Together we came to a conclusion: the more diversity we have in our fields, the more resilient we will be. This season, farmers who found that their maize harvest was poor were saying to me: “But I still got something from my millet crop,” or, “Nonetheless, I got something from my groundnuts.”

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In this part of the world, farmers are encouraged by the government to grow cash crops and to use pesticides and herbicides, which these crops depend on. Our trajectory in recent years has been the opposite – to revive the diversity of local, traditional crop varieties suited to our lands and climate from the seed we save ourselves.

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We have seen amazing and unexpected results from this work. No crop exemplifies our success better than millet.

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Hosken, L. (2017, October). Learning from Nature’s Laws and Lores. Resurgence & Ecologist, 304, 21–23.
https://www.resurgence.org/magazine/article4937-learning-from-natures-laws-and-lores.html
 

This thinking resonates with Indigenous shamans from the Colombian Amazon with whom the Gaia Foundation has also been working in recent years. They are deeply concerned that the dominant industrial growth economy consistently breaks the laws that govern life. “The consequences will be severe,” said shaman Rodrigo from Pia Paraná. “Those who believe that humans are superior and can override Nature’s laws are destabilising Mother Earth, and the consequences will affect everyone. It will lead to sickness and chaos for the Earth, and for all who depend on her, including humans. What we do to the Earth, from whom we are born, we do to ourselves. We are part of the web of life. This is the way things are, whether we see it or not.”

 

Kumar, S. (2016, October). The Answer Lies In The Soil. Resurgence & Ecologist, 298, 66.
https://www.resurgence.org/magazine/article4736-the-answer-lies-in-the-soil.html
 

The reality that Vandana points out is that 70% of the world’s food is still grown by small farmers around the world. Further, through careful and thoughtful methods these farmers look after the soil and maintain the fertility of the land, whereas 24 billion tonnes of fertile soil are lost from large-scale industrial farming each year.

 

Vandana reminds us that no technology can claim to feed the world while it destroys life in the soil. “Degraded and dead soils, soils without organic matter, soils without soil organisms, and soils with no water-holding capacity do not provide food security: they create famines and are at the heart of the food crisis the world is facing today,” she says.

 

Lamb, H. (2020, June). Champions of the Future. Resurgence & Ecologist, 320, 30–32.
https://www.resurgence.org/magazine/article5530-champions-of-the-future.html

Brazilian enterprise Rede de Sementes do Xingu has been operating in the Amazon since 2007. Native seeds are gathered from the forest and sold by Indigenous and agricultural communities for reforestation of degraded land. The restoration approach is called muvuca, whereby large quantities of native seeds are scattered across an area.

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Xingu is the most mature seed-collection network in Brazil, with over 550 collectors. In 2018, 200 tonnes of seeds were gathered from over 200 native species – a huge contribution to restoring biodiversity.

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The network was formed in response to demand from Indigenous communities for ways to restore their lands. As well as earning more and protecting the forests, and improving water quality as a result, the people working within the seed network now have much greater social visibility, pushing the issues of deforestation and climate emergency up the priorities of those beyond the local community – all this at a critical and dangerous time for Brazil’s Amazon forests and Indigenous people.

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Lane, C. (2017, October). Conflict in a Place of Milk and Money. Resurgence & Ecologist, 304, 10–12.
https://www.resurgence.org/magazine/article4933-conflict-in-a-place-of-milk-and-money.html
 

In my time with the Barabaig, I learned that they had suffered from prejudice and imposition at the hand of others. The resulting decline of Barabaig pastoralism offers an important precautionary tale on how ill-conceived interventions can so easily undermine the lives of Indigenous peoples.

 

Up until the 1960s, the Barabaig sustained themselves through a pattern of migration managed by a communal land tenure system, which made best use of scarce and variable resources in a climate with only 600mm of annual rainfall. Since then, loss of land through encroachment and state-sponsored alienation has threatened that way of life.

 

Largo, V. (2017, June). Home on The Range—But For How Long? Resurgence & Ecologist, 302, 14–17.
https://www.resurgence.org/magazine/article4863-home-on-the-range-but-for-how-long.html
 

Parakuyo Maasai have long connections with the land. They have been documented in the southern part of Tanzania since the late 1700s, and many hills and plains have Maasai names. Parakuyo and Datoga Maasai have been evicted from the Ihefu wetlands and the Kilombero River basin, areas that are now earmarked for huge European- and US-funded farming projects in the so-called Southern Agricultural Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT).

