| Benjamin Geer on Mon, 26 Nov 2007 08:29:40 +0100 (CET) |
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| Re: <nettime> ICT and Aboriginal Peoples |
> On 18/11/2007, Jesse Fiddler <[email protected]> wrote: > All Indigenous communities at one time or another were > self-sustainable. Do you have any evidence for that? Here's some evidence to the contrary: ---------- Bobbi S. Low, "Behavioral ecology of conservation in traditional societies" Human Nature, vol. 7 no. 4, 1996, pp. 353-379 http://www.springerlink.com/content/34g2l3158181r705 Abstract: A common exhortation by conservationists suggests that we can solve ecological problems by returning to the attitudes of traditional societies: reverence for resources, and willingness to assume short-term individual costs for long-term, group-beneficial sustainable management. This paper uses the 186-society Standard Cross-Cultural Sample to examine resource attitudes and practices. Two main findings emerge: (1) resource practices are ecologically driven and do not appear to correlate with attitude (including sacred prohibition) and (2) the low ecological impact of many traditional societies results not from conscious conservation efforts, but from various combinations of low population density, inefficient extraction technology, and lack of profitable markets for extracted resources. ---------- Shepard Krech III. The Ecological Indian. Myth and History. New York: Norton, 1999. >From the H-Net review: Sheppard Krech III's book The Ecological Indian sets out to probe the basis and historical validity of the idea that people of native descent are, and always have been, caring towards the environment, a characteristic commonly claimed by or attributed to them. With a series of empirical case studies he investigates whether their ideas and actions were always those of ecologists and conservationists. He finds that the Ecological Indian proposition is of doubtful validity, concluding that, for example, Indians needlessly killed many buffalo, set fires that got out of control, and over-exploited deer and beaver for their skins. http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.cgi?path=23850987187740 ---------- Ben # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]