Indigenous ecosystem-based adaptation and community-based

ecocultural restoration during rapid climate disruption:

Lessons for Western restorationists

By Dennis Martinez

A paper presented at the

4th World Conference on Ecological Restoration

20th Annual Meeting of the Society for Ecological Restoration International

2nd Meeting of the Ibero-American and Caribbean Ecological Restoration Network

August 23, 2011

Mérida, Yucatan, Mexico

Indigenous peoples, comprising only 5% of the world’s population but occupying 20% of

the earth’s surface and 80% of its biological hotspots, are important to ecosystems far out of

proportion to their numbers. They have a good record of adaptation to a variety of climatic

events and other changes over millennia, and are still adapting in such vulnerable biomes as

semi-arid areas, mountains, sea islands, tropical forests and savannas, the arctic, and boreal

forests—yet bear the least responsibility for climate disruption. But adaptation to climate

destabilization may be the greatest challenge yet because of the increasingly rapid rate of change

and the extremes of size, intensity, and frequency of today’s climatic events—an altogether new

kind of climate that is outside of the historical experience of all Indigenous peoples. For

example, the annual numbers of weather events that have substantially affected humans has

increased from ~ 100 in 1975 to ~ 400 in 2008.

Yet despite a long record, for the most part, of sustainability and resilience in difficult

and vulnerable places, Indigenous peoples have been and continue to be evicted from their

homelands to make way for conservation reserves and denied access to resources and sacred

places. And their traditional landcare practices (TLPs), though belatedly given a measure of 1

respect by a small minority of scientists, are mostly still ignored. While the theme of this

conference and the Mission Statement of the Society for Ecological Restoration International

(SERI)—a statement I helped craft in 1991 as a SER Board member—is reestablishing the link

or relationship between nature and culture, traditional Indigenous cultures that have never

severed that link are still not recognized for their longstanding and important place in nature—

indeed their keystone role in ecosystem dynamics. Whenever a keystone species, structure, or

process is removed from an ecosystem, unanticipated cascading ecological events can occur,

pushing ecosystems over potentially irreversible thresholds or tipping points that can flip them to

novel states outside of the historical range of variability—leaving them even more vulnerable to

rapid climate disruption. This is already occurring. For example, the repeated catastrophic

wildfires that are currently happening on several continents following the forced cessation of

Indigenous prescribed burning—burning that kept fuel levels low enough to prevent the huge

conflagrations we see now—are changing the structure, composition, and function of ecosystems

everywhere on earth.

The 2004 SER International Primer recognizes cultural landscapes [thanks to advocacy

by Eric Higgs and me in 1996 as co-chairs of SER’s Science and Policy Working Group] but

contrasts them with natural landscapes that are “self-organizing and self-maintaining”. But

whether Indigenous peoples are still in their original territories or are gone, the land bears the

historical imprint of a long co-evolutionary relationship with Native caregivers. European

settlement patterns were superimposed on a cultural, not a natural, landscape. Except for parts of

the arctic, the highest mountain ranges, extremely arid deserts, and African equatorial forests that

are purely self-organizing, most biomes where Indigenous peoples have lived for millennia are a

mix of autogenic processes and ecologically competent human interventions—to such a degree

in many ecosystems that Indigenous peoples could be accurately described as nature—indeed are

nature. And that includes most of this hemisphere.

A growing minority of Western scientists over the past 15 or 20 years, however, are

beginning to realize the value of Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) in assisting

Western researchers who need to fill in large data gaps for local places. Observational

approaches to data collection are now understood to be as important as experimental approaches.

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There are just too many environmental variables and too few researchers. Theoretical constructs

based on limited numbers of experimental sites have been extrapolated out of proportion to

observational verification. As the Ecological Society of America writes in the October, 2010,

issue of Frontiers in Ecology: “Spatially explicit local knowledge is particularly important for

identification of thresholds or tipping points…native peoples have intimate knowledge of spatial

and temporal variabilities as observable indicators, which when combined with a scientific

understanding of properties and processes that control ecological potential, can be used to

develop reliable descriptions of reference conditions for assessments…” and “ecological

indicators”.

Local and traditional ecological knowledge based on qualitative observational approaches

and Western experimental and quantitative approaches are being seen as complementary. As

climate disruption continues to impact ecosystems and cultures at multiple spatial and temporal

scales, observational data on sites that are not easily manipulated experimentally are becoming

critically important. There is a real possibility of climate disruption exacerbating already

degraded ecosystems, causing them to cross thresholds well before we are aware of it happening.

