Want to know how to save nature? Ask Indigenous scientists.
- https://www.vox.com/down-to-earth/22849782/nature-conservation-indigenous-science-jessica-hernandez?
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Nature conservation needs a transformation, according to a new book by environmental scientist . Jessica Hernandez, a Maya Ch’orti and Binnizá-Zapotec Indigenous environmental scientist
“Nature protects us as long as we protect nature,” writes Hernandez, who is now a 31-year-old postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Washington. “Ancestral knowledge has been sustained in our communities,” she added in an interview. “It’s a valid form of knowledge that isn’t necessarily validated through the Western ways, like publications and books.” This kind of knowledge forms the basis of Indigenous science, Hernandez says, that is crucial to caring for the Earth.
Indigenous peoples and local communities steward far more of the planet than protected areas like national parks, and around 80 percent of the diversity of species known to be living on Earth are found on lands owned or managed by these groups. That’s despite centuries of genocide, racism, and what Hernandez and other academics and activists refer to as settler colonialism — the intentional displacement and erasure of Indigenous peoples by outsiders.
“Conservation continues to teach scientists that scientific knowledge is more valuable than Indigenous knowledge,” Hernandez writes. This attitude ignores a staggering variety of insights in Indigenous communities, from medicinal knowledge of plants and animals in the Amazon to coral reef conservation in Australia to the prescribed burning practices in the West.
