The Biophilia Hypothesis by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781597269063
Publisher: Island Press
Published: 2013-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

We wish to make it clear that O‘odham and Yaqui knowledge of other life-forms does not extend to all the species in their environments. Of the more than 250 Western scientific taxa of plants known at desert oases inhabited by O’odham farmers and gatherers for centuries, only about 87 folk taxa are named, representing a corresponding 96 Linnaean species (Felger et al. 1992; Nabhan et al. 1983). Between 150 and 200 folk taxa of higher plants are recognized by desert O‘odham hunter-gatherers and farmers, representing 250 or so Linnaean taxa, though there may be as many as 500 species within foraging distance from a village (Nabhan 1983). Similarly, of more than 240 birds known in historic and recent times in the Middle Gila River habitats where Pima Indians have lived for centuries, 75 O’odham folk taxa have been recorded, corresponding to 85 to 90 Linnaean species (Rea 1983).

What, then, is the relationship between local indigenous cultures and the sensitive species most likely to be lost from the biological diversity of the Sonoran Desert? Of more than thirty plant species now considered at risk in the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument vicinity, in the heart of O‘odham country, eighteen were historically used but only eight are used today (Nabhan and Hodgson 1993). Two of these plants have been locally depleted at their northern margins, but traditional uses have hardly affected them elsewhere. Overall, other factors such as modern agricultural clearing and overgrazing better account for the rarity of these two species over most of their distributional ranges. Likewise, of the twenty-nine species of birds that have been locally extirpated on the Middle Gila River during this century, the loss of twenty-five has been associated with riparian habit degradation caused by the non-Indian neighbors of the Pima. No losses seem to be due to Pima hunting or agricultural practices (Rea 1983). The loss of eleven of these species was recorded in Pima oral history. Of the twenty-five other bird species which have conspicuously declined during this century, oral accounts by Pima elders comment upon population reductions in nine of them. O’odham elder George Webb (1959) says that in contrast to the verdure and diversity on the Gila River floodplain that he knew as a child, he ended his days next to a “river that is an empty bed of sand. . . . Where everything used to be green, there were acres of dust, miles of dust, and the Pima Indians were suddenly desperately poor.” Davis (1982) and Rea (1983) have compiled numerous historic accounts of other animals that no longer occur in O’odham and Yaqui Indian country as a result of recent changes in river flow and groundwater levels, induced by non-Indians.

While these statistics and anecdotes do not fully answer how much the O‘odham and Yaqui historically affected desert biodiversity, other studies suggest both positive and negative local effects—the negative ones largely created through overgrazing by introduced livestock (Felger et al. 1992; Nabhan et al. 1983). But how has the loss

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