“I would suggest that young people in Sacha Loma–given their participation in routinized forms of practice that hinge on the aspiration to future participation in wage-work in the local eco-tourism and service economy–are applying a reasoning frame about local forest species styled on a basic assumption imported from Western-style environmentalism: that non-human environments are fundamentally fragile and in need of protection” (Shenton 2018).
Jeffrey Shenton makes an interesting point about ecological understandings in his article titled, “Going to School in the Forest.” His fieldwork took place in an Amazonian village in Peru. While many similar studies looking at the transmission of ecological knowledge focus on the amount of knowledge younger generations are learning (for example, they may be learning less than elder generations), Shenton looks instead at how children are learning, and how they evaluate the importance of ecological knowledge. He notes that even though children today are going to school during weekdays instead of working on farms as they would have in the past (this is what he calls a sort of habitual reorientation), they are still interacting with the natural world: “Though this community reorientation was far-reaching, it still took place in a context in which young people had consistent access to local biota. School standards, though, indexed a clear division between town activities and forest activities. Students traveling to school went to great lengths to stay meticulously free of the omnipresent rain forest mud, wearing a uniform that included a white polo shirt, dark blue dress pants for boys or skirt for girls, and black dress shoes” (Shenton 2018). Children still learn about the forest, but they do so with a different overarching mindset than their parents may have.
In a similar yet distant case, Jeremy Spoon in his article on tourism in the Himalayas, discusses how younger generations have grown up deeply embedded in a world of tourism, which affects how they perceive their environment: “Younger Sherpa experienced most if not all of their lives so far inside a tourist destination engaged in the host-guest drama. For these individuals, tourism may be causing the land to seem more as a tourism commodity and less spiritually endowed” (Spoon 2012: 52).
In both cases – Peruvian rain forest or Nepali mountains – children continue to interact with their natural worlds daily. For many of them, future jobs in tourism demand that they know their environments well. However, the way in which they are learning about their world has shifted, their daily rituals reoriented, and thus nature reinterpreted. While young Kichwa villagers think that the forest is in need of protection, elders believe it provides useful materials for everyday life. Young Sherpas believe nature should be preserved for tourism, while elders believe it should be protected because of intrinsic spiritual qualities. Neither is necessarily wrong, but as Spoon points out, Western concepts tend to create a human/nature divide, whereas indigenous ones commonly do not. Western environmentalism works well when its values align with local values, but we must also be aware of how it is changing people’s fundamental relationship to knowledge and the environment, creating fences where there use to be none.
References:
Shenton, J.T. 2018. “Going to School in the Forest: Changing Evaluations of Animal-Plant Interactions in the Kichwa Amazon.” Journal of Ecological Anthropology 20(1).
Spoon, J. 2012. “Tourism, Persistence and Change: Sherpa Spirituality and Place in Sagarmatha (Mount Everest) National Park and Buffer Zone, Nepal.” Journal of Ecological Anthropology, 15(1) pp. 41-57.
The Edited Jottings of an Amateur Anthropologist 