To bring conservation
management to the heart of family life requires an ability in
each individual to conceptualise the wholeness of self and environment as a set of
beliefs to live by and a context that gives meaning to life. This ability may be
described as ecosacy; a third basic ability to be taught alongside literacy and
numeracy. The term ecosacy comes directly from the Greek oikos meaning house,
and household management includes making decisions about the natural resources
that flow into it. To be ecosate means having the knowledge and mind-set to act,
speak and think according to deeply held beliefs and belief systems about people in
nature, which is conceptualised as a community of beings.
The educational framework
of ecosacy is cultural ecology. The term has its origin in
the work of Steward in the 1930s on the social organization of hunter-gatherer
groups. Steward argued against environmental determinism, which regarded specific
cultural characteristics as arising from environmental causes. Using band societies
as examples, he showed that social organization itself corresponded to a kind of
ecological adaptation of a human group to its environment. He defined cultural
ecology as the study of adaptive processes by which the nature of society and an
unpredictable number of features of culture, are affected by the basic adjustment
through which humans utilize a given environment.
Cultural ecology originated
from an ethnological approach to the modes of production
of native societies around the world as adaptations to their local environments. It has
long been accepted that this anthropological view is too narrow. It isolates knowledge
about the ancient ways of resource management from possible applications to
present day issues of urban consumerism. Conservation management is now an
institutional process of political adaptation to the environmental impact of world
development. Conservation systems are concerned with stabilising the functional
relationships between people and the environment, and managerialism has to be
integrated into people's perceptions of how they fit within environmental systems.
Because traditional
systems often involve long-term adaptations to specific
environments and resource management problems, they are of interest to resource
managers everywhere. Also, there are lessons to be learned from the cultural
significance of traditional ecological knowledge with regard to the sometimes sacred
dimensions of indigenous knowledge, such as symbolic meanings and their
importance for social relationships and values.
