Power-sharing in Canada: "A wild experiment is under way in British Columbia, Canada’s westernmost province: the government is rewriting its laws to share power with Indigenous nations over a land base bigger than France and Germany combined.

[...]

The legislation is dauntingly complex, involving distinct negotiations with more than 200 First Nations and the dismantling of a system built to protect industrial profits over any other interest.

[...]

6% of the world’s population is Indigenous; so is 6% of BC’s. That’s 300,000 people speaking 34 languages, spread across coastal fjords and misty rainforests, subalpine meadows and semi-arid desert and dense boreal forest. Most have been here since the last ice age.

Almost their entire land base – about 97% of most of what’s now “British Columbia” – was seized without a treaty or any pretence of legality. Since then, four-fifths of the province’s primary forest has been logged. Wild salmon and herring are down to a 10th of their once-spectacular abundance. Habitat destruction from mining and fossil fuel development have pushed another 2,000 species to the brink of extirpation." - theguardian.com/world/2024/oct…

#indigenous #canada #environment #nature

Study showing how Australian Aboriginal people shaped the distribution of useful plants across their lands, dispersing them in more preferable areas, etc:

"The findings call into question our whole notions of what agriculture is," said Douglas Bird, study co-author and professor of anthropology at Penn State. "Rather than thinking about the difference between agricultural societies and hunter-gatherer societies as a matter of kind, we'd be better off thinking about it as a matter of degree—that people influence plants long before they engage in what we think of as farming."" - phys.org/news/2024-10-landscap…

Peoples who are used to living with the environment (instead of "against" it) understand that often the best interventions are the ones that are extremely subtle. In this case, the interventions were so subtle that they didn't fit into traditional western understandings of cultivation and agriculture.

So it's good to see this kind of subtle cultivation getting more recognized by science. There are many ways to live with the environment and to place the resources you need into places that are convenient for you and your people. The more that westerners can learn that, the more possibilities open up for how to live with the land.

#indigenous #australia #cultivation #agriculture #science #gardening #gardeningau #plants #nature #environment #ecology #anthropology