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Lights, Z. (2020, December). Standing Up For Land in Indonesia, Zion Lights speaks to Dayak leader Emmanuela Shinta. Resurgence & Ecologist, 323, 16–18.

https://www.resurgence.org/magazine/article5625-standing-up-for-land-in-indonesia.html

Research has found that handing over care of the land to Indigenous people who have managed it for generations is the best way to protect the land and biodiversity and therefore help to protect us from the impacts of climate breakdown. This has been found to be true even when comparing Indigenous knowledge with other land-management methods. For example, legally protected large territories in Brazil are crucial for the protection of biodiversity. Yet Shinta states, “Indonesia still does not recognise the rights of the Indigenous people and it makes the fight to protect the forest more difficult.

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“Indigenous people are the guardians of the forest, and the local communities are at the frontline of envir­onmental battle. Climate change is the fight that belongs to all of us. However, if you learn more about Borneo forest fires and their relation to the palm oil plantations, everyone can relate to the issue and has some responsibility. Indonesia is the biggest exporter of palm oil, and more than half the plantations are located in Kalimantan.”

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Mills, S. (2017, February). Distant Voices Still Live, Warn and Inspire. Resurgence & Ecologist, 300, 11.
https://www.resurgence.org/magazine/article4807-distant-voices-still-live-warn-and-inspire.html

 

Ladakh, northwest of Tibet, was then one of the world’s last virtually intact subsistence economies. Norberg-Hodge, the first Westerner to become fluent in its language, brought captivating images and accounts of Ladakhi life. She spoke of the manual and animal cultivation of grains in comely irrigated fields, the summertime grazing of hardy invaluable cows, dzo, goats, sheep and yaks in high montane meadows, of the multigenerational households, the winter ceremonies and festivals, of polyandry and monastic celibacy and the finely tuned structure of land tenure that helped keep Ladakh’s population proportionate to its affordances.

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Moses, K. (2020, April). The Wilderness Myth. Resurgence & Ecologist, 319, 26–29.
https://www.resurgence.org/magazine/article5495-the-wilderness-myth.html
 

The displacement of Indigenous peoples is one of many dark legacies of European colonialism. By 1914, most nations had been colonised by Europeans at some point. The ‘colonial package’ imposed on invaded lands contained a suite of dominatory elements: western systems of rationalist, mechanistic thought; capitalism, along with its money, work ethic and aspirational consumerism; ‘development’ in the form of infrastructure and extractivist industry; patriarchal, monotheistic, ‘sky religions’ (usually Christianity); shaming of ‘heathen’ Indigenous, Nature-based culture and spirituality. Above all else, what the colonists imported and what these elements support is the conceptual separation of humans from Nature.

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Murphy, J. (2020, September 15). Decolonizing Environmentalism. YES! Magazine. https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2020/09/15/conservation-decolonize-environmentalism

 

The exclusion of Indigenous people and other non-white communities in environmental and conservation work is, unfortunately, nothing new. For centuries, conservation has been driven by Eurocentric, Judeo-Christian belief structures that emphasize a distinct separation of “Man” and “Nature”—an ideology that does not mesh well with many belief structures, including those belonging to Indigenous communities.

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Mutch, T. (2017, April). Planting Seeds of Resistance and Renewal. Resurgence & Ecologist, 301, 11-13.

https://www.resurgence.org/magazine/article4823-planting-seeds-of-resistance-and-renewal.html

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Janet Maro is not a woman to be messed with. Of the Chagga tribe in northern Tanzania, and fiercely proud of it, she started farming on the slopes of Kilimanjaro (famous for its rich volcanic soil and hundreds of small, successful vegetable farmers) with her family. She says: “I’m basically a farmer. All I am doing is building on traditional Chagga knowledge, what my grandmother taught me, and bringing it up to date.”

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She’s not even 35, but her achievements (though she doesn’t brag) are impressive. She has serious international funding and she has the ears of donors who are desperate to find alternatives to the nagging problems of underperforming yields, farmers stuck in cycles of poverty and unstable markets, and the gradual encroachment of ‘big agra’ onto what it views as prime virgin markets.

