Field environmental ethics: Integrating ecology and philosophy for biocultural conservation in southern South America

Background/Question/Methods
Field work and ecological sciences can play a critically important role today to overcome the disconnection between society and the vast biological and cultural diversity which is a main underlying cause for its losses. This disconnection is generated by both physical and conceptual barriers imposed by globalizing economic discourses and urban-industrial environments. Among physical barriers, urbanization has been identified as a process which inhibit direct encounters between people and biodiversity. In 2008, for the first time in history, more than half of the human population (3.3 billion people), will be living in urban areas. Less known are the conceptual barriers including emphasis on “mediated” knowledge of nature through increasingly one-dimensional cultural lenses for observing and analyzing the world. A fundamental metaphysical assumption of these modern “cultural lenses” is mathematics, which permeates formal education, scientific, economic, and everyday media representations and decisions regarding “natural resources.” Universal formal education favors these modern lenses, often supplanting the knowledge and ways of life of local communities. To counterbalance these globalized curricula in education, interdisciplinary field experience helps: i) recover the practice of observing, interacting and dwelling in biologically and culturally diverse environments., and ii) deconstruct metaphysical assumptions of mathematics and other forms of mediation.

Results/Conclusions
We present an interdisciplinary field environmental ethics program conducted at the Omora Ethnobotanical Park in Cape Horn, one of the world’s most remote places. Omora program considers it is essential to recover “face to face” or direct encounters with other beings. Through the physical, emotional and sensorial involvement of these encounters the notion of biodiversity ceases to be solely a concept, and begins to be also an experience of cohabitation with many beings. A relation based on purely knowledge about biodiversity is transformed into a relationship based on living together with biodiversity. We illustrate this approach with experiences based on i) the encounter between volunteers and scientists with species of birds not formerly registered for the area; ii) the discovery of exuberant diversity of species, colors, and forms of lichens, mosses, and invertebrates forming the metaphorically called “miniature forests of Cape Horn”; and iii) inter-cultural meetings between students, scientists, and members of the indigenous Yahgan community. These experiences have uncovered knowledge about regional biological and cultural singularities, previously invisible to the modern lenses shaping educational and development practices. These discoveries justified the creation of the Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve, and stimulate diverse forms of cohabitation