Indigenous Environmental Protection

Many of the indigenous knowledge approaches to environmental conservation included such technologies and
practices as shifting cultivation, mixed cropping or intercropping, minimum tillage and agro-forestry, transhumance
and a system of taboos and customary restrictions.
Shrines and medicine
 as shrines to be used for worship and other rituals forests have been protected. Such protected areas tend to have
multiple functions i.e. elements of the environmental management such as biodiversity, forest, wetlands
conservation, land use control e.g. Kinga shrine in Mfangano forest, western Kenya. Besides spiritual value, the
shrine has also provided a sanctuary for a variety of indigenous trees, plants, animals, birds and insects. The forest
itself was protected by strong traditional rules and prohibitions.
 Based on cultural artifacts, totems, rules and taboos, beliefs and prohibitions, every young boy in the villages of
Western Kenya was restrained from killing frogs by creating the fear that his mother’s breasts would disintegrate if
he did so. The purpose was to protect frogs from extinction as they had traditional medicinal value.
Land management
 
Land management under indigenous knowledge involves a number of farming technologies that have repercussions across
the whole spectrum of conservation.
 
 Use of Grass strips: In Swaziland, these are common traditional land management systems. Pieces of land, one to one-
and-a-half metres wide, with traditional vegetation are left between fields to control soil erosion and conserve
biodiversity. The strips also serve as sources of medicinal plants and feed for livestock.
 
 Simple tools: Land clearing and cultivation was done using simple tools. Indigenous communities lacked tractors and
ploughs but used curved iron blades with long handles to clear shrub. The simple implements were not capable of cutting
big trees or clearing large tracts of land easily or gigging into deep layers. This helped in nature conservation because big
trees, forests and deeper soils were undisturbed.
 the harvesting of fish and other aquatic products was done using traditional tools and equipment including
spears, nets, traps, canoes and stockades of a rudimentary nature that made overfishing difficult and did not
cause stock stress.
 
 Slash-and-burn: Given the simple tools in use, the most popular method of land clearance has been “slash-
and- burn” where bushes are cleared with a slasher, collected in heaps and burned. Alternatively a small
bush area would simply be set on fire, which was carefully controlled. The method also assisted in
controlling disease vectors both for human and livestock. The fires might also destroy some nutrients and
living organisms but the land was left to lie fallow under shifting cultivation and was able to regenerate.
 
 Shifting cultivation: a major form of land use management involving cultivating one spot of land, then
leaving it fallow after a few years of cropping. Where land is communal or freely available, movement
from one piece of land to another to allow for natural rejuvenation of the land was easy. In Uluguru
mountainous area of Tanzania, shifting cultivation helped control gully erosion by allowing natural
vegetation to reclaim the land. However, population increase diminished land availability and the fallow
system as sedentary farming set in.
 Mixed cropping: Besides shifting cultivation, mixed cropping and intercropping farming technologies were adopted to
optimize the use of naturally available soil nutrients and promote high yields. Mixed farming could also mean keeping
livestock as well as engaging in crop growing at the same time, which improves soil fertility by using the animal
manure.
 
 Minimal tillage: Minimum tillage and agro-forestry as land use and management methods were commonly used in
Tanzania. Bushes or forests were cleared and the vegetation burned and the resulting ash used as the initial fertilizer.
Only the area where the collected vegetation was placed and burned was tilled and planted, hence minimal tillage. In
Mbinga district, branches of the leguminous acacia tree were burned in heaps and finger millet and pumpkins planted on
the ashy spots to obtain very high yields due to the nutrients released into the soil. In Zimbabwe, the advocation for zero
tillage is part of the minimal tillage management system.
 
 In agroforestry practice, only the branches of acacia trees were cut, leaving the tree to regenerate new branches for
future use. Agro-forestry system involves various combinations of woody and herbaceous vegetation with agricultural
crops. It could result in multiple agronomic, environmental, and socio-economic benefits, and conserve biodiversity.
 
 Precision Farming is part of minimal tillage practiced in Tanzania, i.e. identifying parts of the field that had more
fertility than others e.g. planting on spots that used to have anthills, cattle kraals, or household wastes.
 
