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Sustainable development cannot ignore ancestral knowledge

2022-08-24T10:49:43.889Z


We must recognize the resilience of black people in Latin America who have persevered in safeguarding ancestral traditions for the care of nature


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Sustainability is a discussion that needs to be addressed more acutely.

We must understand the reasons why entire countries continue to deny phenomena such as global warming and see where the collective efforts to preserve the well-being of the planet come from.

When we talk about sustainable development, we sometimes leave out an essential conversation that has relevant and ongoing consequences in our societies: the overexploitation and extractivism of natural resources are dynamics inherited from colonialism and perfected by late capitalism.

In contrast to these models of exacerbated consumption, black and indigenous communities have kept ancient techniques of environmental care alive.

Ecological discussions about the rights of nature can be highly mediated by a Western scientism that forgets to recount how Afro and indigenous communities have always sought to maintain a balance with nature.

The Global South, where many of these communities live, continues to fight to maintain that balance, now more than ever.

In the Colombian Pacific you can see this desire for preservation, this search for mutualism that is part of the ancestral knowledge of Afro-diasporic communities.

Colombia is the country with the largest number of hummingbirds in the world (these birds are pollinators), one of the countries with Amazonian territory (lung of the Earth) and home to humpback whales from May to December where they come to complete their mating cycle , thanks to the temperature of the Pacific waters.

Humpback whales maintain marine ecosystems by fertilizing them.

These are just some of the thousands of cases that exist in this biologically diverse territory with a global impact on the preservation of the environment.

This is why it is so significant to see what this region can teach the world about caring for the territories and,

Muntú Bantú, the Afrodiasporic memory center of Colombia, calls for more conversations that relate the history of black peoples with active listening to the environment, thus understanding the importance of maintaining harmony with nature in order to attend to the environmental emergencies that challenge us right now.

We must recognize the resilience of black people in Latin America who have persevered in safeguarding ancestral traditions for the care of nature.

For this reason, knowledge such as techno-environmental knowledge is also a record in itself of the struggles of Afro-diasporic communities.

Let's go back to the moment where the transatlantic slave trade took place: the enslaved people were forced to travel long distances to reach the American continent;

These trips were not devoid of knowledge, since the Africans were characterized by having among themselves many forms of expertise such as knowledge about plants, both medicinal and food.

According to the academic director and history teacher Sergio Antonio Mosquera, there are places in Chocó called rooftops, where different types of plants are grown, which in his own words are "like living pharmacies."

During the global crisis caused by covid-19, many impoverished black communities had to resort to their own resources to care for those infected.

The crisis that the pandemic brought with it was not only health, it was also a window to see the deficiency in the health systems of the Global South so plagued by corruption and state negligence.

Afro-Colombian communities were not exempt from this oblivion.

Thanks to knowledge inherited from Afro-diasporic resources such as that of living pharmacies, many people managed to cope with the symptoms of covid-19, even defeat it.

It is undeniable that government centralism is a real problem for people who live in the so-called periphery.

During the peak of the pandemic, the lack of food and other resources was also evident.

Techno-environmental knowledge in Chocó developed on rooftops points to food sovereignty, but food sovereignty in the Colombian Pacific does not only refer to land-friendly agricultural techniques.

To carry out these traditions, it is necessary to listen to the territory in its entirety.

Sergio Antonio Mosquera and María Fernanda Parra, general manager of Muntú Bantú, maintain a space in the Afrodiasporic center exclusively to talk about the impact that nature has on human lives and vice versa.

For them, it is vitally important to respect the crop cycles in their region, since they are what determine what economic activities people carry out and not the other way around.

“There are certain times of the year when the fish harvest comes.

In the subiendas (as the times when the fish go up the river are called in Colombia), people come down from where their crops are and make ranches on the banks of the rivers where they fish.

Meanwhile, the sowing of corn, plantain, and cocoa is growing;

when the subienda passes, then people are already dedicated to agricultural activities, but if agricultural activities are not yet at their best, they also dedicate themselves to mining activities.

These traditional technologies are compatible with the environment, because they do not deteriorate it and they generate sustainability”.

Economic activities change with what the territory offers.

Thus, María Fernanda Parra recounts that in the Quibdó market squares you can find women during the subienda season who are dedicated to selling fish, since it is what matters most at the moment;

however, at other times they may be selling chontaduro or plantain.

Bearing in mind that overproduction is one of the imminent dangers that we must fight against in order to avoid an increase in the ecological crisis, these types of traditional dynamics are infallible proof that damage to the environment does not require conversations solely guided by natural sciences;

we have to see that there is also a social element behind the way the world economy continues to move.

The human factor is essential in stopping global warming,

as well as understand the history behind ancestral knowledge, which is sometimes underestimated by Science with a capital letter.

Actually, as we can see thanks to efforts like the one carried out in Muntú Bantú, this knowledge is the key to saving the Planet and keeping people well-being simultaneously.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-08-24

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