 

Rademacher, N. (2020, September 18). Indigenous Educators Bridge Native and Western Science in the Classroom. YES! Magazine.
https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2020/09/18/environmental-science-indigenous-educators

 

Gregory Cajete stands in front of a classroom full of University of New Mexico students enrolled in a graduate seminar on Indigenous nations and sustainable communities. Cajete is teaching these students about having a relationship with, and responsibility for, the environment. This way of knowing is called Native Science, and it is part of a body of evolving Indigenous knowledge based on generations of learning and direct contact with nature.

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Raygorodetsky, G. (2018, October). Lessons from the Peoples of the Land. Resurgence & Ecologist, 310, 26-28.
https://www.resurgence.org/magazine/article5161-lessons-from-the-peoples-of-the-land.html

 

Gleb Raygorodetsky reports from western Canada what we can learn from Indigenous cultures about responses to climate change.

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[…]

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The circumstances of each Indigenous community are different – distinct cultures, unique histories, diverse ecosystems, and multiple climate change impacts. Yet their individual predicaments are fundamentally similar – colonial history, displacement, pressure from resource extraction, and limited political power to determine their own future.

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To understand how Indigenous communities stay resilient in the face of all the challenges that the ‘civilised’ world continues to throw at them, including climate change, it is essential to go beyond dissecting the specific how-to lessons, and attempt to explore the fundamental principles of how these communities maintain their relationships with the living world around them. To heal the Earth and rebalance our relationship with it, it is not enough to ‘treat’ the symptoms: our medicine must penetrate to the very core of our affliction. This is why, when I meet Levi for lunch, I am seeking some guidance from the ‘all-knowing’ Kaa-muth.

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Shiva, V. (2016, December). Exterminating the Amaranth. Resurgence & Ecologist, 299, 18–19.
https://www.resurgence.org/magazine/article4751-exterminating-the-amaranth.html

 

[Personal note on this article from Earth in Common:

one of us recently foraged some amaranth, growing wild, on a trip to South Africa,

where it is known as morogo or marogo, and found it delicious!]

Amaranth greens are incredible edibles that grow uncultivated in our fields. They are a major source of protein, calcium, phosphorus, carotene, vitamin C, magnesium, zinc, sodium and potassium. Amaranth is nearly 500% richer in carotene than the genetically modified “Golden Rice”, which is being promoted as a means of addressing vitamin A deficiency in some of the world’s poorest countries.

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In many parts of the world, therefore, the poorest, landless woman and her children have access to nutrition through the generous gift of the amaranth. Yet, just as during the Spanish colonial era cultivating amaranth was made illegal in Mexico, so in our time modern industrial agriculture has treated amaranth greens as “weeds” and tried to kill them with herbicides.

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Tickell, O. (2016, December). Going Against the Grain. Resurgence & Ecologist, 299, 13–15.
https://www.resurgence.org/magazine/article4749-going-against-the-grain.html

“Just focusing on GMOs (genetically modified crops) is not enough. The point is, what is happening in the fields even without GMOs? Industrial agriculture only works with tons of soluble nitrogen, fungicide, insecticide and herbicide. And the result is that the bees are dying out. We cannot go on like this. GMOs are just the final tweak in the entire system of industrial agriculture that is destroying our environment and ruining our health. So we have to do more than just complain about it. We have to set out the alternative.”

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I meet John Letts – academic, organic farmer, archaeobotanist, crop breeder and agricultural revolutionary – at the Buckinghamshire farm where he is now growing 50 acres of “heritage grains”, a term he invented some 15 years ago to describe the genetically diverse seed mixes he has spent much of his life developing.

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Tickell, O. (2017, April). Turning the Tide in a Desert War. Resurgence & Ecologist, 301, 22–24.
https://www.resurgence.org/magazine/article4827-turning-the-tide-in-a-desert-war.html
 

“If elephants disappear it means the land is no longer good for us either,” one villager told zoologist Susan Canney in the early days of her conservation project in 2007. A subsequent survey revealed that 78% of people in the 42,000km2 project area share his views.

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“They know their survival depends on the quality of their environment,” says Canney, “and for them elephants are like very large canaries in the mine – so long as they are flourishing, the land is also flourishing and they can flourish within it.

