Pioneering political ecology: perceptions of nature, Indigenous practices and power relations during Alexander von Humboldt's travels in Latin America

This article is an attempt to discuss the image of Alexander von Humboldt as a pure natural scientist with a humanist ethos, and to highlight that he was in fact one of the first thinkers who anticipated positions known today as political ecology. We outline that his universal knowledge obviously has contradictory perspectives, and was interpreted in several directions. On the one hand, there is the position taken by post-colonial critics that Humboldt showed Eurocentric and imperialist thinking during his travels to the Americas, as Pratt has advocated. On the other hand, and in explicit contrast to the post-colonial critique, Humboldt has been regarded by Sachs as a founding figure of American environmentalism and as "perhaps, the first ecological thinker." Furthermore, Wulf's biography titled The Invention of Nature tries to show that Humboldt wanted to bridge the gap between the emerging natural sciences and Romanticist aesthetics. However, based on his writings, we argue that his perception of nature has been misread and that his position was shaped by a view akin to open and critical political ecology, as opposed to pure nature constructivism without including local humans. We show this by focusing on his research methods that were open to local Indigenous ecological knowledge, his appraisal of Indigenous socio-cultural systems, his perception of nature as Indigenous cultural landscapes degraded by colonial and early capitalist market forces, his openness towards Indigenous ontologies of what we call nature, and finally his focus on local institutions for the sustainable governance of resources.

Nexus between Indigenous Ecological Knowledge and Ecosystem Services: A Socio-Ecological Analysis for Sustainable Ecosystem Management

The well-being of the human society cannot be ensured and sustainable unless the flow of Ecosystem Services (ESs) would be matching with their consistent demand. The consistent flow of ESs required sustainable management of ecological resources of the ecosystem. The management of ecosystem can be ensured with variety of approaches. Integration of indigenous ecological knowledge (IEK) in management prescription with the view that IEK based extraction of ESs ensures removal of resources from the ecosystem within the limit thereby ensuring the sustainability of ecosystem. Present study is an evaluation to understand the nexus between ESs and IEK for sustainable environmental management. The focus of the study was a tribal dominated socio-ecological patch of Barind Region of Malda district, Eastern India. The assessment of ESs and IEK was based on the data collected from the randomly selected tribal households following the pre-tested questionnaire containing questions on ESs as per millennium ecosystem assessment. The data were analyzed following social preference approach, and statistical tests (Krushkal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney). General linear model (GLM) has also been used to examine the impact of socio-demographic attributes on the perceived valuation of ESs. The results revealed that the provisioning ESs (such as water, fuel wood, medical plants) was most preferred followed by cultural and regulating ESs by tribal. Differential importance of ESs was observed among tribal and accounted by gender, education as well as age of the tribe. A gap between the actual accessibility and evaluation of ESs by the tribal communities was also apparent. The socio-demographic attributes have an immense impact on the valuation of ecosystem services and also governed based on the IEK. Various types of indigenous ecological belief systems were closely linked with conservation of ecosystem and sustainable supply of ESs. Present study can contribute to understand socio-ecological nexus with the lens of IEK in tribal dominated ecological landscapes for improved ecosystem and environmental management besides ensuring sustainability of flow of ecosystem services.

Creation of a Field Guide to Camas Prairie Plants with Undergraduates: Project-Based Learning Combined with Epistemological Decolonization

Remnant camas prairies and associated oak woodlands are the focus of contemporary Indigenous food sovereignty efforts in the Salish Sea (aka Puget Sound) region of western Washington. They are also the focus of research and restoration to conserve at-risk species of animals and plants protected under the United States Endangered Species Act. Currently there is little collaboration between tribes and restoration scientists. These conditions create an opportunity and ethical imperative for developing undergraduate curriculum that highlights the connections between biodiversity conservation and traditional Indigenous ecological knowledge. Patchy mosaic prairie-oak woodland vegetation visibly reflects the imprint of human activity, which includes past burning to foster native food plants including common camas (Camassia quamash) and Oregon white oak (Quercus garryana). Using a floristic research project focused on these cultural landscapes as a case study, this essay illustrates how interdisciplinary inquiry and service learning can enrich college-level plant taxonomy curriculum, while creating rich opportunities for students to link their botanical studies to a historically-grounded understanding of why the conservation challenges exist in the first place. Through this collaborative, multi-year research effort, students contribute to the production of needed resources useful to regional conservation efforts. Affiliated learning communities also consider what it might mean to decolonize botanical knowledge in the context of ecological restoration.

Thiti as an Institution for Sustainable Management of the Resources in the Himalaya

Himalayan communities still have traditional ecological knowledge with a strong social mechanism for the management of resources to live in a harsh environment. This paper mainly discusses two thematic issues; how the Himalayan people optimize the use of limited resources to thrive in a harsh environment, and what the key socio-cultural factors which help them to survive in the rugged environment sustainably. The paper is based on nine months of ethnographic study from 2012-2018among Gurungs, agro-pastoral communities in Nhason Valley of Manang. The findings reveal that thiti is a socio-cultural institution to Himalayan dwellers that controls the behavior of the people in a society; the source of the awareness and recognition of the fragile resources for living in rugged terrain; means of defining rights on resources. In the Himalayan region, indigenous ecological knowledge does not work in isolation; it is intertwined with a socio-cultural institution that unfolds in a social context.