A combination of qualitative and quantitative research bears directly on what we call

“ecosystem-based adaptation” to rapid climate destabilization. [Ecosystem-based adaptation is a

term that originated with Preston Hardison of the Tulalip Tribes in Washington State.]

Adaptation would still be necessary for at least decades to come even if emissions stopped today.

Ecosystem-based adaptation requires eco or biocultural interventions that assist ecosystems to

adapt. Because of species range shifts due to global warming, many restoration ecologists are

now looking at building in resilience to change by creating “designer” non-analog systems

composed of novel assemblages of species they hope will be adapted to warmer, more extreme

conditions. Assisted species migrations are also being discussed.

Indigenous peoples, on the other hand, are rooted in place and cannot migrate with

displaced species, afford expensive assisted migration even if they have territories large enough

to do so, or create non-analog ecosystems. Many species are culturally important—some the

basis for their very identity as Indigenous peoples, e.g. The Salmon Peoples of Pacific North

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America; or a number of medicinal, food, fiber, and sacred plant species and animal habitat that

are irreplaceable. There may be a time in the future when alternative resources will have to be

found, as has happened in the past. But it is about buying time with which to plan intelligently

for the future instead of having to do so by default.

If we consider the current very limited experimental knowledge about non-analog

systems—based so far mostly on a few simulated aquatic system experiments and models and

little real world research—while also considering the iffy nature of predicting how our more

generalized understanding of climate change will play out in any given place—I believe that the

global restoration community must be willing to keep other options open. For example, “assisted

species regeneration” and subsequent enhancement by controlled propagation of plant

populations below the species level—subspecies, populations, and Indigenous-developed

heirloom crop varieties—that show exceptional adaptation already to extreme or hot sites and

drought, including populations that continue to flower at their usual times and not earlier—due to

earlier spring warming—so that pollinators and seed-carriers continue to visit them at their usual

times. A good example of assisted regeneration comes from “Potato Park”, Peru, where local

communities have reversed the effects of increasingly warming temperatures that had been

forcing farmers to plant further and further up in elevation. Although potatoes prefer cool

growing conditions, local Indigenous farmers found varieties that would grow well in warmer

weather and are now planting them at lower elevations.

Ecocultural restoration is the primary building block for ecosystem-based adaptation. [I

and a few others began using the term ecocultural restoration in the early 1990s.] It can be

defined as: The process of recovering as much as is recoverable of the key historic precontact

ecosystem structure, composition, processes, and function, along with traditional, time-tested,

ecologically appropriate and sustainable Indigenous cultural practices that helped shape

ecosystems, while simultaneously building-in resilience to future rapid climate disruptions and

other environmental changes in order to maintain ecological integrity in a way that ensures the

survival of both Indigenous ecosystems and cultures. Ecocultural restoration is distinguished

from ecological restoration by its additional focus on culturally important species while also

taking care of the non-cultural communities that the cultural plants are associated with; and the

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use of traditional landcare practices like prescribed burning, selective harvesting, microsite-

targeted agroecology, and agroforestry through selective cutting and replanting.

The foundational assumption of ecosystem-based adaptation is that the more of key pre-

industrial landscape structure, composition and processes one can conceptually reconstruct, the

more certain that ecological integrity— i.e. ecologically intact ecosystems with all the key

components of structure, composition, and function in place—will be restored. [Of course, some

ecosystems have been so degraded or destroyed that this will be exceedingly difficult or

impossible to do. Nevertheless, it is possible with many others.] The more ecological integrity

restored, the better able ecosystems will be to absorb and adapt to climate disruption—i.e., the

more resilient to change. A key component of ecosystem-based adaptation is genetic diversity.

Large and diverse gene pools are restored or maintained by ensuring maximum habitat

heterogeneity across the landscape, providing sufficient microsites that could be both adaptation

nurseries and climate refugia at the subspecies or population levels during further climate

destabilization.

Existing ecological degradation will be exacerbated by climate disruption, which in turn

will amplify both the effects of climate disruption as well as climate itself—a positive feedback

loop that will reinforce and exponentially intensify all cumulative climate effects still further. If

this progresses to a certain but still largely unknown point, irreversible thresholds may be

crossed.