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Torres Torres, A. I., & Torres Chaparro, G. (2020, April). The Right to Life. Resurgence & Ecologist, 319, 14–15.
https://www.resurgence.org/magazine/article5491-the-right-to-life.html

 

The mamos and kwimis are the male and female spiritual leaders chosen from among the Arhuaco people. Under their leadership, the Arhuaco people think and act in pursuit of “the quest for balance with Nature and oneself”. The mamos explain that humans must compensate for every harm committed in the material dimension; otherwise, the harm will cause a perturbation of the spiritual order. The disturbance of both orders puts in danger the existence and wellbeing of all the inhabitants of Niwi Umukunu.

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Wahl, D. C. (2020, August). Building a new normal. Resurgence & Ecologist, 31, 25–28.
https://www.resurgence.org/magazine/article5563-building-a-new-normal.html

Our future depends not just on a reinhabitation of our bioregions but also on a reindigenisation of our way of being. What does it mean to belong to place as a healthy expression of that place? We are coming home to a deeper knowing. Our bioregional Indigenous ancestors always knew that we belong to the land rather than the land belonging to us.

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Wegener, J. (2020, April). Bringing Back the Good Fire. Resurgence & Ecologist, 319, 34.
https://www.resurgence.org/magazine/article5498-bringing-back-the-good-fire.html

As devastating wildfires rip through Australia, stories have emerged of land being saved by a different kind of fire, “good fire”, managed through a traditional practice called cultural burning.

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The phrase describes burning practices developed by Aboriginal people over thousands of years to enhance the health of the land and its people. It can include burning or prevention of burning for the health of particular plants and animals, clearing pathways and protecting property. It can also be as simple as a campfire around which people gather to share, learn, and celebrate.

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Colonial powers largely eradicated cultural burning in the 1700’s because they “didn’t quite understand there could be a ‘good fire’”, Jessica Wegener, a Ngiyampaa Wangaaypuwan woman, told Resurgence. “On the other hand, I have heard personally from Australian European settlement families who learnt the ways of fire management practices from local Aboriginal people and continued this practice with Aboriginal support across generations.”

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Wooltorton, S., Poelina, A., Collard, L., Horwitz, P., Harben, S., & Palmer, D. (2020, October). Becoming Family with Place. Resurgence & Ecologist, 322, 34–35.

https://www.resurgence.org/magazine/article5596-becoming-family-with-place.html

Listen deeply, look closely! Indigenous narratives help us to see, hear and feel our places and our world in ways that reveal an animate, communicative, living Nature.

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Everyone has ancestors who are indigenous to somewhere, and we all have the capacity to meaningfully engage with our places. Acknowledging living lands, living waters and traditional knowledge holders where we all live and work demonstrates our ethics and values and helps us remember there are layers of cultural, historic and contemporary meanings in our landscapes, waiting in full view.

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Yeo, S. (2020a, October). Buying Time. Resurgence & Ecologist, 322, 18–19.
https://www.resurgence.org/magazine/article5591-buying-time.html

[Note: Earth in Common is not enthusiastic about fostering dependence on export markets, but this article does raise some interesting points for discussion.]

The Rainforest Alliance is a non-governmental organisation that works with farming and forest communities across the world, mostly in the tropics. The organisation has a two-pronged approach: it seeks to improve the lives and livelihoods of forest communities, while also ensuring the sustainability of their operations, helping them to protect the diverse ecological landscape of the forests and adapt to the impacts of climate change. Its certification scheme – essentially a regular audit to ensure that farmers are meeting high social, economic and environmental standards – covers a huge variety of farm and forest products, from coffee to soap.

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Yeo, S. (2020b, December). Research makes Nature-based solutions more accessible (in FRONTLINE: Beavers, good news for biodiversity and nature-based solutions in Zimbabwe). Resurgence & Ecologist, 323, 7.
https://www.resurgence.org/magazine/article5618-nature-revival.html

[Note: see also the article by Kwashirai about Zimbabwe's Chinhoyi Caves,

listed in the main bibliography section of the PDF version of this page,

in which he refers to sacred forests (rambotemwa).]

In Zimbabwe, protected forests provide honey to supplement food and income when crops are lost to droughts. This is one of hundreds of ways in which Nature-based solutions can help bolster our ability to thrive in a warmer world, according to new research published by the University of Oxford’s Nature-based Solutions Initiative.