 Agro-pastoralism and transhumance: Emphasizes grazing rotation to avoid overexploitation of vegetation. Among the
Lake Victoria communities of Kenya, for example, this rotational grazing was practiced as a form of transhumance
where animals were grazed in the higher areas during the wet season and brought back to the river banks and lake
shores during the dry seasons.
 As in Makueni district of Kenya, livestock is moved from pasture to pasture to maintain ecological balance.
 In Kitumbeini division of Arusha region in Tanzania the Maasai pastoralists divide the village into pasture zones to
conserve their pasturelands and prevent drought-borne disasters and also seasonally moved their herds to take
advantage of the rangeland.
 Zoning: communities “zoned” their land, according to ecological factors. The rotational grazing practiced by the
Lake Victoria communities, for example, was in fact land zoning - using the higher grounds for homestead
settlements and the lower grounds closer to the lakeshores for cultivation and animal grazing.
 
 Terrace system: A land management systems used among the Matengo people of Tanzania to conserve the
environment, designed much like terraces to prevent the destructive effects of surface runoff in cultivated steep slopes
or hilly lands. Conserves soil moisture, soil fertility, controls soil erosion and maintains yields in the face of the
intense rainfall as was experienced in the past.
 Mound System of Land Management: practiced in the Rukwa region of Tanzania. The compost mounds
are prepared mainly for planting finger millet, cassava, beans and maize and they help to maintain soil
fertility, control soil erosion, and conserve moisture and help farmers avoid the use of expensive
fertilizers
 
 
 Conservation of fisheries: an important aspect of indigenous knowledge in land use and management.
The communities that live around water bodies such as Kenya’s Nyanza people have used water
resources for survival. For sustainable harvesting of the aquatic resources they developed;
 strict rules on sizes of nets, types of traps and methods of fishing for specific periods of the year. Any
young fish caught by mistake was thrown back into the water. The rules gave the fish opportunities for
breeding while at the same time allowing the communities to fish for specific types of fish each season.
Traditional selective fishing methods were critical in the preservation of aquatic biodiversity.
 strict rules on the conservation of mangroves along the coastline provided a safe sanctuary for the
breeding of these marine species and contributed towards nature conservation by controlling coastal
erosion, accretion and water pollution.
 totems and taboos checked illegal fish catches and promoted compliance. More recently, however,
commercial fishing has destroyed traditional fishing with licensed foreign fishing fleets with large
factory trawlers spending months at sea hauling in large netloads of fish indiscriminately.
 In Kwale, Kenya, the sea was divided into riko (sub-zones) for better management and conservation of the
biodiversity. Each zone was put under the supervision of village elders who ensured that no fisherman would
catch small and immature fish and the ban on the use of poison for catching fish was observed. Poison kills off
fish and other aquatic organisms. The village elders a particular radius to a fisherman beyond which he was not
allowed to fish. Village elders inspected the fish and if a fisherman was found with small fish he was banned
from fishing for a time.
 
 Forests conservation: it is intimately tied to indigenous knowledge land management practices. Using
indigenous knowledge, rules, prohibitions and taboos, all the communities practiced forest conservation as
follows:
 farmed on the edges of forests, leaving the thick forests untouched, thus protecting slow maturing indigenous
plants in the thick forests; preventing land degradation.
 preserved tree and plant species considered sacred, or as totems, or associated with some taboos and bad omens.
For instance, tree known locally in western Kenya as pocho, is considered sacred and is not to be cut down or
its wood used for fuel.
 In Swaziland trees such as bhubhubhu are protected from being used as sources of building materials.
 plants and trees associated with shrines and water sources were protected.
 Traditional elders enforced customary restraints and taboos whereby communities in all areas conserved trees
needed for their beauty, fruits and berries, medicine, fuel wood and construction materials by harvesting them in
a manner that allowed them to regenerate.
Indigenous Wildlife Management
Most traditional wildlife management methods are rapid, low-cost, and easily comprehensible. For example, most
of the known indigenous methods for monitoring populations are based on observations related to harvests. These
include harvest rate, or what we can call the similar catch per unit of effort (CPUE) measurement.
 the Catch Per Unit Effort approach: is the main mechanism for harvest decision making in the subsistence
fisheries of the Cree people of northern Canada.
 The fishermen use 50-m gillnets of various mesh sizes. Kept a mental note of their harvests and their CPUE
relative to expected CPUE based on previous experience
 Collected information determined decision about which nets to use, how long to keep fishing in a given spot,
when to relocate, which species to target, and how often to visit distant but high-CPUE areas.
 Body condition monitoring approach: Cree fishermen monitored other environmental signals e.g. species
composition of the catch; size distribution; body condition, which was considered important as an indicator of
health; and reproductive condition (Berkes 1999).
 
