Worldview s and Integra tion Micro-nursery of indigenous trees An ancient planting practice that was overlooked can be read with the science of mycorrhiza to produce healthy trees in a micro-nursery 118 17 where the wild plant and the soil micro-organism mutually benefitted. With this knowledge on the moving of indigenous trees and the story on the recovery of ethuthwini composting practices, the Makana youth cooperative developed a cleaning and greening strategy for Ward 7. The locally initiated Makana RCE project has recently been supported as a Grahamstown 200 initiative by Makana Municipality. Previously unemployed youth were assisted in developing a proposal by Deepka Joon of RCE Delhi whilst she was on an internship at the Environmental Learning Centre. In this initiative, each weekend five youth activists would clean a household stand and set up a composter to decompose biotic waste. This should reduce the waste stream to the landfill and provide future greening and kitchen garden food production. With the winter cooling, the participants in the programme will add biotic waste and water weekly until the spring when trees will be planted and summer gardens started. Tools for a Realist Analysis across Indigenous Knowledge Practices and Modern Scientific Propositions in Contexts of Risk Much of the indigenous knowledge discourse has been constituted as dialectic (opposing Indigenous and Western), spawning counter hegemonies that have sought to take up the moral high ground and engage the unsustainable excesses of modernisation. Much of the struggle for ascendency here has become detached from indigenous peoples and their environmental practices. The Makana RCE’s work has found that surface narratives commonly slip into an assumption that difference is the focus to attend to. To support a process that might circumvent surface readings to provide ‘explanatory depth with emancipatory critique’ that is more reality congruent, the RCE has been exploring Critical Realist tools after the work of Roy Bhaskar that is now being taken up around the emerging issue of climate change (See Bhaskar, 2010). Here all representations are treated with respect as real and, where there are apparent differences, as plural perspectives borne of differing practices in relation to a real phenomenon, as in the earlier example with the multiple ways in which people see and use trees. What has been interesting is how the concern with purposeful knowledge practice and the ways in which these enable a reflexive grasp at the boundaries between ‘knowledge systems’ is restoring dignity along with better and more practical ways of doing things together in a world at risk. Conclusion The narrative recovery of indigenous knowledge practices was a slow but rewarding process of retroductive endogeny, looking back to recover and learn with the heritage wisdom within. This process restored dignity to practices that had been vilified or lost in the tyrannies of oppressive marginalisation within both the colonial and modernising periods of the state appropriation of daily life. The mother tongue narratives, with translation, produced stories of indigenous knowledge practice that were developed for urban children to explore with parents and elders and to take into learning in schools and communities. The Makana RCE project has thus been built around the interface between heritage practices and modern scientific propositions. The assumed differences of intellectual discourses on indigenous and Western has not materialised and the outcome appears to be a recovery/ rediscovery process where change practices have a latent endogeny and reality congruence that is encouraging for shaping better ways of doing things together in a changing world.
Traditional Knowledge and Biodiversity
To see the actual publication please follow the link above