Native American Ecologies and Sustainable Development: Group Travel for a Symposium of the 50th International Congress of Americanists, Summer 2000

Pennsylvania State Univ University Park, University Park PA

Investigators

Abstract

This project is to provide partial funding for eleven U.S. geographers to participate in the symposium on Native American Cultural Ecologies at the 50th International Congress of Americanists (ICA) in Warsaw in July 2000. The multinational interdisciplinary group of between thirty and forty experts from Europe, North, Middle, and South America who will collaborate in that symposium intend to synthesize, reevaluate, and redirect theoretical and applied efforts regarding the relationship between sustainable development and the ecological knowledges and practices of native peoples in the present and the past. Scholarship on both past and present native ecologies is well advanced and has achieved many significant insights. But without theoretical integration of those different strands into a meaningful whole that cuts across study of the past and the present to engage contemporary theorization of society, nature, space, and their intersection in development and conservation challenges, the empirical detail will mount without significant general understanding. Understanding of the relationship between sustainable development and the ecological knowledges and practices of native peoples remains as intellectually and societally important as it remains controversial and unclear. The notion of "sustainable development" sits at the core of addressing the two great challenges of our time -- global poverty and environmental degradation. Those two phenomena are linked in complex ways at multiple scales and with increasing globalization will become ever more interwoven. The special symposium will strengthen an international network of collaboration and help increase our understanding of the various issues associated with sustainable development and native ecologies.