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Hum Ecol (2006) 34: 495513
DOI 10.1007/s10745-006-9042-0
Published online: 20 July 2006 # Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2006
Abstract Lessons in conservation are often seen as resulting from cycles of overexploitation and subsequent depletion of resources, followed by catastrophic consequences of shortage and starvation, and finally, development of various strategies, including privatization of the commons, to conserve remaining resource stocks. While such scenarios have undoubtedly occurred on many occasions, we suggest that they are not the only means by which people develop conservation practices and concepts. There are other pathways leading to ecological understanding and conservation, which act at a range of scales and levels of complexity. These include: lessons from the past and from other places, perpetuated and strengthened through oral history and discourse; lessons from animals, learned through observation of migration and population cycles, predator effects, and social dynamics; monitoring resources and human effects on resources (positive and negative), building on experiences and expectations; observing changes in ecosystem cycles and natural disturbance events; trial and error experimentation and incremental modification of habitats and populations. Humans, we believe, are capable of building a sophisticated conservation ethic that transcends individual species and resources. A combination of conservation knowledge, practices, and beliefs can lead to increasingly greater sophistication of ecological understanding and the continued encoding of such knowledge in social institutions and worldview.
Key words Traditional ecological knowledge . conservation . indigenous peoples . ethnoecology.
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the IASCP Conference in Oaxaca, Mexico (August 2004) for a panel organized by Berkes and Turner, How does resource management knowledge develop?
N. J. Turner (*)
School of Environmental Studies, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia V8W 2Y2, Canada e-mail: [email protected]
F. Berkes
Natural Resources Institute, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3T 2N2, Canada
Coming to Understanding: Developing Conservation through Incremental Learning in the Pacific Northwest
Nancy J. Turner & Fikret Berkes
496 Hum Ecol (2006) 34: 495513
Introduction
Resource conserving practices of indigenous and local peoples drawn from their traditional knowledge systems have been described for many parts of the world and for many different cultures and environments (Blackburn and Anderson, 1993; Bale, 1994; Berkes, 1999; Berkes et al., 2000; Minnis and Elisens, 2000; Turner et al., 2000; Alcorn et al.,...