Indigenous knowledge can fashion a sustainable economy

Dr Tyson Yunkaporta, Apalech Clan

Senior Lecturer, Indigenous Knowledges, National Indigenous Knowledges Education Research and Innovation Institute (NIKERI), Deakin University

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Increase is a sacred principle at the heart of Indigenous ritual, knowledge and economy. In the First Nations world these three are indivisible domains embedded in the patterns and cycles of land, water and sky. The environment, including humans, is totally integrated.

Increase differs from the current concept of growth, in that it enriches resources which can regenerate the supply of what is needed for consumption, trade, technology, health and communication.

Growth is measured by gains in value, that is, the quantity of resources extracted using reserves of energy, matter and information. Ecology and economy are seen as separate. Increase is measured by improvement in the regenerative capacity of the systems that produce resources.

In fact, when increase is ignored, growth becomes finite in the long term. And while growth can produce surpluses in the short term, it must be adjusted constantly to ensure demand exceeds supply, as the economy is powered by scarcity. This is the inverse to an economy powered by regeneration.

Indigenous knowledge involves constant inquiry and interpretation of natural signals, to ensure that harvesting, building, manufacture, travel and trade all promote the health of the environment. Data is generated from networks of signals of the activity and movement of all entities in the sky, air, land and waters that trigger vast chain reactions of response across the local and non-local environment. In this way, much of the computation power for land-based economies is provided by the land itself.

In the Indigenous world, disturbances created by economic activities are designed to have regenerative effects that stimulate abundant regrowth. For example, First Nations people dig for resources in rotating locations. This exposes the soil fauna, which attracts birds who drop seeds in the disturbed ground.

Specialists can adjust such bio-economies with well-timed and well-placed interventions at seasonal inflection points – using low intensity fires, for instance –which then prompts multiple species to respond distributing energy, information and resources through the environment.

Let’s look at an example of how differently an economy could operate based on Indigenous concepts and knowledge of the integration of the whole environment. As an  example, I will use investment in 10-year eel bonds.

The initial opportunity for eels would be signaled by massive demand in Asia, due to a rising scarcity of glass eels from Europe that leads to poaching and smuggling. To satisfy this demand, investors would initially seek short-term yields from increased eel fishing allocations in the Coral Sea. The forests and creek systems of the Blue Mountains would be completely ignored.

But gradually, awareness would grow of the annual migration of eels from New Caledonia to the Australian coast, then inland along remnant waterways and overland into the Blue Mountains. The journey of the eels ends upstream of the dam that supplies Sydney’s water, at sacred increase sites where young eels mature and mate before returning to the sea to spawn and replenish the stocks of the much-coveted glass eels. 

So, restoring health to mountain forests and waterways would then become part of the portfolio for increasing reserves and fishing allocations in the distant ocean. A mountain pass on the eel migration route could provide a convenient choke point to facilitate the counting and measurement of eel stocks to inform trading of the bonds.

In Indigenous land-based cultures, we know that abundant systems are not created by nature separate from human communities. They are co-created and co-designed by humans living in responsive relation to what is going on in their world and optimising their environment so that all beings can thrive.

Humans have an ecological niche as a custodial species, a biocultural role to increase the health of the land through economic and cultural activities. For First Nations people, land not populated by responsible human communities is ‘sick Country’. So wildlife reserves, state forests and sanctuaries separated from areas designated for settlement and industry could never achieve a AAA rating in an Indigenous bio-economy.

Lands and economies are self-organising systems that seek equilibrium, but this balance can only be achieved when there are real-time feedback loops between them. Projections of future environmental impacts, statistics on biodiversity loss, and warnings from scientists studying distant ecologies do not provide behaviour-changing signals. The daily choices of plants, animals and humans are not affected by climate change, but by changes in the weather.

The implications of this perspective are counter-instinctive and somewhat discomforting: in short, under the current system nature cannot survive unless it is valued, and it cannot be valued unless it is measured and priced. Indigenous knowledge of complex systems management, however, may provide ways of turning that unsettling prospect into a pathway towards transition from unsustainable growth to regenerative increase.

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