12 - Strategies

Summary

People are part of ecosystems. Even places that are sometimes considered pristine have been influenced by the activities of people for millennia, and the local and traditional knowledge of those peoples contains important insights. Conservation that strives to maintain or restore biological diversity and cultural diversity, which often have similar geographical distributions, takes many forms. People live and pursue their traditional livelihoods in Indigenous reserves, extractive reserves, and biosphere reserves. Collaborations between Western science and parataxonomists or other local experts combine the insights and skills of people trained in different cultures. Some programs strive to create economic incentives for local participation in conservation through ecotourism, bioprospecting, or harvests of nontimber forest products. Co-management of resources has resulted from some cases in which Indigenous or local people took initiative in managing their resources, challenged Western wildlife management, or formed cooperatives to promote sustainable use and equitable working conditions. The success of these endeavors depends on economic, social, political, ecological, and historical conditions.