Traditional knowledge finds place in mining

BAGUIO CITY—When a layman says the skies have turned much more silvery compared to the blue skies of yesteryears, mining leaders should not dismiss the opinion offhand as idle chatter.

Often, a cattle raiser or a village chief will express changes in the environment, which can help industry leaders understand their fears and objections to corporate mining, said Jeffrey Joseph Araula, an Ateneo de Manila University researcher sent to study Australian mining communities.

Araula spoke at the January 25 forum on “After Mining Workshop: Improving Training of Environmental Scientists and Developing Management Strategies for Community-based Ecological Restoration Projects of Mined Lands.”

The forum was sponsored by Ateneo de Manila University, the University of the Philippines, Baguio Cordillera Studies Center and the Philippine-Australian Studies Center (PASC) of AdMU, and the La Trobe University of Australia.

It offered for discussion management strategies for the rehabilitation and restoration of mined-out areas, particularly the so-called “legacy mines.” These are abandoned or decommissioned mines operated by pioneer mining companies at the start of the 20th century.

University researchers and scientists who attended the forum said hard science can validate the environmental observations made by residents of places primed for mining or other industrial development.

Understanding traditional ecological knowledge is necessary for industries like mining, which needs to interact with people who have custody of these lands, said Araula.

He said bridging this barrier would also help the industry and the government establish the technologies and development projects that would be acceptable to the people.

According to Araula, the fusion of traditional knowledge and science “is important in sustainable environmental and resource management [because] both bodies of knowledge validate each other, [and] involving local people’s knowledge makes [the use and management of resources by a private firm] acceptable by the users themselves.”

He cited as example the folk notion that Ifugaos sculpted mountainsides “to fashion terraces they could till [because] indigenous people in Banaue have limited arable land.”

He said scientists validated this folk wisdom by stating that “terracing prevents soil from mountain slopes from eroding as it designs the land according to its contours, thereby making a strong and solid structure.”

He said industries often make little sense of traditional ecological knowledge because the scope of information it provides is limited to the resources of a community.

For example, he said, “plant identification is related to its usefulness and there is no information on the chemistry of plants.”

Traditional knowledge is also “inseparable from culture and philosophy, which is why foreigners are often excluded from information that is shared only by the village,” Araula said.

However, this type of knowledge is useful to ecologically responsible industries because the community can “locate endangered species and migration pathways, which help the firm identify sensitive areas and hotspots” it would need to exclude from its development projects, he said.

More importantly, fusing these bodies of knowledge can help industries like mining come to terms with what scares people about extractive mining, he said.

Minerva Chaloping-March, a PASC research fellow who hails from Mt. Province, said that no form of rehabilitation could restore a mined-out area to its original condition.

However, the forum featured methods that allowed mined-out areas in Australia to be converted into something equally more useful to the local inhabitants.

For example, the indigenous Kangarakun of Australia’s northern territory negotiated with a mine firm to convert an old mine there into marshlands.

Finding a way to have a common language for technology could also enable inhabitants of lands primed for mining to understand what technologies would help keep their environment safe, March said.