Welcome to my blog! Now as a zoology student, most of my time is occupied by non-human animals. I do still have a soft spot for our own species though, and so the aim of this blog is to shed some light on how indigenous peoples are affected by environmental change.
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Who are Indigenous Peoples?
According to the UN, there are more than 370 million indigenous peoples (IP) across 70 countries, from the Inuit in the Arctic to the Maasai in East Africa. Many IP live in the most biologically rich regions of the planet,with human cultural diversity closely mirroring levels of biodiversity. This has been quantified in a paper by Gorenflo et al., which also found that biodiversity hotspots harbour 70% of the world's languages. Indigenous peoples are incredibly diverse, making an official definition almost impossible, but they are generally united by a close relationship with the natural environment.
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| A:biodiversity hotspots and high wilderness areas; B: 2009 geographic distribution of indigenous or non-migrant languages (Gorenflo et al. 2012) |
Threats
A reliance on natural resources means that IP are disproportionately affected by environmental changes, including climate change, pollution, and deforestation. This is most apparent in the Arctic, which is home to around 400,000 IP including the Inuit and Sami. Between 1976 and 2016, the monthly September ice extent shows a linear rate of decline of 13.3% per decade. For these groups, hunting, fishing, homes, and travel all depend on stable ice, and so rising temperatures will severely impact food security and health. Furthermore, shifts in phenology due to climate change have made indigenous knowledge unreliable. The Dayak people of Borneo, for example, traditionally use bird migration patterns to dictate hunting or cultivation routines, but these have changed and are no longer useful as guides.
Forms of environmental degradation, such as deforestation, also threatens indigenous communities. Extensive logging in Malaysia to make way for rubber or oil palm plantations has devastated the Temiar people, who are finding it increasingly difficult to hunt and gather food from the remaining forests. However, in a few cases, it has been suggested that indigenous peoples may actually be contributing to issues such as localised overhunting and habitat loss due to subsistence agriculture- creating a conflict which I hope to discuss in a future post.
Resistance
Despite the threats that IP face, they are not just passive victims and continue to resist or adapt to changes in their environment. Many indigenous leaders have sacrificed their lives to defend their communities and way of life. Earlier this year, Berta Cáceres, a prominent leader of the indigenous Lenca people in Honduras, was assassinated in her home. Cáceres was an environmental activist, who was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015 for defending the Gualcarque River from the Agua Zarca Dam project. The name of this blog is based on the opening of her acceptance speech:
‘In our worldviews, we are beings who come from the Earth, from the water and from corn. The Lenca people are ancestral guardians of the rivers, in turn protected by the spirits of young girls, who teach us that giving our lives in various ways for the protection of the rivers is giving our lives for the well-being of humanity and of this planet.’
Future posts
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