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.
