoration and management of biocultural landscapes in Hawai‘i.”
It’s a good read with a lot of important things to consider.