What is too often left out of restoration planning as theoreticians and armchair

restorationists scramble to leave history behind and embrace untested non-analog systems—is

good baseline information about pre-industrial environmental conditions. I am not claiming that

we can ever restore all of the complexity of ecosystems once they are gone. I am claiming that

we should strive to recover as much of the key historic ecological elements of structure,

composition, and function as are recoverable, removing barriers and setting trajectories that both

autogenic processes and human interventions will continue over time. We are not attempting to

set the historical clock back; rather we are re-setting the evolutionary clock—allowing

evolutionary processes to operate at a rate sufficient for species to adapt to changing

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environmental conditions. We are balancing historical fidelity with ecological function, integrity,

and resilience. But our historical reconstruction work must be balanced with assisted species

regeneration and enhancement in order to build in resilience. And assisted species

regeneration will work best if maximum genetic diversity is ensured through the restoration of

landscape heterogeneity—the maintenance or restoration of micro-sites where more climate

adapted subspecies and populations can be in-situ nurseries for future propagation and

climate refugia for future recolonization. That is, the restoration of climate refugial capacity

will strengthen ecosystem-based adaptation. In focusing on generalized climate

destabilization, we can easily forget the innumerable microsites available for adapted

populations—sites that Indigenous caregivers know well.

The field of historical ecology employs a variety of indirect or proxy and direct

techniques to conceptually reconstruct historical reference ecosystems. Although our reference

model will have to be modified by present changed conditions, the model will steer us in the

right direction. We can avoid the phenomenon of “shifting baselines”—the proverbial “death by

a thousand cuts”—the process over time of getting used to present environmental conditions and

forgetting original longterm historical conditions with roughly the same historic climatic regime.

The traditional landcare practices of Indigenous peoples, as keystone players in ecosystem

dynamics and as an integral part of nature, cannot be left out of historical reconstructions.

Indeed, advocates of non-analog creation totally leave out Indigenous peoples as do most

mainstream restorationists. Indigenous peoples should be viewed as “alternative modernities”—

as relevant to meeting today’s climate and environmental challenges as any modern Western

culture, and in many cases, probably more so. Adaptability and resilience define “Indigeneity”. It

defines TEK as well. That is why we are in a Special Session that includes a few Indigenous

participants but also includes mostly Western restorationists. That is, Indigenous cultural

practices and knowledge do not stand apart from restoration theory and practice; they need to be

recognized as competent contributions to mainstream restoration.

Indigenous peoples are collaborating with Western researchers in the Arctic, northern

Australia, Latin America, and other parts of the world. Indigenous peoples must have parity with

Western scientists—mutual trust and respect—respect for Indigenous ethical protocols,

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intellectual property and knowledge. Western science can be a useful quantitative tool when it is

needed or as a common language in cross-cultural communication.

In the community climate assessment and adaption work that the Indigenous peoples’

Biocultural Climate Change Assessment Initiative (IPCCA), based in Cuzco, Peru, is doing in

nine countries, we encourage both the use of traditional knowledge and Western science in a

complementary way when necessary. I serve on the IPCCA Steering Committee for Pacific

North America—from the Klamath Mts. of nw California where I live and nw Nevada to Haida

Gwaii in nw British Columbia—encompassing two biomes: the moist Pacific coast, coastal

mountains, and coastal islands; and the semi-arid interior continental Great Basin/Shrub-Steppe

high desert.

Our mission is to empower Indigenous communities to develop and use their own

ecocultural realities and knowledge to assess the effects of climate disruption; the development

and implementation of response options for building Indigenous resilience and buen vivir or

wellbeing, and adaptive strategies to mitigate climate disruption impacts by enhancing

ecocultural diversity for food sovereignty, security, and self-determined development.

The IPCCA Initiative allows three parallel Indigenous-led processes to support self-

determination through producing practical local adaptation strategies at the local, national, and

international scales: (1) A global initiative through community partnerships; (2) global

assessment based on community knowledge; and (3) bringing the local and global approaches

together to understand the localized effects and responses and coordinate a synthesis into

relevant policy to influence key international policy responses.

