Natural resources knowledge shrinks as economies grow
New research shows that Indonesians can identify 71% of local plants when asked, while the British can name only 24%.
Most people realize that as a society becomes more industrialized, individual knowledge about the natural world diminishes. New research published in ES&T (DOI: 10.1021/es070837v) analyzes interviews done with various age groups living in Indonesia, India, and the U.K. to find out how much ecological knowledge is lost, when it is lost, and how that loss affects society's ability to manage natural resources as industrialization occurs. The findings indicate that future efforts to conserve biodiversity on a global scale are at great risk.
Researchers from the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Essex (U.K.) interviewed 1095 people with different levels of economic development and resource dependence, varying social and political norms and frameworks, and different environmental protection institutions. They asked participants to identify and list uses for up to 50 local plant species and then examined the differences in knowledge between sites, as well as within communities.
"Preserving natural resources has always been separate from social issues," such as providing housing and food, explains lead author Sarah Pilgrim, senior researcher at the University of Essex. "Yet most of the world's resources are located where people are living. So we've got to look at local knowledge and management capacity, because the local residents will have to manage these resources in the future."
In the past, valuable natural resources have been protected by keeping them off-limits to development in designated national parks. This approach can't be used to protect global biodiversity as a whole, because it often requires moving people off their land, which "damages the cultural, physical, and social health of communities," Pilgrim says. "Many of our indigenous groups live in mostly untouched areas; therefore, they interact on a daily basis with some of the world's most valuable resource pools," she says.
Rather than performing a long-term generational study, the scientists used a "snapshot" approach that looked at three different generations in each country. The pattern of acquisition was clear: in industrialized regions, young people knew less than older folks. In Indonesia and India, however, young people knew the names of many local plants, yet people tended to lose this knowledge as they became older, says Jules Pretty, professor of environment and society at the University of Essex, and one of the paper's authors. In Indonesia, the scientists report a strong inverse correlation between income and the number of uses for local plants people reported, with wealthy villages knowing on average 18 fewer species uses compared with villages with lower incomes. "But still, these people knew more than people in industrialized countries," Pretty says.
Rural U.K. residents, for example, with a mean per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of US$26,150, identified the fewest plants (on average 24%), while people living in rural areas of Indonesia, with a GDP of US$2143, identified the most (71%).
There are many reasons for dwindling ecological knowledge in developed countries, the researchers note. Yet they highlight the fact that most urban children spend very little time in unsupervised play outdoors. A 2002 study by David Orr, professor of environmental studies and politics at Oberlin College, states that the average child in urban areas spent 42 minutes per day outdoors in 1997, compared with 86 in 1981. Kids are outside so little that they don't even notice when a local species has been wiped out, says Pretty. "You won't invest time in protecting something that you don't love, and you can't love something that you don't know," he adds.
The loss of knowledge of the local ecosystem—of how to grow food, use the local soil, and build shelters—will catch up with us in the near future, Orr explains. "We are at the end of an era of cheap fossil fuel use, and our reliance on importing food, medicine, and products from a long distance" will soon be impractical. Stephen Trombulak, professor of biology and environmental studies at Middlebury College agrees with Orr. He commented that the ES&T study "involved both a robust experimental design and a large sample size, which make the conclusions they draw compelling."
Few, if any, regulations exist to protect many natural resources, "so the trend is to overexploit and to underinvest," Pretty says. "Climate change is a classic example of this, and the same goes for the exploitation of resources in the open seas." Recent estimates show that conserving biodiversity worldwide would cost US$300 billion, the researchers note.
Generally, a successful society can handle a small percentage of "free riders," or people who take advantage of natural resources, say 2 or 3 out of 30, Pretty says. But if 10 out of 30 people break the rules, then it's hard to maintain the resources, he says. "People don't intend to break the rules, but they are doing so, and there is no knowledge on why abiding by the rules is so important."
