Indigenous Wisdom: how the past can shape our future

/ January 26, 2022

By Guy Boonyarakyotin – 

Dreams of sustainable development are often accompanied by images of skyscraper greenhouses or groundbreaking technologies of renewables and electric vehicles.  Our growing populations and demand for resources are also becoming a testament to our need for better ways to use our dwindling resources.

Living root bridge, southern part of Meghalaya, a Northeastern state in India [7].
They may become an inspiration for future dynamic infrastructure that may prove useful in the era of climate change, while also serving as a feature of natural beauty. It is a clear example of development alongside nature rather than in spite of it.

This, however, makes it easy to forget our roots as integral parts of the Earth’s systems; the majority of ecosystem services have been degraded over the past 50 years [1], and should trends continue, be unfit to support current levels of human wellbeing in the future.  We have shifted from being cogs in the environment as hunter-gatherers to spanners in the works as our priorities shifted from surviving the next winter to keeping up with the economy [2].  The takeaway from this can easily be to judge the villains we have become, but the more useful ideas can stem from discovering the heroes we used to be.

The Khasi people of northeast India, for example, face the wettest conditions on earth [3] and use this fact to navigate the impending floods of the monsoon by slowly morphing living bridges out of tree roots across streams [3,7].  They may take decades to grow, but the bridges can only grow stronger with time, which will serve to be immensely useful in the era of anthropogenic climate change.  Other wisdoms such as the knowledge of weather forecasting can be implemented in the agricultural communities around the world.  The Borana Pastoralists were able to accurately predict the weather using an amalgamation of natural indicators, which served to prepare the group for periods of rain and drought; combining this instant, localised information with the long term predictions of meteorological forecasts can give more accuracy in the planning stages of our farming systems [4].  Considering that the food lost to droughts can feed “81 million people every day for a year” [5] suggests that this knowledge would be invaluable to food production systems near areas of greater climate risk.

The main challenge posed in the implementations of these technologies comes in the form of the inevitable loss of these wisdoms and techniques over time.  Athayde et al., through researching the effectiveness of a ‘participatory action research project’ based on the Kawaiwete knowledge of weaving in the Amazon [6], realised a significant decline in the number of people who inherited the knowledge.  However, the project successfully taught 49 younger members of the population techniques supplied by teachers and found that the knowledge  persisted for years after the initial stage of the project.  The success could also be attributed to innovations such as media or museums to aid the retention and further spread of the knowledge, while new techniques were modified from and by neighbouring cultures.  We need to realise the potential of collaboration of the community and researchers in innovating the solutions and frameworks to climate change; when progress is too slow, we need to seek what answers can work with us again.

References and further reading

[1] Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) Ecosystems and human well-being: Synthesis. Washington, DC: Island Press.

[2] Steffen, W., Persson, Å., Deutsch, L. et al. (2011) The Anthropocene: From Global Change to Planetary Stewardship. AMBIO 40, 739

[3] Vallangi, N, BBC (2015) India’s amazing living root bridges. https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20150218-indias-amazing-living-root-bridges [4.12.21]

[4] Birhanu, I. & Abdulaziz, H. (2019) Adaptation to climate change using indigenous weather forecasting systems in Borana pastoralists of southern Ethiopia. Climate and Development 11:7, 564-573

[5] The World Bank (2017) Misery in slow motion: the deep and long lasting effects of drought. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2017/10/24/misery-in-slow-motion-the-deep-and-long-lasting-effects-of-drought [4.12.21]

[6] Athayde, S., J. Silva-Lugo, M. Schmink, A. Kaiabi, and M. Heckenberger, (2017). Reconnecting art and science for sustainability: learning from indigenous knowledge through participatory action-research in the Amazon. Ecology and Society 22(2):36

[7] Tyagi, H. (2014) The living root bridges of Cherrapunji in Megahalya, India [photograph]. Wikimedia Commons