a case study on the

A case study on the need for preserving biological diversity

The successful effort to preserve sea turtles in a subsistence village in northwestern Guyana requires educational work with indigenous Arawak inhabitants. Arawak peoples and their descendents have lived in this part of South America since long before the coming of Columbus ad the Europeans five centuries ago. On the coast of the Guyana shield between the Orinoco and Demerrara Rivers lies the coastal mangrove rainforest remaining rich in the biological wealth of both the Amazon jungle and the tropical Atlantic Ocean.

To accomplish this task my objectives are to gather field and archival data on the long-term and short-term history of coastal settlement in Guyana, once a British Colony. I have an objective of comparing and contrasting what native villagers say about what they have achieved in turtle protection with what naturalists, settlers and specialists have said with respect to the protection of biological diversity.

An underlying objective is to discover what factors make for a successful cultural commitment to the preservation, restoration and management of the resources upon which these endangered species depend. The overall approach is critical and comparative by using dialectical analysis and applying the results of dialectical understandings to clarify how cultural knowledge of biological and physical conditions assists in the protection of endangered organisms.

Historical ecology is conducted on many scales of reference and across a wide array of time. Such an approach to study is needed to fully reveal the dynamic relations between people and the physical and biological environment. That is there are several scales from the tribal and village microcosm to the regional and biome level macrocosm that reveal the dynamic quality of human dependence on culture and nature.

The long period of discovery 1500s, settlement 1600s, exploitation 1700s, and independence 1960s, reveals enduring as opposed to fleeting impacts of humans on the land. This association of villagers on the ecological habitats, the biological communities and the species that use the seashore as their home, nursery, or feeding grounds has until recently been dominated by purely local or regional conditions. With the pronounced decline of Atlantic nesting marine turtles, these purely regional impacts were further affected by deep sea fishing practices. That is because turtles spend all of their adult lives except when laying eggs on beaches, in the oceans.

The analysis of biological diversity and its preservation rests in large part on examining and explaining in narrative form Darwin's "organic and inorganic conditions of existence," with respect to this coastal rain forest.

Any use of historical ecology is an aspect of dialectical analysis and practice that deals specifically with human-environment interactions. Humans are both actors and objects -- from this dialectical perspective of the ecology of the place -- because the earth's primal forces become both active partner and frequent intruder into human affairs.

These ecological relations among particular peoples and their surroundings involves the manner in which people treat one another in their daily quest for security. Hunger in lean years when matched with the rich protein source of the nesting turtles and their eggs act as an entice some in th ecommunity to poach the protected sea turtles.
: These human to human relations in the use of natural products are basic to this approach of historical ecology. The villagers have worked with biologist Dr. Peter Pritchard, and Jesuit Missionaries for nearly three decades with the help of international foundations to protect sea turtle eggs and hatchlings.; This foundation of human action within an ecological setting is important because the biological wealth and the physical sources of ecological functionality are interpreted by people through language and represented as a taxonomy of meaningful categories.

Clifford Geertz, (1973, 5-23.) is an Anthropologist who influenced a generation of other careful observers who practice historical ecology. Practitioners refer to this process of taxonomically organizing the material conditions of existence as "cognizing the environment." (Marquardt, 1994, 204) What this means is that we do not actually know the place we investigate as much as we make mental images into conceptual maps against which we can test our assumptions by exposure to the field evidence.

Participants must be experienced in the scientific method and the comparative discipline of history to produce a narrative based on facts to interpret the features of mind and nature that shape the physical order of a landscape in any specific place and during a particular time.

To create a case study that informs people is done best by framing the argument in critical and comparative terms. This is done by using dialectical analysis to examine how people go about the efforts to inventory, track, record and report those features of their existence that are dependent directly upon the landscape, air, water and wildlife of their surroundings.

As members of a biologically active ecological setting, any protection of the subsidiary components of the biosphere and depend to a certain verifiable degree upon our relations with the Earth's climatic and biological dimensions. These biological dimensions include the present functional relationships among producing and consuming members of the biological community, and the past evolutionary entanglements that sustain the dominant creatures and keystone species in the existing web of ecological relationships.

The five stages in the project are:

Through research of current literature and archival sources to establish references one may reveal to what extent current conditions diverge from the situation described by discovery narratives and colonial descriptions of coastal habitats. The Dutch redesigned the coastal defenses of these low lying coasts of the Guyana shield, but did not alter these northwestern river mouths and beaches.
By observation in the field of the Arawak native villagers' actions one may discover how these indigenous people have successfully maintained a program of protection for sea turtle nests for some 30 years.
A dialectical analysis of documentary, published, unpublished and observational data from which to establish the factual conditions under which resource protection is successful and under other conditions where it fails to achieve the purpose is required to set out the means of replenishing the endangered animal or plant populations.
Any ecological synthesis that incorporates the human cultural formalities and the social gestalt into a coherent set of beliefs and behaviors must be analyzed in relation to the physical and biological conditions of material existence that promotes strategies for both human and animal survival.
The last step of these five stages is: inductive reasoning to achieve a workable understanding of human relations with nature in order to affect behavior and encourage beneficial changes in institutional and personal arrangements that have a negative impact on the environment.

The importance of this project is twofold: one functional and the other ethical.

Preservation of biological diversity through the active involvement in habitat and species protection is a general category to which the case of the protection of sea turtles' nesting grounds belongs.

From an ethical perspective modern commentators have called such active participation in the recovery of populations of endangered species stewardship.

To isolate the factors that promote beneficial interventions in natural systems by their adjacent human settlements has value because climate change and biological diversity loss currently threaten the economic, social and political arrangements we have come to rely on for providing our growing populations with a reasonable standard of existence.