My community visits in Pacific North America revealed numerous worrying impacts of

climate disruption. A partial list includes:

Higher average temperatures and less precipitation causing droughts and loss of both

subsurface and surface water quantity and quality

Increasingly frequent and intense wildfires

Loss of cultural plants, animals, birds, and fisheries

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Loss of TEK and the ability to accurately predict weather, especially mid and long term

forecasts

Loss of biodiversity

Invasive plants, animals, and insects and the subsequent loss of native plant communities

Soil erosion and subsequent sedimentation of salmon spawning gravels

Increase of forest diseases and insect pests like bark beetles and increase of their

regeneration cycles because of shorter winters and longer warmer periods

Shorter and warmer winters with increasingly earlier snowmelt driving more frequent

and intense flood events

Glacial melt, a major driver of water and fisheries loss

More rain than snow

Predator-prey imbalances

Loss of riparian vegetation

Ocean acidification and loss of shellfish

Storm-driven tidal surges that are already inundating low-lying areas on the coast

Loss of the historic temporal synchronicity between available fresh water and

anadromous fish returning from the ocean to their natal spawning streams [salmon are

arriving at the usual times but water is arriving two months earlier]

Loss of watershed moisture-holding capacity due to loss of old-growth trees and surface

litter, and soil compaction from industrial logging

Increases in rare and endangered plants and animals

Loss of wetlands and their pollutant-filtering capacity and other services; and habitat

Increased in respiratory diseases from dust storms as vegetation disappears from growing

desertification in the high desert biome.

The resultant compromise of ecological integrity and depredation of ecosystem function,

e.g. the geobiochemical [carbon and nutrient retention and cycling], hydrological cycles,

etc.

There are a number of human factors extrinsic to climate destabilization that act as indirect

drivers that interact with and exacerbate already existing environmental degradation amplifying

it and in turn directly intensifying climate disruption itself while negatively impacting

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community adaptive capacity, resilience, and buen vivir. They include everything from

industrial-scale resource extraction to overgrazing to fire suppression policies to modern

agribusiness monocultures to excess groundwater pumping driven by population growth to loss

of ancestral lands and lack of access to cultural and natural resources—and the poverty and

social malaise that follow dispossession and marginalization—to government assimilation

policies to loss of traditional knowledge and ceremonies songs, stories, and dances.

I will take one such indirect driver—government fire suppression policies—and show the

cascading chains of cause-and-effect as this policy impacts cultures and ecology in much of

North and South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia. Indigenous peoples have a positive

narrative regarding traditional low-severity, frequent prescribed or intentional fire, including

controversial swidden burning in tropical regions [and once practiced in eastern North America].

An example in this region is the traditional Mayan burning of “milpas” or garden type

agroecology and agroforestry that historically contributed to bountiful and diverse cultural crops

and increased biodiversity in the forest—including fruit and nut trees, medicinal plants, and

animal habitat—as small patches were cleared in the forest and burned in an anywhere from a 15

to 80 year rotational cycle before beginning again—the 2 or so year short cropping and long

fallow cycles of true swidden farming with five fallow plots for every farmed one at the

landscape level. Fallow periods are now significantly reduced for a variety of reasons, not least

of which is the loss of ancestral forest lands to usurpation by the Mexican government for

logging leases followed by inexperienced mestizo settlers coming in on former logging haul

roads. . [Extensive deforestation in the Yucatán is once again creating the environmental

conditions that Jared Diamond wrote about with respect to the Classic Mayan collapse of the 8th

century—the obliteration of a resilient landscape of repeating and balanced mosaics of forest

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and farm that has enabled the Yucatán to maintain its ecological integrity, including the original

species composition, for over 3000 years (Gómez-Pompa et al, 2003).]

An unfortunate feature of the Western scientific mind is the tendency to minimize or

dismiss what they do not understand or are culturally—not empirically—biased against.

Indigenous peoples recognize the cleansing and rejuvenating effects of fire—its positive role

in renewing the earth and maintaining high levels of biodiversity and cultural species. This is in

contrast to European settler societies that fear all wildland fire. Our recent history of increasingly

frequent and severe wildland fires is a result of fire suppression policies and removal of

Indigenous fire experts—exacerbating global warming. As average temperatures increase and

precipitation decreases, we now see shorter and warmer winters with earlier springs and longer

fire seasons. In temperate Pacific North America, bark beetles that are killing millions of conifer

trees from Mexico to Alaska now have more time to reproduce additional generations and cause

more tree mortality. Longer warm periods dry forest live and dead fuels earlier, increasing the

likelihood of more wildfires. Catastrophic wildfires are responsible for many environmental,

economic, and cultural problems, including hydrophobic soils that resist water infiltration,

diminishing precipitation and groundwater recharge and drying springs and streams; erosion that

clogs salmon spawning gravels with sediment, diminishing salmon reproduction and widening

stream channels while raising streambed levels to the point where riparian vegetation, that

provides shading for fish in hot weather, is lost during intense flood events resulting from earlier

snow and glacier melt; a loss of animal habitat and cultural plants that, together with the loss of

salmon and other aquatic species, conspire to rob communities of nutritious wild foods and

impacting individual health and community buen vivir.

