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1. Revitalisation
Projects
Recognising the
importance of nature to human health and well-being, particularly in
resource dependent societies, many indigenous and tribal peoples
around the world have established, or are in the process of
establishing, what we term revitalisation projects. These are
projects organised by local communities to revitalise the
traditional activities, cultural values and knowledge and skills
they once relied upon.
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Initiatives include
hunter support programs, outpost programs and traditional food
initiatives. These projects offer community-driven,
culturally-appropriate alternatives to dealing with the growing problems
caused by forced disconnection from nature, including social
pathologies, ill-health and cultural collapse.
We analysed 40 of these projects from around the world, including Canada and the US, regions of the Arctic and sub-Arctic, and locations in Asia and Australia. In doing so, we created a typology of the different revitalisation projects that exist and carried out an informal analysis of their varying impacts, including their potential as a policy tool for dealing with the current crisis of disconnection.
Typology of Revitalisation Projects
| Project Type
|
Objectives of Project Type |
1. Traditional Foods
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To increase the consumption of traditional local foods and revive food collection and preparation practices |
2. Ecotourism |
To revive traditional cultural practices and ceremonies as an income generating strategy |
3. Education |
To provide a more balanced, culturally-appropriate education system for marginalised cultures |
4. Language
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To protect endangered languages and open communication channels between community elders and young people |
5. Cultural
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To revive particular cultural components or give a holistic experience of an entire culture |
6. Rights
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To increase the rights of indigenous cultures with a view to ensuring cultural continuity and diversity into the future |
Read Revitalisation projects - iCES Occasional Paper
2. Global Challenge
Project
According to the UK
government’s Chief Scientific Advisor, a perfect storm is brewing. An
unprecedented combination of pressures is emerging to threaten the
health of social and ecological systems across the world. Continued
population growth, rapidly changing consumption patterns and the nascent
signals of climate change are driving limited resources of food, energy,
water and materials towards and beyond critical thresholds. Modern life
has brought astonishing technological advances, but modernisation is
also a story of traditional cultures eroding beneath swift currents of
change. However, vulnerabilities now reach beyond traditional and local
cultures into the global arena, as exemplified by the current economic
crisis and the rolling consequences of oil depletion.
It is evident that
human-environment systems are intimately linked in ways that we are only
just beginning to appreciate (Pretty
et al., 2007, 2008; Escobar,
2008; Pretty & Pilgrim, 2008; Hulme & Ong, 2009). However, we do know
that there are certain sets of circumstances by which a society is
resilient to perturbations in a system (shocks and stresses), and others
by which a society is so vulnerable that it will be unable to cope.
Resilience refers to the capacity of a system to absorb or even benefit
from changes to the system, and so persist without a qualitative change
in structure (Holling, 1973; Costanza
et al., 2007).
Vulnerability, on the other hand, refers to instances when they lack
resilience and robustness, so being driven to rapid change, chaos or
collapse (Berkes et al.,
2005; Diamond, 2005; Costanza et al.,
2007; Pretty, 2007).
It is increasingly
clear that certain cultural and ecological components build system
resilience: 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 that provides knowledge, skills and capabilities to produce the
technologies for well-being; and physical and financial capital that
provide infrastructure and financial resources (Pretty, 2003). Our
current period, termed by some the “anthropocene” for humanity’s intense
modification of the environment, has resulted in dramatic worldwide
declines in these renewable capital assets (MEA, 2005; Pilgrim
et al., 2008). These
concerns are not entirely new, and include the alarms of the Club of
Rome dating to the 1970s, the measured tones of the Brundtland
Commission to the late 1980s, the growing evidence base of the
International Panel on Climate Change and Millennium Ecosystem
Assessment of the 1990s and 2000s, and unmet aspirations of the
Millennium Development Goals of the 2000s.
What is new, though,
is the growing recognition exemplified by the government’s Chief
Scientific Advisor that social-ecological systems are more vulnerable
than formerly predicted, and that further global change is inevitable.
The only question is whether human systems will act quickly enough to
avoid severe non-linearities, or whether they will simply be in
responsive mode (MEA, 2005; Folke et
al., 2007; Brown, 2008). The immense challenge and diverse
consequences mean it will take a combination of economic, social,
political, legal and management expertise to analyse and develop
solutions to address these challenges (Pretty
et al., 2008; Pretty &
Pilgrim, 2008; Hulme, 2009). Such changes are going to be required over
large geographic areas – communities, towns or cities, landscapes or
watersheds, mountains or marshes.
In this research, we
propose to investigate existing communities or cultures (which we here
call EcoCultures) in a variety of political and governance contexts in
both industrialised and developing countries. Some of these have been
deliberately designed as cultural revitalisation projects (Pilgrim
et al., 2009), others are
historical relics; some are distinct communities, such as indigenous or
religious groups, others are indistinct from the surrounding or
neighbouring human systems, but nonetheless all of them have implicitly
chosen pathways towards resilience. Despite the prevailing gloom about
global prospects, these communities are living in ways that build
natural, social and human capital, maintain well-being and happiness,
and contribute to the sustainable use of resources (Reinsten & Song,
2008), as a result of various projects, programmes and cultures (Samson
& Pretty, 2006; Pilgrim et al.,
2009). For different reasons, resilience within these EcoCultures is
high or has increased.
