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This week I learned a ton. I visited a local NGO called Chuyma Aru. Heres my findings.
Monday, 27 May 2013, I did an interview with two of the directors of Chuyma Aru, a local NGO that works with local populations to help them remember ancient or forgotten practices. They work with youth and schools as well to put local knowledge into the hands of kids through primary and secondary education curric…ulum. They say that there are 22 other similar organizations that work on projects like this throughout the country.
What I learned the most today is that my thesis of ecosystem services is just a fancy name for local knowledge and practice that has been part of Andean life and cosmovisión for millennia. The directors of Chuyma Aru say that part of the problem is that scientists and engineers come into a diverse region like the Andes and want to prescribe a single solution to variety of microclimates and ecological situations whereas local knowledge is much more adept at addressing these issues because local knowledge addresses the local ecosystem. The way this works is that these communities and each individual has an ongoing conversation with everything around them, from rocks to animals to water to the moon to the clouds. Because each of these things is an indicator of the climate and the ecosystem and the particular weather to come. Also, in the past, each person or each community has had an intimate relationship with everything around them. This relationship is one in which each person takes care of the earth and the earth takes care of them. This is also a relationship of equality where man or woman has no more value or ego than a rock or moss or the toad that has made a home in your garden. Ecosystem services have to brought down to the ground level. The directors explained that each farmer will tell you how he plants his garden but then at the end of the explanation they will tell you, “Pues así lo hago yo,” (well, this is the way I do it) because every single person has their own manner of going about planting and their own manner of relating to their surroundings. Also, even though they only have certain dates that they do big celebrations for Pachamama, what an outside observer doesn’t see is that ongoing conversation and the little things like blowing on coca leaves and letting them go in the wind as a constant relationship and closeness with the ecosystem and Pachamama. These are things that a scientist or ecologist or practitioner of sustainable development may not catch. The last observation is that local knowledge is much deeper and much more tailored to the ecosystem than any scientific system or technical solution. Local knowledge has enabled people to do all sorts of sustainable projects such as the waru waru, the qotañas, the andenes, even construct canals that go down a hill without promoting erosion because they have drops into small ponds at each level of the andene. Also, people here in the past have used different methods to ensure that water gets water, by using certain plants that attract water and making small ponds with fish that help with the microclimate and encourage a healthy ecosystem. I have more details in the recorded interview about these methods. In the end, ecosystem services appears to be a fancy name for reintroducing or revalorizing ancient and local knowledge that is becoming just a memory to those who have been influenced by the church, by school, by the government and by the introduction of new ideas via the highway. However, in those less developed areas, many of these practices still continue.