Abstracts

Place-Based Traditional Knowledge, Endemism And Environmental Change:
What TEK Can Offer Conservation Biologists

Gary Paul Nabhan
University of Arizona

Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), just like Western ecological science, has unique insights, convergences, blind-spots and limitations; it most often draws upon place-based "found experiments" that offer longtiudinal data on endemic species, environmental change and multi-factorial causal factors at the local or regional level that visiting scientists can seldom be exposed to any oher way. I will give examples from the new book from Island Press, Where Our Food Comes From, to exemplify indigenous foragers and farmers' knowledge of endemic species and varieties and the effects of global and local environmental change upon them. The process of cross-cultural exchange of such information; however, is not merely about decoding TEK; it exists in a complex political ecology that must be negotiated through time.

Indigenous Agriculture in North America:
Recognizing Complex Knowledge in a Traditional Cropping System

Jane Mt. Pleasant
Cornell University

Large areas of land in eastern North America were used for crop production centuries before Europeans arrived. Although many contemporary crop and soil scientists dismiss these indigenous agricultural systems as mere "subsistence strategies", closer analysis reveals a complex knowledge system based on principles remarkably similar to western agronomic science. Using the traditional cropping system of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois or Five/Six Nations), this presentation will explore the multiple levels of knowledge embedded in a polyculture of maize, beans, and squash planted on mounds or hills. It will also evaluate traditional cropping systems as a source of knowledge for implementing sustainable agricultural systems today

Integrating Western And Eastern Sciences

Darshan Shankar
Foundation for Revitalization of Local Health Traditions, Bangalore, India

The eastern and western ways of knowing about nature are fundamentally different. They both use the same six human instruments of knowing that all scientists are endowed with namely the five senses and the mental faculty, but they use them differently. The depth, range and scope of knowledge they therefore discover is different. Western Science has an incredibly detailed knowledge about parts of nature, whereas the Eastern Sciences have an amazing and empowering knowledge of the whole.

Western Science studies nature from the standpoint of an observer with nature being the observed. The five senses are employed, alongside an everincreasing range of sophisticated scientific tools that dramatically extend the range and depth of the senses, to gather sensory data about nature. The nature thus discovered by Science is only that aspect of nature that is amenable to the senses. It is a hugely diverse physical and biological world that appears in terrestrial, subterranean, aquatic and extra-terrestrial space This sensory data about the physical and biological world is then analyzed with the aid of limited (from the perspective of the eastern sciences) faculties of the mind, viz logic and mathematics and intelligent conclusions are arrived at. In this observer-observed frame one is bound to obtain partial views of nature because a part of nature, (the observer scientist,) can never view the whole. A part can only view another part. Epistemologically Western Science is thus characterized as being reductionist.

The Eastern Sciences do not adopt the observer- observed frame for the study of nature. The scientists immerse themselves into nature and study it by becoming one with it. The immersion is done with the aid of an advanced application of the mental faculty. The Indian Science of Yoga specializes in such applications and in other cultures there are likely to be other knowledge tools. In this application an extraordinarily integrative but a perfectly natural state of mind is achieved through a training of the mind. This way of knowing therefore provides the eastern scientist access not only to sensory data gathered by the senses but also to non-sensory mental experiences gathered by the mind in its extraordinary state. The sensory data integrated by the mind in this state, is organized and interpreted very differently from the logical and mathematical interpretation of the scientific mind. It results in a whole view of nature. In addition, the mind in the immersed state, also achieves a kind of impersonal subjectivity and can see itself as mind-matter very different from physical and biological matter, which is all that is available and evident to the senses. It thus gets exposed to a new non-sensory existential reality which constitutes another dimension of nature, a mental or spirit plane which is not accessible to the western sciences because of their way of knowing. The Eastern Sciences thus recognize three planes of natural existence, the physical, biological and the mental or spirit plane,

The question can Western and Eastern Sciences be integrated, is equivalent to asking the question can the whole and its parts be integrated? It is obvious that the whole and part are related but it should be equally obvious that the relationship is not one to one because the whole is not equal to the part and nor do the sum of parts add up to remake the whole. In addition there are certain incredible details of parts that science uncovers that can enrich the understanding of the whole and similarly there are new dimensions that are revealed in a holistic view that can fundamentally alter the partial outlook. Therefore in exploring integration of western and eastern sciences there is promise of an extremely exciting and mutually beneficial learning relationship but it needs to be handled carefully as it is complex.