Stewardship, IPCC, and Indigenous Knowledge

In the run-up to COP26, a high-profile team of climate and biodiversity specialists published an opinion piece in PNAS Rockström et al 2021 in which they called for ‘biosphere stewardship’ in response to the climate and biodiversity crisis. While their description of the crisis, its drivers, and its characteristics is clear and well-made, there is a profound misunderstanding in their approach to Indigenous territories of life.

The problem is that Rockström et al argue from, and for, an anthropocentric ecological ethics, but they insist, without reflecting on their ethical position, that Indigenous territories of life must be used to further that ethic. While there is no single Indigenous ecological ethics—indeed, the term ‘Indigenous’ is a remainder category that serves more to highlight assumptions about the superiority of non-Indigenous peoples—it is nonetheless true that most Indigenous communities who live in highly biodiverse landscapes, and who foster that biodiversity, do not see humans as a special, separate, or unusually worthy species. Because they do not engage in human exceptionalism, they do not engage in a ‘stewardship’ ecological ethics that sees the planet as a resource and arrogates to humans the right of stewardship; rather, they understand their communities to be interwoven through bonds of kinship and place with non-human beings.

Hence, the PNAS article, however well intentioned, in fact reproduces environmentalist colonial attitudes and power relations. It does not lay any foundation for working together with Indigenous communities; it does not even recognise that there might be a problem in the politics and attitudes of non-Indigenous conservation and climate scientists that Indigenous activitists, land-dwellers, and tradition holders might find oppressive and threatening. This is unfortunate as it is hard to believe that so eminent a team of physical, natural, and social scientists would intentionally alienate the very communities they need the most help from.