Besides government fire suppression policies—other indirect drivers—and many I did not

mention—direct drivers like wildfires amplify global warming by releasing enormous amounts

of CO2, methane [25 times more potent than CO2], nitrous oxide, and other greenhouse gases.

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Increased warming in turn increases fire hazard and risk, and on in a positive feedback loop that

exponentially accelerates all of these cumulative effects in an ever-widening and deepening

spiral of environmental and cultural degradation and loss of resilience and buen vivir.

The Indigenous view of ecocultural restoration in the context of traditional burning is that

the responsibility of renewing the earth with fire and other traditional landcare practices never

ends. Restoration never ends. No division exists, as in the SER Primer, between restoration and

follow-up maintenance, believing, as most do, that autogenic processes relieve us of our

responsibility to continually intervene. Given today’s incredibly high fuel levels in Pacific North

America, self-organizing processes are not sufficient by themselves to reduce the severity and

frequency of wildfires—even in regions where lightening-ignited fires are common. Experienced

human intervention will always be required—and must be done intergenerationally.

To those that echo the Kyoto and Copenhagen Protocols by saying that all fires contribute

greenhouse gases [GHGs] to global warming, I say that this position reflects shorterm thinking.

In the longterm, despite initial loss of CO2 to the atmosphere, more will be sequestered than lost

over time because of the stimulating effects on vegetation growth with the appropriate kind of

burning—traditional frequent low-severity burning. In my biome in Pacific North America, the

prevention of conflagrations by these “cool” burns protects both secondary and primary forests—

mature and old-growth trees that hold massive amounts of carbon but are not eligible for market

carbon trading because they grow too slow and are too messy, not easily measured for carbon.

I am not advocating for a carbon market for Indigenous peoples. I believe Indigenous peoples

should be compensated for their protection of forests and savannas from severe wildfires for

millennia—as President Lula did in the Brazilian Amazon and as northern Australian Aboriginal

peoples are compensated now by the government. REDD+, the UN scheme for protecting forests

in the South, is a bad policy for Indigenous peoples for a lot of reasons—one of the most

important of which is that it is top-down, devised in the North without the consultation with local

people, and with negative impacts for livelihoods, cultures, and the environment. And it

commodifies nature.

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I have talked about the potential for complementarity between Indigenous and Western ways

of knowing in meeting the challenge of rapid climate disruption through ecocultural restoration

and ecosystem-based adaptation, and how there are increasing mutually respectful collaborations

in the field between Western researchers and Native experts. This is not a marriage. It is a

working relationship on an as-needed basis, with Indigenous peoples retaining the prerogative to

say “No” as they see fit. For example, Western fire ecologists are still a long way behind

traditional Native burners. I know this because that is what I do at home. In both Pacific North

America and Australia—where I have heard similar stories—National Park prescription fire

rangers are still very inexperienced compared with their Native counterparts.

An unfortunate feature of the Western scientific mind is the tendency to minimize or dismiss

what they do not understand or are culturally—not empirically—biased against.

Reciprocity is an important Indigenous principle and is practiced universally. Indigenous

peoples are willing to collaborate and share that portion of their knowledge that they choose to

share. Western restorationists need to reciprocate instead of cheery-picking those parts of TEK

that they think are important for their own needs. Instead of taking knowledge out of its cultural

context, they should try to understand that the source of that knowledge lies in a fragile library of

oral tradition that comes from countless generations of practice in particular places and depends

on the survival of Indigenous cultures—not scientific papers and books. We ask support for

Indigenous cultural survival by supporting their access to cultural and natural resources,

protection from States that marginalize them and are evicting communities from their ancestral

homelands to make way for conservation reserves and parks, mistakenly believing—and it is a

dogmatic and uninformed belief—that natural autogenic processes are all that is needed.

Restoration ecology must move beyond its present ideological fixation on a purely autogenic

nature and embrace a natural world that in large part includes—and has always included—

Indigenous cultural practices like intentional burning, and reestablish the relationship between

culture and nature for our mutual survival and wellbeing.

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