Biodiversity Losses: Impacts and Insights

                                                    PWJ February 2023  

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was a landmark international agreement adopted by over 190 United Nation member states in 1992. It set guidelines for countries to protect biodiversity. The latest CBD conference was held in Montreal in December 2022. Delegates approved a UN agreement to focus on 27 biodiversity targets. The most prominent of these targets is protection of 30 percent of the planet’s land and oceans by 2030.   

This 30-30 goal will be a challenge in increasing the estimated 17 percent or so of the planet’s land and roughly 8 percent of its oceans that are protected through laws and restrictions. Countries also agreed to manage the remaining 70 percent of the planet to try to reduce biodiversity losses and to increase private-sector responsibilities for disclosing biodiversity risks and impacts from their operations. 

This conference on biodiversity, and the even higher-profile conference on climate change just a month earlier in Egypt, signal growing international engagement for difficult tasks of moving beyond mere research and goal setting. Significant in these recent climate change and biodiversity agreements is increased recognition of indigenous peoples’ rights and roles. The clear message in the Montreal biodiversity agreement is that indigenous-led conservation approaches must become much more the norm for the future. 

Why this increasing emphasis on indigenous concerns and leadership? Indigenous communities tend to be more vulnerable to biodiversity losses and adverse climate changes. Also, these communities often have traditionally had closer relationships with their surrounding biodiversity.   

The natural world never comes alive for many, because they don’t have direct and vital interactions with it that start from childhood. Indigenous communities, including many native-American cultures, often have more members with these direct and compelling experiences. Some of these elders retain and pass along enduring memories and stories that demonstrate heightened respect for all of Earth’s inhabitants.    

Botany professor and Potawatomi Nation citizen, Robin Wall Kimmerer, stresses that we can hardly gain ecological sensitivity if we cannot even imagine what the path toward this feels like? Our relationship with the natural world cannot heal until we experience it more profoundly and learn many of its lessons.  

The wonders of the natural world can easily be pushed aside for many people by their childhood and later influences. Messages from the mass media and peer pressures can glorify more materialistic desires and ambitions. The natural environment, when considered at all, becomes viewed almost entirely as means or products for human consumption. The negative impacts of climate changes and biodiversity losses can seem far from the priorities or practical daily cares for many Americans. 

Recent native-American authors are sharing contrasting biodiversity stances and narratives. Kimmerer explains that improved science education must bring learners into greater intimacy with a natural world fraught with mystery, wonder and creativity. She believes that to better understand other life forms, so unlike our own, can be a humbling and deeply spiritual pursuit. 

Pueblo/Tewa professor Gregory Cajete in his book Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence states that indigenous ways of knowing concentrate on all four aspects of our being: mind, body, emotion and spirit. Traditional science privileges one or possibly two of these ways of knowing and seldom integrates the other dimensions for improved human learning. European settlers arriving in America seldom cared to listen and learn from indigenous cultures that had lived for millennia in more physical and spiritual harmony with their environment. Cajete claims that the sciences and worldviews of this continent's First Peoples offer key perspectives for meeting current and future ecological challenges.  

Traditional Ecological Knowledge by Melissa K. Nelson (Editor) includes many chapters by indigenous authors, including Kimmerer and Cajete. The book explains holistic and broader approaches for ecological sustainability, including language, art, and ceremony for healthier human-environment relations. Concepts and practices such as “honorable harvesting” promote these healthier relationships. This indigenous harvesting advice often emphasizes practices of taking only what you need, minimizing potentially harmful harvesting consequences, using fully what you harvest, expressing active thankfulness for the life forms that are taken, and reciprocating these gifts through future efforts to nurture and sustain these natural wonders.  

 

Some Americans, beyond those residing within or deeply influenced by indigenous cultures, have traces of these more holistic values for ecological sustainability. Those with deeper ancestral roots or personal experiences in rural areas may have accepted certain indigenous or Depression-era attitudes such as “Waste not, want not.” Rural and small-farm lives long ago might appear to have demanded a lot of sacrifices in material and other advantages. My interviews 20 years ago with my own family elders often included their recollections of having had in many ways a richer and more fulfilling life then associated with their closer interdependence with the natural world. 

 

Future climate crises and biodiversity losses will no doubt force some shocking and difficult challenges in Louisiana and elsewhere. One important question will be how we respond to these losses and crises over time. I hope that Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinoir Ostrom is correct in her assessment of human potentials. She believes that humans more often respond to scarcity and crisis with strategies of cooperation and sharing. Morbid individualism, or ignoring what other life forms need to survive, turns crises into tragedies, according to Ostrom. Perhaps we need to value the ecological insights expressed by indigenous and native-American thinkers as much as those who have more elite scientific credentials.