 Among the Rakiura Maori,an indigenous group in New Zealand's who travel to 35 islands each autumn to harvest the
chicks of birds called shearwater, Harvesters primarily monitor the long-term well-being of the birds, from the rate at
which they can catch chicks (Lyver et al. 1999, Kitson 2004).
 They observed catch totals (Lyver 2002), or harvest intensity and breeding habitat. They also observed weather or moon
conditions during each hunt to make informed judgment about sustainable harvesting i.e. basing assessment of trends in
abundance on whether they can still get their target daily total catch about the same time, about the same area of
breeding ground, or how far birders must go from their base to complete the harvest. Harvest rate guides short-term
decision making to optimize returns, to discontinue harvesting or reduce it.
 Cree and Dëne hunters and fishers regularly check the fat content of the animals they harvest. They pinch the undersides
of the bodies of geese and ducks, assess the mesentery fat of fish when cleaning them, and check the fat content of large
mammal species.
 Three indicators for monitoring of body condition, i.e., back fat, stomach fat, and marrow color (Kofinas et al. 2002).
Monitoring wildlife fat makes sense as an index that integrates a number of factors at the ecosystem level, such as the
condition of the feeding range and population dynamics.
 They considered healthy fat as an indicator of the use of new feeding grounds, adequate feeding or population well-
being and good range conditions while poor body condition indicated overpopulation (Kofinas et al. 2002)
 Because there are local prohibitions against disturbing nesting geese, this monitoring takes place only at the edges of
nesting areas and with the information passed around, hunters can predict a good or a poor hunt.
 When the harvesting starts, hunters also monitor the average young per adult couple and decide whether a shift to fishing of
large game hunting is not more sustainable. Shifting effort to other resources in this manner may help reduce the pressure
on the resource population that is experiencing a low (Berkes 1982).
 Hunters also form impressions of population status through "eyeballing" the numbers of birds, game, and even fish, e.g.,
salmon in upstream migration (Swezey and Heizer 1977), and monitoring the density of tracks. Maori sometimes refer to
sensing their environment through "touch, feel, and sight" (Heaslip 2002); Cree hunters sometimes judge the numbers of the
Canada goose population in staging areas by the amount of noise they make.
 Indigenous observers similarly note unusual patterns in animal distributions, strange behavior, diseased animals, and
breeding failures. For example, massive food failure events are long remembered and recounted by Rakiura Maori
harvesters (Hunter et al. 2000). Changes in the frequency of such unusual events are often interpreted as signs of long-term
alterations in ecosystems or resource levels. (Krupnik and Jolly 2002).
 Observations of species mixes or assemblages: This provides important information on upcoming population change. The
cabbage tree on the North Island of New Zealand started dying for an unknown reason in the mid-1980s. The New Zealand
Department of Conservation commissioned a report on Maori knowledge of the condition and found that the cabbage tree
"need to be part of a vegetation complex, rather than all alone in a paddock". Some months later, scientists isolated the
passion vine hopper as the disease-carrying vector. The hopper does not fly more than 1.5 m above ground and is inhibited
by surrounding vegetation that also protects cabbage trees against accidental damage to the lower trunk. The response of
the tree species to injury is to grow another head at the injury site, and it is only at the base of a leafy growth that the hopper
can penetrate the cortex and exchange fluids (P. Simpson, personal communication).
Through the combination of monitoring and management approaches many indigenous communities are aware of a
declining resource. Occurrence of seasons with low numbers of fat birds or animals signaled an environmental
perturbation (Lyver 2002) requiring not only indigenous mitigation but adaptive management.
 
The end