Preserving Indigenous Cultures to Preserve our Planet

I went on a trip to Ecuador this summer with my mom and brother. While touring around the different parts of Ecuador, we stopped at the city of Santo Domingo and stayed for a couple days. Once there we decided to go visit the Tsachala Indian reservation. Our Tsachala tour guide showed us around the reservation while also teaching us about their medicinal practices and food preparation (see picture above!). The Tsachalas are an indigenous people that have been living in Ecuador for many years and hopefully will continue to do so. But as the New York Times article I read today talked about, there is the problem of climate change affecting indigenous peoples too. Climate change is something that affects everyone but since indigenous peoples rely on certain animals and plants being available in ecosystems, any shift may affect their traditional subsistence method. Problems can be anything from rivers water levels lowering to weather becoming more unpredictable. As Dr. Baptiste, the director of the Colombian Environment Ministry’s Alexander von Humboldt Biological Resources Research Institute said, indigenous cultures adapt to changes over long periods of time, thus the reason their cultures have lasted so long - but climate change is occurring rapidly, and it can be hard to adapt quickly. Some of the young people in the tribes are leaving their communites because of this and the lure of better economic prospects. But losing this cultural diversity also means losing a "resilient knowledge base for adapting to and counteracting the effects of climate change". Many of these indigenous peoples have their own ways and technologies of dealing with nature, and to lose this would mean to lose new knowledge and methods that could help now and in the future. Efforts are being made in many countries to strengthen the indigenous cultures against the threat of climate change. Let's hope these efforts succeed.